“As things stand right now,” the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Mike Howell declared last week, “there’s zero chance of a free and fair election. I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policy-makers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.”
Howell’s words are part of the latest chapter in a long and intensifying campaign on the conservative side of US politics. The Republican Party has this year filed more than ninety legal challenges to electoral rules — an unparalleled pre-election blitz — few of which are are likely to have merit. But that’s not the point: their aim is to persuade voters that the Democrats are undermining American democracy and only the Donald Trump and the Republican Party stands in their way.
Howell’s words came in the same week that the New York Times revealed how the Republicans are preparing, in its words, to “short-circuit the election system” if Trump doesn’t win in November. “Mr Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr Trump loses,” the paper reports. “The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.”
So intense is this assault that Howell could turn out to be right for the wrong reasons: America’s ramshackle electoral system might be rendered even less capable of reflecting the will of American voters.
Trump’s efforts to project onto his opponents his own hostility to democracy go back at least to the 2016 election. Although he won a majority in the electoral college he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.9 million votes. Not content with the win, he tweeted: “In addition to winning the electoral college in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
The commission he appointed to investigate the alleged fraud, headed by a strong backer of the claims, Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, and vice-president Mike Pence, quietly dissolved just over a year later without publishing a report. It had failed to substantiate a single case. According to one of its members, Maine’s secretary of state Matt Dunlap, it had a pre-ordained outcome that it could not deliver.
Even before polling day 2016, Trump had been laying out his public response if he lost. As Michael Wolff reported in his book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Trump made it clear that he would declare the election “stolen” if his presidential bid failed. Before a single vote had been cast, before anyone had made any claims whatsoever, he had his story ready.
But Trump’s allegations of electoral fraud go back even further, to election night 2012 and Barack Obama’s successful re-election. Trump tweeted that the result was a “total sham” and a “travesty,” and asserted that the United States was not a democracy. He also called on the American people to “fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice” because “the world is laughing at us.” Neither the defeated candidate, Mitt Romney, nor any other prominent Republican endorsed Trump’s view.
During the 2016 Republican primaries, after a setback, he trotted out the same claim: “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.” Then, as he won more primaries, his complaints about cheating evaporated.
Two years later, before the 2018 congressional elections, Trump and his attorney-general Jeff Sessions warned of widespread voter fraud; during the counting Trump tweeted “Many ballots are missing or forged, ballots massively infected.” No evidence was produced and no inquiries launched.
All of this was but a prelude to Trump’s most intense and sustained charges of electoral fraud, which came following his loss (by seven million votes) to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
As early as August he fired the first salvo: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” On election night, he declared “Frankly, we did win this election.” From then on, in tweets and statements, came a repetitive refrain: “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country.” “Watch for massive ballot counting abuse… Remember I told you so.” “I won this election. By a lot.” “No way we lost this election.”
As well as these claims by Trump and close allies, the Republicans filed sixty-three law suits contesting the election. Like this year’s volley, their purpose was less legal than political. The strategy was summed up by Trump’s head of agitprop, Steve Bannon: “flood the zone with shit.” The aim was to use a blizzard of activity to sew doubt and confusion.
Fox News’s Tucker Carlson was among those who loyally toed the party line. “In case you haven’t noticed,” he declared with unconscious irony, “it’s hard to trust anything you hear right now… There are conflicting versions of virtually every part [of the story of last week’s election].” All sixty-three legal actions eventually failed.
Contradicting the Trump line wasn’t a good career move during his administration. A few days after Trump’s election loss, in violation of the longstanding practice of keeping the justice department out of electoral politics, attorney-general William Barr authorised federal prosecutors to look into claims of voter fraud. Barr publicly conceded that the department had no evidence of fraud; days later Trump announced Barr’s resignation.
A similar sequence of events followed claims that Dominion Voting Systems was deleting votes cast by Trump supporters. Trump’s head of US Cybersecurity, Chris Krebs, said there was no evidence of any voting system destroying or changing votes; not long after, Trump fired him.
No matter how many claims were refuted, Trump’s mantra of industrial-scale fraud remained constant. Often they were framed as if no checks and balances existed and as if no booth- and district-level numbers from previous elections existed that would have made fraud on the alleged scale glaringly obvious.
The polls had for some time been pointing overwhelmingly to a Trump defeat, and in fact Trump did somewhat better in the election than many of them suggested. Were the competing polling companies also in on the con? And if the election riggers were Democrats, they didn’t serve their party especially well: they failed, for example, to secure a solid Senate majority.
Among officials directly involved in vote counts or electoral administration, few if any supported claims of fraud. When the New York Times conducted a survey of election officials in every state, Republicans and Democrats alike, none said they had seen evidence of fraud capable of overturning the 2020 outcome.
Despite the lack of evidence and despite the fact that not a single accusation has been proved, Trump continues the attack. And in the Trump-dominated Republican party, endorsing those fantasies has become a rite of passage. A Washington Post survey before the 2022 midterm elections found that nearly 300 of 500 Republican candidates for federal and state offices embraced Trump’s claims of fraud.
One of the 300, Don Bolduc, who ran for the Senate and lost, later admitted to the Post that he told rallies Trump had won the 2020 election. Now, he said, he had decided “no more political games… the election wasn’t stolen.”
It would be interesting to know how many others parroting Trump’s lies actually believe them. Even Trump’s vocal supporters in the media have been shown to be duplicitous. In the embarrassing and expensive Dominion Voting Systems case, Fox News personnel who gave the fraud claims lots of oxygen were shown in private communications not to believe them. Fox had to pay the company a record $787.5 million in compensation.
Whether or not political apparatchiks actually believe them, the claims still have an impact. According to a 2023 opinion poll, just 31 per cent of Republicans think Biden was the legitimate winner in 2020. Moreover the election rigging is just part of the alternative reality that a hard core of Trump followers now believe. A poll in late 2023 found a quarter of Americans believe the FBI probably or certainly instigated the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.
As last week’s New York Times report shows, the Republicans have been laying the ground for these claims to intensify later this year. In January, Trump tied the electoral rigging issue to illegal immigration: “That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote.” In fact, most studies show voting by non-citizens is minute, between 0.0003 and 0.001 per cent according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The chilling reality is that any efforts to overturn an unwelcome result will be much better planned than in 2020. Personnel in key positions are ready to act.
All democracies have rituals to signal the legitimacy of the post-election transfers from one government to the next — though the US more than most — but this pageantry normally has no significant impact on the political processes. MAGA Republicans have been looking since 2020 for vulnerabilities in these formalities: gaps and loopholes where the democratic process can be overturned.
Try to imagine what would have happened if vice-president Mike Pence had bowed to Trump’s demand in January 2020 and disallowed the electoral slates sent by the states. Predictably, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee in 2024, J.D. Vance, is on record as saying Pence should have carried out Trump’s scheme to overturn the result.
Trump has been making charges of large-scale election fraud, sufficient to change election outcomes, for twelve years. Not once has he been able to substantiate an actual example, but the essential charge has proved immune to counter-evidence. This is a cynical, calculated and sustained assault on the legitimacy of American elections. It is still too early to gauge its long-term impact on the country’s democracy. •
