Voting Experts Fear Post-Election Chaos But Tout Resilience of Electoral System

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Voting Wrongs

After months of fending off last minute challenges to electoral procedures and voter eligibility in key swing states filed by an array of right-wing forces, voting rights groups say the election system remains resilient ahead of Election Day as people vote early in record numbers. Experts say they’re confident in the guardrails put in place to prevent the losing presidential candidate from overthrowing the results, as former President Donald Trump attempted to do in disastrous fashion after losing in 2020.

However, the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 and other protections for election certification established since the Trump-fueled uproar over the last presidential vote can’t prevent the losing candidate from filing frivolous lawsuits against the 2024 results, or angry supporters from swarm voting precincts targeted by online conspiracy theorists. Election watchdogs are warning about “credible” threats of violence and disruption in the potentially stormy period of time after voting ends on November 5 and before the results are tallied and reported on cable news.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said voters should not expect final results by midnight on November 5. Ballots in the U.S. cover a range of races and initiatives that take time to process, and new laws in Wisconsin and other swing states prohibit the counting of mail-in ballots until Election Day, which could further delay the process.

On election night in 2020, Rudy Giuliani reportedly urged Trump to preemptively declare victory while votes were still being counted. A White House aide told Congress that Giuliani was drunk at the time, a claim the former attorney denied in social media posts that were later deleted.

“I don’t think it’s out of the question that the losing candidate will try to make a different impression and will try desperately to take power; that will fail, but could escalate to violence,” Becker said during a press conference on Wednesday.

Becker and other experts expect Trump to declare victory regardless of what is reported by the media and election officials, just as he did in 2020. Disinformation targeting voters heading to the polls is already rampant online, and the vast “election denial” movement inspired by Trump has only become better funded and more organized since the former president and his supporters unleashed deadly violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Despite polls showing an extremely tight presidential race, Becker said Trump and his acolytes are broadcasting to supporters that victory is inevitable, setting the stage for another wave of anger and denial if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election. With attacks derided as racist and misogynist, Trump has consistently painted Harris as “low IQ” and incompetent while leaning on baseless conspiracy theories about voter fraud to suggest that she cannot win a fair election.

“If [Trump] loses, or perceives that he is losing, you can imagine the shock that will be felt by his supporters, and how that will be leveraged by grifters to anger them and incite them to violence — and more importantly, incite them to donate,” Becker said, referring to election denial groups that fundraise off of baseless conspiracy theories.

Trump supporters have already been blamed for isolated incidents of violence during the early voting period, including a 18-year-old man who was arrested on Tuesday after threatening two elderly Harris supporters with a machete outside of an early polling place near Jacksonville, Florida. However, voting rights groups caution that record numbers of people are voting early, and the process is otherwise going smoothly.

“Most election voting related violence is very isolated and episodic,” Becker said.

After years of litigation over racial gerrymandering and other voter suppression efforts by the GOP, Democrats and leftist voters may also be troubled if election results appear tainted by voter suppression or reports of partisan intimidation at the polls.

Damon Hewitt, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said voting rights have eroded over the past decade (especially in the South) under a conservative Supreme Court that greenlit racial gerrymandering and gutted the Voting Rights Act.

“We are facing a unique set of cumulative impacts,” Hewitt said on Wednesday.

For months now, Republicans and a vast array of right-wing groups have filed dozens of lawsuits against election procedures, as well as complaints with election boards challenging thousands of voter registrations in crucial swing states, often putting access to the ballot for legitimate voters in the crosshairs.

Most challenges were thrown out by judges and election boards but created mountains of paperwork ahead of the election and put individual citizens at risk of losing their right to vote. However, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court allowed a purge of 1,600 voters from the rolls in Virginia one week before the vote. Under state law, the targeted voters can reregister at the polls on Election Day.

Republicans say they want to ensure election “integrity,” but voting rights groups say their rhetoric is all part of a broader strategy to cast doubt on any election results that do not go their way.

“We are seeing litigation designed to set the stage for claims that the election was stolen,” Becker said.

Reflecting the Trump campaign’s racist fearmongering about immigrants, right-wing groups and activists are particularly focused on the idea that noncitizen immigrants are voting for president in large numbers, when in fact noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal and extremely rare.

In North Carolina, the leader of a pro-Trump “election integrity” group instructed volunteers reviewing voter registrations to flag “Hispanic-sounding last names” as suspicious. The group is part of a larger network led by Cleta Mitchell, the GOP attorney who was on the phone in 2020 when Trump infamously asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,000 votes and reverse Biden’s victory in the state.

Amir Badat is a voting rights attorney at the Legal Defense Fund who, like Becker, frequently engages with election officials in multiple states. Badat said dozens of the lawsuits filed by Republican politicians and Trump-aligned groups over allegedly bloated voter rolls and noncitizen registrants were mostly frivolous and dismissed by the courts. However, such lawfare is designed to conjure the false narrative that large numbers of ineligible people are voting, providing fodder for further challenges after Election Day.

“I share the same fear that these narratives and the flurry of frivolous litigation will also embolden people to engage in violent acts,” Badat told Truthout in an interview.

However, pro-democracy groups say that the election system and the officials running it remain resilient despite right-wing efforts to gum up the works. Susannah Goodman, director of election security at the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, said election administrators across the country have been preparing for months and working with federal law enforcement to identify potential threats from election deniers and other extremists.

“The level of preparedness and resilience among our election officials is terrific,” Goodman told reporters on Tuesday.

Part of that preparation on the part of election officials includes beefing up security at the election offices. Next week, snipers will be posted on the roof as votes are counted at the tabulation center in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where outrage and disbelief over Trump’s 2020 loss in the state created a hotbed of conspiracy theories and violent threats.

Despite the chaos sown by Trump and his followers in 2020, Becker said hundreds of thousands of election workers and volunteers successfully managed the highest voter turnout in U.S. history. That record is expected to be broken again this year, with more than half of votes cast during early voting periods.

“[Election workers] have been threatened and abused and harassed for over four years now, not because they did a bad job, but because they did an outstanding job” in 2020, Becker said. “They are exhausted, but yet they are still getting the job done.”

Becker remains confident the 2024 election will be properly conducted and tallied, even if poll worker face threats once again during the “perilous” period of time after polls close and before results are announced on TV. Attempts to undermine the vote counting process, which could be dragged out by lawsuits and audits, are “likely to happen or very possible,” Becker said.

“That doesn’t mean election officials won’t see vile things attempted, but these efforts are going to fail, and I can say that with absolute certainty,” Becker said.

Becker says Trump’s choice of words after Election Day will be telling. A candidate who is clearly winning has every incentive to say the process is legitimate; only a candidate who thinks he is losing would claim that an election is rife with fraud.

“Overall, I am optimistic about where we are headed at the end of all this, but it might be a trial by fire in the meantime,” Becker said.