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The roadmap laid out by the Justice Department in court this week for how former President Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election feels eerily familiar to many election officials and voting rights advocates who are gearing up for November.
In battleground states across the country, Republicans have worked aggressively to raise concerns about noncitizen voting (which experts say is rare in federal elections), to contest thousands of voters’ registrations and to challenge the once mundane process of certifying results.
They’ve filed an avalanche of pre-election lawsuits in swing states. And they’ve kept up a drumbeat of dubious claims about voting, along with the lie that the election was stolen in 2020.
“There are a number of parallels in the strategy we are seeing develop to what we saw in 2020,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director for the Brennan Center’s voting rights program. “The election deniers’ playbook – the plan to subvert the outcome of the election – is more coordinated, it’s more planned out, it’s much more well-funded and sophisticated than it was in 2020.”
The details alleged in special counsel Jack Smith’s filing unsealed this week were ultimately part of an unsuccessful effort. But several of the strategies Trump and his allies deployed four years ago have been fine-tuned in 2024, raising fears that Republican activists and officials are actively laying the groundwork to contest the results again if Trump falls short.
“The attacks on voter eligibility, lies about immigrants and voting, also attacks on methods of voting,” said Hannah Fried, executive director of All Voting is Local. “These are about laying groundwork for challenging results.”
A Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to the campaign’s released comment slamming the Smith filing, which called it “falsehood-ridden” and an attempt to “interfere in this election.”
Smith’s filing recalled tense scenes from 2020, when counting sites in battleground states were swarmed by angry protesters, fueled by baseless claims of voter fraud, trying to disrupt poll workers from counting ballots.
When a Trump campaign operative was told by a colleague during the 2020 election that the behavior of the crowd at Detroit’s TCF Center was headed in the direction of the so-called Brooks Brothers’ riot that sought to block ballot counting in Florida, the operative said “Make them riot” and “do it!!!,” Smith’s new filing revealed.
Prosecutors allege that the Trump campaign used similarly aggressive tactics in Philadelphia to force confrontation with election officials, which Trump and his allies used to claim his supporters were denied access to observe the count.
Republican Al Schmidt, who oversaw the counting in Philadelphia in his role at the time as a city commissioner, was at the heart of the chaos. At a recent event about safeguarding elections in Michigan, he said he remains concerned about how misinformation can whip up citizens and create dangerous situations for election workers.
“There were people from other states who put guns in their car and drove to our tabulation center – because of all the misinformation that they had been exposed to,” said Schmidt, now the Pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth.
Going into 2024, Republicans say they have been focused on recruiting an unprecedented number of attorneys and poll watchers who they say can be ready to monitor the administration of the election and potentially collect evidence to support litigation in court.
“You have to be in the room when people are voting. You’ve got to be in the room when the votes are being counted,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley said at a Michigan event in June to recruit volunteers and tout the party’s election monitoring efforts. “It is not an election denier conspiracy theory to say that you should be in the room, and you should make sure that these things are being done fairly.”
When an apparent protester weighed in during a public commentary section to ask Whatley to tell the rest of the room the 2020 election was free and fair, others in the room booed the man.
Whatley simply chuckled and said he was “fully committed to making sure that the 2024 election is going to be fair, accurate, secure and transparent.”
Last month, the RNC announced that it had recruited more than 200,000 volunteers in its poll watching efforts.
Election officials have been operating in an increasingly hostile environment as GOP skepticism of election administration has climbed. Officials are bracing for another wave of misinformation this year and preparing for security threats that could follow.
Zach Manifold, elections supervisor for Gwinnett County, Georgia, said official poll watchers have been trained and tend to abide by the rules.
“The biggest worry would just probably be like public observers,” Manifold said. “They haven’t been trained… and they read something online, they don’t really know what the rules are, and then they come in.”
Like most election offices now, Gwinnett County has security contingencies, including panic buttons on election workers’ cell phones, in case members of the public get out of hand.
“If you really have a problem, we don’t want poll officials having to engage,” Manifold said.
In 2020, the Trump campaign embraced an evolving set of fraud allegations that were never backed up by hard evidence, Smith’s filing lays out. Among them: shifting numbers of noncitizens Trump allies claimed had voted in the 2020 election.
Heading into 2024, Republicans continue to beat the drum that mass noncitizen voting is a major problem – an allegation that has been debunked by election experts.
But that hasn’t stopped those in the MAGA echo-chamber from blasting out baseless claims that undocumented immigrants are signing up to vote in numbers that could sway the election results in November.
“I think it’s pretty clear that one of the plays in the Democrats’ playbook for 2024 has been to convert all of these illegals coming across the border into voters,” conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell, who worked to upend the results of the 2020 election, said on a right-wing podcast last month.
“This is a really big threat, and the more we can keep it on the front burner, hopefully the more awareness there is that people need to be watching their DMVs and watching their local election offices and finding out – what’s going on in your community to keep noncitizens from voting?” she added.
The GOP-led House passed a voting bill this summer that would have required people to show documents proving their citizenship to vote – and hardliners suggested that Republicans force a shutdown fight over including the measure in must-pass government funding legislation. But the Senate never took up the bill.
Meanwhile, lawsuits brought by America First Legal Foundation, a conservative group led by former Trump officials, are seeking to force election officials to use federal immigration data to verify the citizenship of those on the voter rolls.
Election experts warn that doing so without proper safeguards would risk purging eligible voters because the immigration data doesn’t account for immigrants who registered to vote after they became naturalized but are in the non-citizenship databases because of driver’s licenses they obtained before their nationalization.
“I’ve never experienced a noncitizen having cast a ballot,” Lisa Posthumus Lyons, the clerk for Kent County, Michigan, said at the election safeguards event. She has seen instances where noncitizens who are in the US legally were automatically – and accidentally – registered to vote when they obtained a driver’s license, though she noted it was rare and has happened less frequently the longer the system has been in place.
When those noncitizens realize they are registered, “in these very few instances, they’ve self-reported to us. They want off the rolls. They don’t want any misunderstanding that they had any intention of violating the laws here because they know what the consequences are,” Posthumus Lyons said.
Swing state election officials also have been grappling with lawsuits claiming their voter rolls haven’t been properly maintained to ensure only eligible voters are registered, lawsuits that many voting rights groups believe could be used as a foundation to try to challenge the election results.
A group called United Sovereign Americans has filed longshot lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and several other states seeking court orders blocking certification of elections in those states unless certain steps are taken to vet the voter rolls.
“There is an effort to promote a narrative that somehow there are scores of ineligible voters registered – ineligible people – on our registration list,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said at the election safeguards event. Despite efforts to debunk the claims, she said, “it is still one of the narratives we’re going to see.”
Voting machines and certification
Smith’s latest filing specifically notes how Trump in 2020 pushed baseless claims about the security and accuracy of voting machines, claims that were central to many of his failed post-election lawsuits.
Several right-wing media organizations that amplified those claims were sued for defamation by voting machine companies — including Fox News, which paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to settle its suit.
Still, Republicans and Trump allies have continued to question the security of voting machines.
In Georgia, Republican Party officials and Trump allies are trying to preemptively sow doubt about the viability of Dominion systems, arguing in court that the machines should not be used because they are not safe or secure. At a recent hearing, none of their witnesses could provide clear evidence that any vulnerabilities in the Georgia voting systems were exploited in earlier elections.
A sizable portion of Smith’s filing focuses on the pressure campaign by Trump to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election.
Pence ultimately rejected Trump’s appeals. To ensure a president never has that kind of leverage over a vice president again, Republicans and Democrats enacted stronger guardrails on the congressional certification process.
In 2022, Congress updated the Electoral Count Act, a vague 19th century law that Trump tried to lean on as he pressured Pence to overturn the election results.
The new legislation clarifies that the vice president’s role in certifying the election is purely ceremonial. It also makes it harder to submit alternative slates of elections and for lawmakers to object to a state’s slate of electors.
Smith’s brief also focused on the ways Trump and his allies pressured state and local officials to delay certification. In the years that have followed, certification fights have popped up in swing states across the county, though Republican officials have so far been unsuccessful in blocking certification.
Still, Democrats and voting rights activists are sounding the alarm over new attempts by state and local officials to try to delay or outright decline to certify election results this year.
In Georgia, state courts are reviewing new rules from the State Election Board that Democrats say give county election officials broad authority to delay certification of the results in search of purported election irregularities.
And a federal judge recently struck down an Arizona election regulation that would have allowed the secretary of state to proceed with certifying statewide results if an individual county refused to formalize its count.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told reporters on Thursday that the state is still exploring strategies for overcoming local certification shenanigans, while noting the two local officials who held up the certification in Cochise County in 2022 now face criminal charges.
“We have been gaming out – in conjunction with not only the attorney general’s office, but with the governor’s office – a variety of different legal strategies and responses to those potential strategies that may be employed not just by county officials, but by outside actors, before, during or after the post-election exercise,” Fontes said.
It’s an example of how officials have responded to the increasing challenges from election skeptics this year: by being ready to combat them more aggressively.
“The preparation for responding to that playbook is much more coordinated,” said Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center. “I am confident that these institutions will hold, and we will have a safe and secure election.”
CNN’s Marshall Cohen and Fredreka Schouten contributed to this report.
