Even as votes continue to be tallied in a handful of battleground states, Republican Donald Trump is projected to win the presidential race against Vice President Kamala Harris. The GOP is also projected to win a slim majority in the Senate. The House remains up for grabs as counting continues, but Republicans are hoping for a federal trifecta that could set the nation on a radically reactionary course.
Voting rights attorneys and election officials contended with a variety of challenges preceding and during the vote, including a flurry of right-wing challenges to voter eligibility, reports of rampant online disinformation, non-credible bomb threats at critical polling sites, and scattered reports of racist voter intimidation fueled by anti-immigrant conspiracy theories.
Election officials had been preparing for the worst in the months preceding the vote, especially given the heightened rhetoric from the Trump campaign and its allies. In Georgia’s populous Fulton County, the day began with panic as five polling locations received “non-credible” bomb threats that forced two sites to be evacuated for at least 30 minutes. Election officials extended voting at these locations by one hour, but advocates on the ground said some voters remained confused about the changes as long lines formed in the evening.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, bomb threats were made against four polling locations in Navajo County, home of the Navajo Nation and a high concentration of Indigenous voters.
“If your voice didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying to silence it,” said Jenny Guzman, director of Common Cause in Arizona, in a conference call as polls closed on Tuesday evening.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said on Tuesday that the threats were “unsubstantiated” and likely of Russian origin, reminiscent of a claim from the FBI about “non-credible” bomb threats against polling sites in “several states,” which they said appeared connected to Russian email addresses.
Guzman said voters were safe on Tuesday, and that there are “checks and balances” in place to ensure a fair vote tally, but that the process could take days to complete.
Arizona has been a hotbed of misinformation and disinformation since Trump and his far right ally Kari Lake contested the 2020 results. Back in 2020, when Lake lost the state’s gubernatorial race, she and Trump both demanded controversial recounts and audits that did nothing to reverse Democratic victories.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Lake, who ran this year to represent Arizona in the Senate, was trailing a few points behind Democrat Ruben Gallego. Both the Senate and presidential race have yet to be called in the state.
Ahead of the vote, the Trump campaign and election denial groups leveraged an array of frivolous legal challenges to voter registrations and election procedures along with inflammatory, anti-immigrant rhetoric to prime voters for false narratives about the election if Trump were to lose like he did in 2020.
In response, Common Cause and other nonpartisan pro-democracy groups formed sweeping “election protection” coalitions ahead of the vote. An army of civil rights attorneys and nonpartisan volunteers fanned out to polling sites across the country to keep tabs on partisan poll watchers and help voters overcome barriers to the ballot, with a focus on battleground states, such as Georgia and North Carolina, where Republican efforts to restrict voting went into hyperdrive after Trump lost in 2020.
As right-wing forces threatened to wreak havoc on the election in the weeks before the vote, the preparations made by civil rights groups reflected decades of organizing against the intentional disenfranchisement of low-income voters and voters of color, particularly in the South.
More than 80 million people — about half the national electorate — voted early this year, with pre-Election Day turnout smashing records in swing states, such as North Carolina and Wisconsin. Election watchdogs told press throughout the day that the vote was broadly successful despite the isolated technical hiccups and reports of voter intimidation.
However, the groups received thousands of calls to a multilingual hotline set up in July to take questions and assist voters facing barriers to registration and the ballot. The calls included at least 250 reports of aggressive electioneering and voter intimidation, according to Caitlin Swain, a civil rights attorney and founder of Forward Justice, a legal aid group in the South.
“There is hostility in this cycle, there is a climate of cynical intimidation tactics that are occurring, but our people are standing up and fighting back and resolving these issues,” Swain told reporters on Tuesday.
Though Trump is projected to retake the White House without turning to conspiracy theories and baseless legal challenges as he did in 2020, reports of racist voter intimidation and “aggressive electioneering” fueled by the Trump campaign’s intense anti-immigrant rhetoric are still likely to be reexamined by civil rights groups.
In North Carolina, Forward Justice sent a cease-and-desist letter last week to a pro-Trump “election integrity” group, accusing them of an illegal scheme to disenfranchise Latino voters. Founded by Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who assisted in Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the right-wing group made national headlines after a leader was caught instructing volunteers to flag “Hispanic-sounding names” as suspicious on voter rolls.
According to Forward Justice, the group posted yellow signs outside polling places in 11 counties that were written in Spanish and designed to intimidate Latino voters by warning that any noncitizen who votes would be deported. In the letter, Forward Justice said community members worried the signs were meant to scare legitimate voters into thinking they could face harassment at the polls due to racist misconceptions of their citizenship status.
Forward Justice sent a separate letter to the North Carolina Board of Elections detailing an increase in complaints of voter intimidation. The board released a statement clarifying that all citizens 18 years and older are eligible to vote regardless of whether they were born in the U.S., but Forward Justice said the yellow signs targeting Spanish speakers were not taken down.
Swain and Bob Phillips, the Common Cause director in North Carolina, both said supporters of one candidate yelled at and confronted voters at some polling sites as they went to cast their ballots.
“There were isolated incidents of aggressive electioneering at polling sites across the state, but we have successfully been able to get individuals ejected who are engaging in this behavior,” Cain said.
Similar signs in Spanish and targeting naturalized citizens were posted in San Antonio, Texas, according to Emily Eby French, the Common Cause policy director in Texas. French said Latino voters were “certainly” targeted for voter suppression in Texas, and that the group also received reports of Asian voters facing questions about their citizenship at the polls, which is illegal.
“It has impacted a lot of groups in America; every group that isn’t white,” French said on Tuesday.
In Texas, where a notorious voter suppression bill allowed Republican officials to purge 1 million names from the voter rolls, voting rights groups received numerous reports from voters who were denied access to the ballot on Election Day, French said. Unlike other states, voters in Texas cannot register at the polls on Election Day.
Voting rights groups say Republicans have chipped away at ballot access for over a decade under a 2013 ruling by a conservative Supreme Court that gutted a key section of the Voting Rights Act governing states with histories of racist voter suppression. The court more recently greenlit racial gerrymandering, which historically is used to dilute the Black vote.
With vote counts and reports from local areas still coming in from across the country, it remains unclear what impact voter intimidation and suppression will have on the 2024 election results. But millions of disappointed voters are bound to want answers after months of Republican fearmongering over immigration and debunked conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting.
Still, voters in eight states approved ballot measures on Tuesday explicitly barring noncitizens from voting, even amending the state constitution in some cases. Voting without citizenship is rare, and already illegal under federal law; violators can face stiff penalties, including deportation. Civil rights groups say immigrants have zero incentive to take such a risk, and the ballot measures were designed to advance racist narratives about the “replacement” of white voters that were central to Trump’s campaign.
Access to democracy could further erode in the years to come. Unless Democrats can win a majority in the House, Trump and the GOP will have a federal trifecta for the first time in years, backed up by a conservative Supreme Court that is hostile to voting rights. For the pro-democracy movement in the U.S., Trump’s victory is more than a warning sign. It’s an emergency alert flashing red.
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