Harnessing the power of the election denial movement is a key component of conservatives’ 2024 strategy. Far-right activists and politicians, including former President Donald Trump and his enablers, are working to convince Americans that U.S. elections are riddled with fraud and error, exploiting the same lies that underpinned the effort to overturn the 2020 results to set the stage for post-election chaos and potential challenges.

American Oversight has been tracking and investigating the anti-democracy movement as it seeks to foster doubt in democratic elections. Below, we outline how activists and partisan opportunists are using a variety of tactics to achieve these ends, from voter roll challenges, frivolous litigation, spurious fraud investigations, and voter intimidation to advancing partisan election rules, enabling certification delays, pushing for flawed hand counts, and stoking unfounded fears about illegal voting by non-citizens.

Several of these tactics have their roots in the last election, when Trump and his allies used a version of this playbook to challenge the 2020 results. In the lead-up to Election Day that year, Trump stoked fears about the increased use of mail-in voting amid the Covid-19 pandemic. State leaders used their power to boost fears about nonexistent widespread fraud by creating election integrity task forces. After President Joe Biden was declared the winner, Trump’s team launched a string of failed legal challenges, and supporters in seven states submitted fake electoral certificates falsely claiming Trump won in those states, culminating in a violent attempt to stop the certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021. 

While the attempt to overturn a free and fair election failed, the anti-democracy movement has been fine-tuning this scheme for 2024. The Republican National Committee has taken a lead, making fear-mongering about fraud a central part of its platform by investing “massive resources” in its newly created “election integrity division” and filing dozens of lawsuits in multiple states. The RNC’s transparent effort to undermine faith in U.S. elections is buoyed by a vast network of election deniers, including government officials, lawyers, business owners, activists, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing media personalities.

Alarmingly, a substantial percentage of Republicans share this belief. A May 2021 poll found that 53% of Republicans believed that Trump remained the “true president”; two years later, 63% believed the 2020 election had been stolen. According to a 2023 poll, just 22% of Republicans were highly confident that 2024 presidential election votes would be counted correctly.

The primary objective of those following the Anti-Democracy Playbook is exacerbating distrust by pushing two false central claims. First, election deniers argue without evidence that significant numbers of people are voting illegally. This happens, they claim, because voter rolls are inaccurate, noncitizens are illegally voting en masse, and people are abusing mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes. Second, they lie about structural flaws in the administration of elections, claiming election machines are inaccurate or manipulated, certain election administrators may tamper with the results, and officials are not properly investigating discrepancies. 

To address these purported issues, anti-democracy activists have pushed unnecessary and even harmful “solutions.” Right-wing groups, activists, and public officials are challenging voter registrations, encouraging new laws requiring proof of citizenship to vote, and beefing up law enforcement units set up to investigate and prosecute illegal voting. At the same time, they are encouraging hand counts, recruiting tens of thousands of poll watchers, and adopting last-minute election rule changes.

These so-called fixes are not only unnecessary; they also can make it harder for officials to administer elections while introducing barriers to voting that disproportionately affect people of color and other marginalized groups. Their inevitable failure to solve issues that don’t exist creates the impression that problems remain unsolved, bolstering lies about rife fraud and inaccurate results. And the more widely held the belief in these lies, the more likely their adherents will be to support desperate, drastic, and dangerous attempts to overturn our democracy.  

Table of Contents

The Tactics

Voter Registration Challenges

Election officials across the country have been bombarded with voter registration challenges aimed at removing people from voter rolls. Underlying these challenges, which disproportionately target voters of color, is the false notion that the rolls are riddled with inaccuracies that open the door to mass voter fraud. The demand for voter registration purges has become so high that the U.S. Department of Justice recently issued guidance outlining how and when voters can be removed. Many of the challenges have come from activists and private interest groups — including many of the same people involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election — who see an opportunity to magnify distrust by becoming involved in voter roll maintenance and election administration. 

Groups and private companies supported by election deniers have also developed new products that experts warn will make it easier for voter-fraud vigilantes to challenge and threaten the voting rights of thousands. The Voter Reference Foundation, which is run by Gina Swoboda, the head of Arizona’s Republican Party and a former organizer of Trump’s 2020 campaign in the state, runs an online project called VoteRef.com designed to be a resource for voter-fraud activists who want to inspect voter rolls. EagleAI, another database used by activists on the hunt for voter fraud, is supported by the Election Integrity Network, an organization led by Cleta Mitchell, a longtime proponent of voting restrictions who aided Trump in his attempts to remain in power in 2020. IV3, an app developed by voter-fraud alarmist group True the Vote, enables users to submit voter registration challenges to local election offices. The group has claimed that nearly 7,000 people have used IV3 to contest more than half a million registrations in more than 1,000 counties. 

Voting-rights and privacy advocates have expressed concern that these platforms could be used to compromise individual privacy, intimidate voters, cause mass cancellations of voting registrations, and inundate local election offices with burdensome, time-consuming, and inaccurate challenges. And as individuals and outside groups have launched mass voter challenges, some states have publicized voter list maintenance work that is already required by federal and state laws. Election experts have warned that presenting this routine process as part of preventing illegal voting could further create the false impression that elections are undermined by widespread voter fraud. 

The proliferation of citizen vote challenges was enabled by the months-long effort by election-denial activists and conservative leaders in several states to dismantle the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonpartisan organization designed to ensure accurate rolls. In 2022 and 2023, a misinformation campaign led nine states to abandon their participation in ERIC. Election experts and voting rights advocates have remained concerned about the impact of these hasty ERIC departures, particularly as activists and groups with a demonstrated antipathy toward widening access to the ballot attempt to fill the void. 

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Politically Motivated Litigation

In the weeks following the 2020 election, Trump’s lawyers — with the help of several state attorneys general — launched a barrage of legal challenges to the election results, filing dozens of lawsuits alleging voter fraud and arguing that various measures that facilitated voting during the pandemic had been improperly enacted.

This election, the RNC has gotten an earlier start, launching dozens of legal challenges months before the election and appointing Christina Bobb, who was active in partisan and baseless post-2020 election investigations, as its senior counsel for “election integrity.” “We currently have 78 lawsuits out right now in 23 states across this country to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” Lara Trump said in March in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo. These lawsuits occupy courts’ time and resources, serve as a vehicle for misinformation, and further amplify election denialism by manufacturing legitimacy through the legal process. 

While the specifics of the RNC’s lawsuits vary, the challenges center on many of the false claims promoted by election deniers, such as allegations that states are not properly maintaining voter rolls or administering elections. The RNC has sued the Michigan secretary of state as well as the Nevada secretary of state and five other Nevada election officials, and a lawsuit in North Carolina claims that inaccuracies in the state’s voter rolls could permit noncitizens to illegally vote. The RNC has also sued Detroit for allegedly not hiring enough Republican poll workers. 

Republicans are also filing lawsuits to challenge laws protecting the right to vote. In Arizona, the state Republican Party sued the governor over two measures that expanded voter registration outreach and access to ballot drop-off locations. Two high-ranking Arizona Republicans also filed a lawsuit challenging election administration rules set forth in the state’s new Elections Procedures Manual; a judge dismissed the lawsuit in May. In Nevada and Mississippi, the RNC challenged laws permitting mail-in ballots to be counted after Election Day if the ballots are postmarked before polls close. 

Right-wing organizations have filed similar lawsuits. The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a right-wing legal group, filed lawsuits in South Carolina, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in attempts to gain access to the states’ voter rolls. As of mid-September, at least 36 cases related to registration lists had been filed in 19 states. United Sovereign Americans has filed lawsuits in Florida, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas challenging the accuracy of each states’ registration lists. In October, one of United Sovereign Americans’ founders told USA Today that the group is already planning to sue over this year’s election results. 

Even when unsuccessful, these lawsuits heighten the perception that elections are rife with fraud, serving to motivate voters, drive fundraising, and sow the seeds of chaos before and after Election Day. If he loses, Trump could use these lawsuits to bolster the same unfounded argument he advanced in 2020 — that election procedures are so flawed that the results should not be accepted.

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Anti-Immigrant Conspiracy Theories

Studies have found that voting in federal elections by noncitizens is “vanishingly rare.” But the specter of votes being illegally cast by noncitizens has become a new conservative talking point, as election deniers advance false, xenophobic claims that voter rolls are inflated with non-U.S. citizens. 

Former President Trump has repeatedly made the false and racist claim that noncitizens are coming to the United States en masse to illegally vote. The RNC’s election integrity division has also alleged, without evidence, that illegal votes by immigrants could invalidate the election results, and has sent letters to the secretaries of state in eight states, claiming — also without evidence — that they allowed noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Just weeks before Election Day, at least eight lawsuits have been filed by Trump allies that allege inaccurate voter rolls could permit noncitizens to illegally vote.  In December, officials in Iowa sued the Biden administration, alleging the Department of Homeland Security did not provide information in response to a request from Secretary of State Paul Pate’s office for the citizenship status of more than 2,000 registered voters. Conservative groups with close ties to the election denial movement have also diligently promoted this lie. The Election Integrity Network, United Sovereign Americans, the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, Americans for Citizens Voting, America First Legal, True the Vote, the Heritage Foundation, and others have been at the forefront of the messaging campaign.

Meanwhile, activists have pressured government officials to adopt measures to fix what is a largely nonexistent problem. Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have pushed for a bill banning non-citizens from voting; Johnson even threatened to shut down the government if the bill was not passed. A recent Arizona law requires people registering to vote to provide proof of citizenship. This November, eight states — Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin — will have constitutional amendments on their ballots intended to limit voting to American citizens. 

If adopted, these measures could make it harder for legally registered people to vote, as many may not have easy access to the documents required to prove citizenship. And even if the measures fail, the anti-immigrant rhetoric and fearmongering can chill voter turnout, particularly in communities of color, and among naturalized citizens. Voter roll purges designed to remove noncitizens from voter rolls also risk improperly canceling legal registrations, including for recently naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote. And like lawsuits based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence, the rhetoric further boosts claims that elections are rife with fraud and the results are not accurate. As the Campaign Legal Center’s Jonathan Diaz told NBC News, “Creating doubt in the mind of the public and undermin[ing] the electoral system … possibly makes it easier for the public to swallow attempts to overturn the results.”

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Voter Intimidation

Election deniers claim rampant fraud is not limited to voter registration, but that it also happens at polling precincts and ballot drop boxes — beliefs amplified by Trump, who in September said he wanted to investigate and prosecute election officials he believes are “corrupt” and encouraged police officers to look for voter fraud.

To “solve” this purported issue, adherents to the Anti-Democracy Playbook have recruited thousands of poll watchers to conduct massive surveillance and have pushed restrictions on drop boxes. In Texas, for example, the attorney general has sued and harassed local election offices over their voter registration efforts. During a primary election in July, police in a Milwaukee suburb had to remove two poll observers who were being disruptive and challenging every absentee ballot. These efforts and the surrounding rhetoric raise concerns about voter intimidation and the potential for violence against election workers. 

In March, a Trump campaign spokesperson promised that there would be “soldiers — poll watchers, on the ground, who are making sure that there are no irregularities and fraud like we saw in the last election cycle.” This summer, the RNC launched a massive campaign to recruit 100,000 volunteers in 15 states to monitor polling places in the November election. The effort apparently succeeded: Trump’s campaign and allies claim they recruited about 175,000 people to be poll workers and poll watchers. The party has also reportedly established hotlines for poll watchers to report issues they believe they encounter, with perceived problems potentially resulting in legal action. In some places, the RNC has recruited volunteers from suburban areas to monitor election locations in urban areas, pulling a population with a higher percentage of white residents to observe — and potentially intimidate — a population with higher percentages of people of color. True the Vote is reportedly attempting to enlist law enforcement to assist with election surveillance.

The RNC has also had help from the nationwide network of voter-fraud alarmists. For example, Cleta Mitchell has hosted workshops promoting the importance of poll watching, and told right-wing activist and former Trump White House official Steve Bannon that her work is “arming the army of patriots.” Mitchell also reportedly influenced North Carolina legislators to include poll watcher provisions in SB 747, a 2023 election bill that changes several facets of the state’s election law, including mail-in ballot deadlines, voter identification requirements, and other provisions that election experts warn will make it harder to vote.

The consequences of this strategy are clear in light of the recent past. Before the 2022 midterms, right-wing groups pushing inaccurate claims about 2020 fraud recruited tens of thousands to monitor election sites. Voters and election workers reported feeling intimidated and harassed by observers who reportedly filmed people dropping off their ballots at vote-by-mail locations, tried to see personal voter information, encroached on voters’ physical space, and demanded access to all areas of a voting precinct. 

This “army” of monitors can disrupt overburdened election offices and worsen the harassment election workers are already contending with. According to the Brennan Center, 38% of election workers experienced threats, harassment, or abuse on the job, and more than 50% were afraid for their safety. The increased scrutiny of polling places — and the accompanying safety risks — have prompted schools across the country to opt to not serve as polling locations. 

The increased presence of poll watchers recruited under a misinformation banner contributes to the atmosphere of distrust while also having a deleterious effect on voter turnout in communities less likely to be conservative. “When you come in with a conspiratorial mindset, and not a lot of knowledge about how things work, it’s very easy to misconstrue what’s going on and to act in bad faith,” election law expert Rick Hasen told Time in 2022.

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Partisan Election Administration

Since 2020, multiple states have proposed or passed measures that grant partisan officials more power over election administration, including by lessening secretaries of states’ supervision of elections or shifting certain responsibilities to partisan bodies like election boards or state legislatures. Some proposals would shift appointed election administration positions to elected roles, grant lawmakers the ability to overturn election results, and strip state officials of authority, such as in Wisconsin, where conservative legislators have repeatedly attempted — and failed — to remove the state’s top nonpartisan election official, who has been the target of conspiracy theories. 

The danger is obvious: Leaders with deeply partisan interests could make decisions that impact perceptions about the reliability of elections and could even use their positions to influence election challenges. “Inserting partisan actors into election administration … is really a worrying trend when you understand it in the context of what happened in 2020,” Protect Democracy counsel Jessica Marsden told ABC News in August 2021, as such proposals began cropping up across the country.

In the years since 2020, several changes have already been implemented. For example, North Carolina created new state and county election boards whose members are appointed by the state’s General Assembly rather than the governor. The new boards have an even number of appointees from each party but no guidelines on how to resolve a deadlock, including on issues like certification or ballot challenges. In Texas, two laws enacted in 2023 paved the way for the state to potentially take over election administration in Harris County, the state’s most populous county. 

There has been no shortage in 2024 of last-ditch attempts at rule changes that confer partisan advantage or bolster the voter-fraud myth. In Georgia, the State Election Board (SEB) recently considered a bevy of controversial changes that would go into effect just weeks before the election. In August, the SEB approved a rule requiring local election officials to conduct “reasonable inquiries” before certifying election results, and advanced another requiring workers in each polling place to hand-count ballots. Trump has lavished praise on the three SEB board members who make up the far-right majority pushing these rules, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory,” and Cleta Mitchell has provided similar adulation. One of those members, Janice Johnston, reportedly worked with Trump allies to draft the certification rule. And the Georgia GOP, in apparent coordination with the RNC, reportedly provided Rick Jeffares, another member, with a rule requiring election boards to post daily ballot counts online — one of two rules advanced by the SEB during a hastily convened July meeting that violated the state’s Open Meetings Act. (Following American Oversight’s lawsuit and motion for a preliminary injunction, the SEB rescinded the rules, and reconsidered them at a subsequent meeting.) In October, a Fulton County Superior Court judge struck down seven of the board’s recent rules, determining they were “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”

In September, conservatives in Nebraska made a last-minute push to change the way the state’s Electoral College votes are distributed, a partisan move that ultimately failed. Unlike the vast majority of other states, Nebraska’s electoral votes are awarded by congressional district. The proposed change — which received support from Gov. Jim Pillen, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and Trump — would have adopted a winner-take-all system, almost certainly increasing the number of electoral votes Trump would earn in November. 

In August, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a new Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote could take effect, raising concerns about additional uncertainty regarding the “Purcell principle,” which warns federal courts to avoid permitting changes to voting rules close to an election. As ACLU Voting Rights Project Director Sophia Lin Lakin told CNN, the ruling “creates a lot of anxiety that the rule could be applied in a way that’s inconsistent and tips the scales.”

Empowering partisan actors to oversee elections could allow them to legitimize baseless election challenges or otherwise sow chaos and doubt. Moreover, last-minute changes risk confusing voters, lowering turnout, and tilting the playing field to one candidate.

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Certification Delays

The process by which local and state election officials certify the accuracy of an election and finalize the results has been targeted by anti-democracy activists who have launched a sprawling effort to allow election officials to refuse to certify. Embedded in certification delays is the idea that elections are so susceptible to widespread fraud or error that election officials need additional time to investigate the results. Routine, minor discrepancies between voter totals and ballot counts transform into malfeasance, aggravating doubts about election integrity. Since 2020, officials in eight states have refused to certify results in at least 20 instances, citing vague and unfounded concerns about voting equipment, errors that did not impact the election results, and election laws they consider unfair. 

These refusals have been validated by new measures permitting certification delays and lawsuits challenging the certification process. Experts have pointed out the danger of partisan officials using that latitude to cast doubt on or to subvert elections that don’t go the way they or those influencing them want. Even if courts eventually force officials to certify, the damage is still done: Delays give more fuel to conspiracy theories and further damage voter confidence.

Delaying certification could also put states in danger of missing federal law’s Dec. 11 deadline, which could leave room for legal challenges that exacerbate chaos, confusion, and doubt about the results. This risk is amplified by the many election deniers — at least 200 in seven swing states, according to States United — who are running for office, hold key leadership positions, or serve on county and state election boards. 

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Hand Counts

The misguided push for hand counts is based on the conspiracy theory that electronic voting machines produce inaccurate vote tallies because of errors or tampering. The solution, right-wing activists claim, is to abandon machines and instead count ballots by hand. 

Hand-count disciples have had the support of prominent election deniers, including those with ties to Trump allies who sought to overturn the 2020 election results. Voting conspiracy theorist and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is one of the biggest supporters of hand counts, reportedly funding some efforts and featuring hand-count advocates on his various platforms. Mark Cook, a self-described IT expert from Colorado, has been traversing the country in an RV as part of his “hand count road show,” a series of presentations designed to foment distrust in results and convince local officials to adopt hand counts. 

Activists have managed to convince some jurisdictions — typically small or rural areas that overwhelmingly voted for former Trump in 2020 — to adopt the practice. Local officials in Missouri, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin elected to hand-count ballots in their midterm or primary elections. Earlier this year, more than a dozen legislators in the Ohio House backed a bill that would allow counties to hand-count ballots instead of using machines. Most recently, the Georgia State Election Board passed a new rule that requires each of the state’s voting precincts to hand-count ballots before certifying election results; in October, a state judge put the requirement on hold because it was adopted so close to Election Day.

Election experts warn that hand counts are time-consuming, costly, and less accurate than voting machines. Texas’ Gillespie County Republican Party counted ballots by hand for its March 2024 primary; there were errors in results in nearly every precinct, and in May it was reported that the labor costs of the hand count were on pace to be twice as high as those of the 2020 primary.

Pushing for hand counts and decrying the use of electronic machines is yet another way of feeding the false belief that our elections are not secure. It provides “additional grounds for calling into question the results of elections when there are no valid grounds,” former American Oversight Executive Director Heather Sawyer told the Guardian in April 2024. “There’s no good reason to do it. And there’s lots of room for mischief and problems.”

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State Voter Fraud Investigations

Since the 2020 election, a handful of conservative states have devoted time, money, and resources into creating state offices focused on “election integrity” that lend false credence to the myth of widespread fraud and drain taxpayer money by using law enforcement resources to suppress the vote. 

For example, in April 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law, which his office helped draft, creating an Office of Election Crimes and Security, a police force housed within the Florida Department of State. Tasked with combating voter fraud, the office has, since its creation, targeted people with prior felony convictions, many of whom had been incorrectly informed by official government entities that they were eligible to vote following the passage of a 2018 ballot initiative. While Texas’s Election Integrity Division has ballooned in size since the 2020 election, it has — as expected — found few cases of actual voter fraud. Recently, Attorney General Ken Paxton used the office’s voter integrity unit to conduct raids on Latino voting activists. Several other states, including Arizona, Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Georgia, have created or attempted to create election integrity units in recent years. 

In March, Lara Trump warned the RNC would use its own “election integrity division” to prosecute fraud “to the fullest extent of the law.” While such offices and law enforcement units have failed to prosecute — much less uncover evidence of — instances of voter fraud in any significant numbers, their mere existence inflates false concerns in a bid to gain political support. 

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In the States