Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is no stranger to voter suppression in Georgia and she sees a “nightmare scenario” for how Republicans could nullify a Democratic victory in the state in November.
In August, after Donald Trump praised three Republican appointees to the Georgia State Election Board by name at a rally in Atlanta, the MAGA-aligned majority on the board passed a series of rule changes—requiring counties to undertake a “reasonable inquiry” into the vote totals and review “all election-related documentation” before certifying an election—that Democrats and voting rights groups fear could lead GOP-controlled boards not to sign off on the results if Kamala Harris wins the state. “The discrete and immediate concern,” says Abrams, who ran for Georgia governor in 2018 and 2022 and founded the voting rights group Fair Fight, “is that this will delay the counting of Georgia’s Electoral College votes.”
If there’s a lengthy dispute over the vote count, Georgia could miss the December 11 deadline for certifying its Electoral College results. If no candidate receives the 270 votes necessary to win the Electoral College as a result, the presidential election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where Republicans control a majority of state House delegations, allowing them to swing the election to Trump.
“It is not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams told me recently in Austin, Texas (we did a panel together on September 7 for the Texas Tribune Festival). “There’s a timetable, and that timetable presumes that everything is settled by the federal deadlines that are set. A state’s inability to meet that deadline or refusal to meet that deadline, throws the election to the House of Representatives. That is not the electoral body that should be deciding this election. It should be the people of the state.”
What Abrams is outlining is known as a “contingent election” under the 12th Amendment. If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes, the House selects the president and the Senate picks the vice president. That’s only happened once in US history for the country’s highest office—in 1824, Andrew Jackson won the Electoral College and popular vote, but the House installed the runner up, John Quincy Adams, as president.
“It’s not just a nightmare scenario, it’s a very real possibility,” Abrams says.
In a contingent election, a majority of state delegations, not House members overall, decide the winner. Under this scenario, the House essentially functions as the Senate, with each state getting one vote for president regardless of population. That means California, with 39 million people, has the same level of representation as Wyoming, with 584,000 people. This structure significantly favors Republicans, who are overrepresented in sparsely populated rural states, and who also drew redistricting maps in key states like Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—giving them control of the House delegations despite the closely divided nature of those states.
A contingent election would amplify the structural inequities built into the US political system. “In the Electoral College, voters in large states have slightly less relative power than their share of the U.S. population would suggest. In a contingent election, this imbalance becomes extraordinary,” noted a report last year from Protect Democracy. “The twenty-eight smallest states control nearly 28 percent of votes in the Electoral College (148)—yet, they control 56 percent of the votes in a contingent election.” (Washington D.C., which has three Electoral College votes, but is not a state, is also barred from participating.)
That could lead to an extraordinarily undemocratic outcome—a candidate could lose both the popular vote and fail to gain a majority of the Electoral College, but become president thanks to House members who do not even represent a majority of the body, let alone a majority of Americans.
Currently, Republicans control 26 state House delegations, exactly what they need to pick the president in a contingent election, compared to 22 for Democrats, with the rest divided equally. Though a contingent election would take place after the new Congress is seated in early January 2025, Republicans are likely to add another state, North Carolina, where the GOP gerrymandered district lines last year to pick up three or more House seats. “Republicans should have a majority in at least 26 state U.S. House delegations in 2025, even if they do not retain the overall House majority,” writes Kyle Klondike of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. And if Republicans retain the House majority, GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson could use his power to further tilt the rules in Trump’s favor.
Of course, a lot of things must go haywire for Abrams’ nightmare scenario to occur. Georgia law clearly specifies that counties “shall certify” the election returns. Democrats are challenging the state board’s new certification rules in court ahead of the election. And if counties refuse to approve the vote counts after the election, they will almost certainly be forced to certify the results by the courts or other state officials—which occurred when Republicans declined to certify election results in other states in recent elections. And Georgia may not be the tipping point state in the Electoral College anyway.
Jessica Marsden, counsel to the free and fair elections program at Protect Democracy, called a contingent election scenario “extremely unlikely.” She said that while she was alarmed by election deniers taking over state and county election boards in Georgia, she remained confident that top state officials, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who resisted Trump’s demand to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse Biden’s victory in 2020, along with state courts, would once again uphold the integrity of the election.
“We’ve looked hard at Georgia law and we think it’s well-established that certification is a ministerial duty,” Marsden explained. “Even with the changes that the state board is trying to make, counties have a deadline and they have to certify by that deadline and state officials, based on our understanding, are ready to hold them to account. I think state officials are going to be all over this problem and will have the tools they need to make sure the election is certified.”
But Abrams’ concerns are not as far-fetched as they might seem given what happened in 2020. Yes, the effort to overturn the election failed. But it did lead to an insurrection at the Capitol. And the election denier movement is much stronger this time around, taking control over key election bodies in states like Georgia. Even if the election results are ultimately certified, any kind of dispute or delay in counting votes could be weaponized by Trump and his allies to disastrous effect.
“The biggest increase in risk post-2020 stems from the concerted, intentional effort to foment distrust in the election system,” Marsden says. “It’s less to me an issue that there are weak points that could be used to overturn election results. My concern is primarily the damage that gets caused along the way by people who have been lied to about the validity of the process.”
Before 2020, Republicans who wanted to subvert fair elections were focused on passing laws that made it harder to vote. But after Trump tried to overturn the election, his allies expanded the voter suppression playbook, shifting from simply limiting access to the ballot to contesting election outcomes, as Georgia clearly indicates.
“Georgia is an incubator for voter suppression and has been for decades now,” Abrams says. “We will not be the only state, and in fact, we’re not the only state, that has seen variations on this certification theme. Those who want to destabilize the system realized that voter suppression has three pieces: Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? Does your ballot get counted? Well, they have done what they can to interfere with the first and the second. The ultimate does your ballot get counted is not allowing the certification of your votes, because that is the final administrative step to a vote actually being counted in an election.”
At tonight’s debate, former President Donald Trump repeated baseless claims, increasingly popular among Republicans, that there is mass noncitizen voting in the United States. It has been a persistent theme of the campaign—one that combines two of Trump’s main recurring grievances: anti-immigrant sentiment and the Big Lie.
“Our elections are bad,” Trump said. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”
Noncitizen voting is a non-issue, despite Republicans’ best efforts to make it one. Some of it goes back to a debunked video. In late July, the Oversight Project—a self-described “legal and investigative” group linked to the Heritage Foundation that purports to be “battling corruption and weaponization”—promoted a video with supposed evidence of widespread cases of noncitizens admitting to being registered voters. Behind the camera, a man introduces himself to residents of an apartment complex in Norcross, Georgia, saying he works at a company that helps Hispanic people register to vote. He goes on to ask them if they’re US citizens or not, and a handful of respondents appear to confirm that they are noncitizens who are registered to vote.
In the video, Anthony Rubin—the founder of the right-wing Muckraker website known for pulling undercover stunts like infiltrating migrant caravans to denounce an “invasion” and exposing flyers allegedly calling on migrants at a border encampment to vote for Joe Biden—says 14 percent of noncitizens with whom they spoke admitted to being registered to vote, and then extrapolated that statewide to claim 47,000 noncitizens would be registered to vote in Georgia. “Based on our findings,” he concludes, “the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy.” The video reached 56 million views on X, with a boost from Elon Musk, who has been spreading false claims about noncitizen voting and accusing Democrats of “importing voters.”
NON-CITIZENS REGISTERED IN GA
Footage obtained by @realmuckraker shows numerous non-citizens admitting to being registered voters.
A staggering 14% of the non-citizens spoken to admitted to being registered to voters. pic.twitter.com/0p38irDBZH
It turns out, these unfounded allegations of noncitizen voting can be—and have been—easily and exhaustively debunked.
As the New York Times recently reported, three of the seven people depicted in the video later provided context that contradicts the assertions made, saying they had either only told the man what they thought he wanted to hear to make him go away, or that they feared that by telling the truth, meaning that they weren’t registered to vote, they might be coerced to register and get in trouble with immigration authorities. Georgia investigators also found no evidence that those people had voter registrations, according to the Times.
A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of “suspected noncitizen voting” for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes. In 2020, the Cato Institute concluded that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.” Even the Heritage Foundation’s own data proves that the idea of massive noncitizen voting in the United States amounts to a long-lastingmyth. An analysis by the American Immigration Council of Heritage’s database containing 1,546 instances of voter fraud found just 68 cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s. And only 10 of them involved undocumented immigrants.
Despite all the evidence, the GOP and right-wing activists continue to push conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting and are even proposing legislation barring noncitizens from voting in federal elections (which already is the law).
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said during a press conference earlier this year about the introduction of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE), a bill making it a requirement to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. “But it’s not been something that’s easily provable. We don’t have that number.”
With Johnson now trying to attach the proposed legislation to a stopgap funding bill, Donald Trump suggested congressional Republicans should force a government shutdown if the effort is unsuccessful. “The Democrats are trying to ‘stuff’ voter registrations with illegal aliens,” he posted on Truth Social. “Don’t let it happen—Close it down!!!”
Critics of the SAVE Act say the legislation can only result in more voters of color and naturalized citizens being disenfranchised, pointing to the fact that millions of US citizens don’t have access to a passport or birth certificate to present as proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Moreover, states already have systems in place to verify the citizenship status of voters. “This bill would do nothing to safeguard our elections, but it would make it much harder for all eligible Americans to register to vote and increase the risk that eligible voters are purged from voter rolls,” the White House said in a statement in July.
“In 2020, we heard wild stories of voting machines flipping votes, of boxes of ballots, of ballot paper that supposedly had bamboo fibers in it to prove it came from China,” Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, said in a congressional testimony. “This year, we’re hearing the beginning of wild stories about widespread, huge numbers of noncitizens voting in federal elections.”
Why now?
“It’s being pushed preemptively, I believe, to set the stage for undermining the legitimacy of the 2024 election,” Waldman added. “This year, the ‘Big Lie’ is being pre-deployed.”
At a Tuesday panel dedicated to “Protecting the Vote” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an expert speaker sounded as if he was holding back tears as he explained what motivates him to do the work.
His wife gave birth to a son just two weeks ago, he shared. Suddenly, his job wasn’t just about protecting democracy for the country, but also for his newborn. “I have to fight for his ability to continue to be a respected member of his community and a citizen of his country in a full way,” said Jake Kenswil, director of voter protection at the Democratic National Committee.
“This subject is emotional for us,” said Yvette Lewis, another speaker and the former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party. “What we need you to do is to be just as emotional when you’re talking to your communities,” she added, “and get them to feel what we hope we made you feel today—which is the urgency of why this is so very important.”
But there weren’t many people there to hear their pressing message. In a conference room that could have accommodated hundreds, less than 40 people showed; out of two dozen press-reserved seats, only one was filled (mine). The sparsely attended meeting hosted by Democratic legal experts belies the tremendous threat to voter confidence proliferating this cycle: Deepfake videos projecting fictitious messages from seemingly real officials. Disingenuous lawsuits amplifying debunked theories of fraud. Widespread challenges to voter rolls. Stricter laws on voter identification documentation. Plus, a torrent of requests and threats to local election workers trying to hold down the fort through all of the tumult.
“We have a lot of work to do to prepare for early voting, to ensure our elections are secure, [and] to protect the accuracy of our laws,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told me the following day. “And every minute we spend worrying or thinking about planning to protect against these threats is a minute that’s taken away from our ability to do our jobs.”
Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice, has a theory on the event’s low attendance Tuesday: “Lawyers are boring,” she, a lawyer herself, quipped at a separate event on Wednesday. Moreover, elected officials and election security experts have some trust in reforms that have occurred since President Donald Trump’s supporters infamously broke into the Capitol to overthrow the 2020 election on January 6, 2021.
“There is no legitimate loophole through which somebody can steal an election. It is actually illegal to throw out legitimate votes. It is illegal to reject certification. It is illegal to try to thwart a congressional count,” she said, pointing to the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act, which raised the threshold for members of Congress to challenge the Electoral College and clarified the role of the vice president in election certification.
That being said, with significant progress on protecting the sanctity of elections has come more aggressive tactics to undermine it. “There’s been a strengthening of safeguards,” Weiser said. “There’s also been an increase in risk level.”
In the spring, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump went on conservative cable news channel Newsmax to talk about the GOP’s efforts to ensure her father-in-law, former President Trump, is pleased with the election outcome in November.
“We have lawsuits in 81 states right now,” she said. Late-night television talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel was quick to mock her slip-up on elementary-level geography. “Not just Tennessee, eleven-essee, twelve-essee,” Kimmel joked about the impossible number of states. “West Dakota, South Virginia. Indiana, Out-diana, you name it—they’re suing.”
The RNC says it is already involved in at least 78 election-related lawsuits in 23 states, often working with white-shoe law firms—including Consovoy McCarthy, which employs multiple former clerks to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who may eventually be called upon to hear the merits of some of the cases. Several of them focus on longtime GOP bugaboos, like signature verification laws and absentee voting protocols. Others are dressed-up versions of Trump’s wilder conspiracies, including his claim that a “tremendous number of dead people” cast ballots in 2020. Importantly, the buckshot legal onslaught is preemptive, not defensive, and appears intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results.
Despite the GOP’s claims repeatedly failing in courts, the lawsuits are effective in the sense that they “create smoke” before judges ultimately dismiss them, said Weiser. “They are exploiting a loophole in the system: Courts are slow.”
In our interview, Benson agreed that Republican National Committee lawsuits in Michigan—such as challenges to her state’s voter roll maintenance—are merely “an effort to drive a PR campaign, to drive a public narrative that sows seeds of distrust,” she said. “When the lawsuits ultimately get dismissed, the damage has already been done.”
Lawsuits aren’t the only weapon in the right’s arsenal. Several GOP-led states have enacted stricter voter identification laws that will increase barriers for voters who don’t possess identification for a variety of reasons. Election deniers are also running and winning positions in local election administration. Conservatives in Georgia are pushing for the ability to challenge voter registrations with limited data. And without an ounce of credible evidence, Trump also continues to insinuate there is fraud afoot, especially if he loses.
He maintains that the only way Democrats could win in 2024 is if they cheat. Therefore, he adds, his lead at the ballot box needs to be “too big to rig.” On the question of whether he will accept the 2024 results, Trump said during the June presidential debate: “If it’s a fair and legal and good election.”
Legal experts on the left are countering Trump’s steady drumbeat of lies with tactics like publishing information about election rules in multiple languages, ensuring Democrat-allied lawyers observe court hearings related to election rules, and building relationships with local election boards to build trust, the panelists explained Tuesday.
At the state level, officials are also implementing new tools to fight the second iteration of the Big Lie.
Benson shared that her office is connecting overwhelmed election officials in her state with organizations that provide free legal support. Under her leadership, Michigan has also launched a “Democracy Ambassadors” program that distributes newsletters disproving election rumors and sharing helpful facts. The state has also emboldened messengers such as religious leaders and athletes to serve as sources of credible election information.
Michigan has also held “tabletop exercises that enable scenario planning and partnership building between law enforcement, first responders and clerks, so that there’s a direct line for them to call if something happens.”
“We at our office have all the information necessary to assure voters that their votes will be safe—their votes will be counted,” she added.
Efforts to fortify trust and stability in the electoral process will hopefully ensure that the vote of Kenswil’s newborn son will also be counted…in 18 years’ time.
Earlier this month, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who oversees mail-in voting, voter registration, and property records in America’s fourth-largest county, reached out to Elon Musk with an invitation.
“Can I please give you a tour of our election facility and mail voting process,” he wrote on Musk’s social-media platform, X, after the red-pilled billionaire declared that “electronic voting machines” and “anything mailed in” were “too risky” to use in elections.
“You can go into all the rooms,” Richer continued. ”You can examine all the equipment. You can ask any question you want. We’d love to show you the security steps already in place, which I think are very sound.”
For three-and-a-half years, Richer has been asking skeptical Republicans just to hear him out about how elections really work in the most closely contested county in the nation’s most closely contested state. First elected in 2020 amid right-wing fears about George Soros, Richer, a Federalist Society lawyer,emerged as one of the nation’s most outspoken voices against the myth of stolen outcomes. He held the line against election deniers such as Kari Lake (who Richer is currently suing for defamation) while attempting to make the election process as transparent as possible. Richer opened the doors to the county’s Tabulation and Election Center for more than 150 tours, turned the security cameras on 24/7 for people to watch at home, and tirelessly fielded questions on Musk’s platform—all while facing a stream of violent threats and criticism.
But it turned out that good cheer and transparency could only accomplish so much. Musk, for one, did not take Richer up on the offer. And on Tuesday, Richer finally ran out of time to change his fellow Republicans’ minds: He lost his primary to state Rep. Justin Heap, a member of legislature’s Freedom Caucus, who was backed by many of the state’s most prominent election deniers. The single-digit margin only tells a part of the story; with another Richer critic running a strong third, just 36 percent of Republican voters backed the incumbent.
Heap managed to never say whether he thought the 2020 or 2022 elections were stolen during his campaign. But he didn’t really have to. To understand what he represented and why he was running, you only had to look at the endorsements he racked up from many of the biggest names in what Richer has called Arizona’s “cottage industry” of election denial.
Chief among those backers was Lake, who ran for governor in 2022 while calling for her Democratic opponent to be imprisoned for the 2020 presidential election to be “decertified,” and is still—still!—attempting to get a court to declare her the winner of a race she lost by 17,000 votes. Lake—who in her memoir described a lengthy dream sequence she had about being kidnapped by Richer, taken to the desert, and nearly murdered—is now the Republican nominee for US Senate.
Another prominent supporter was Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer for Turning Point Action, who was indicted in April for his role in the 2020 fake elector scheme. Heap had the support of Arizona Reps. Paul Gosar (who coordinated with “Stop the Steal” leaders on January 6th), and Andy Biggs (who tried to round up support for the state’s fake electors in the run-up to the Electoral College certification). As the Arizona Mirrorreported in April, one of the people who nudged Heap into running was his colleague in the statehouse, state Rep. Jake Hoffman—another fake elector.
The vitriol Richer faced from current party leaders was intense. Earlier this year, Shelby Busch, the vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican party told an audience that if it was up to her, she “would lynch” Richer. Busch, who later said that she was joking, went on to lead the state party’s delegation to the Republican National Convention.
Because of the way elections are run in the county, a new recorder can’t just rewrite the rules on his own terms. The Board of Supervisors is responsible for tabulation and election-day voting, for instance, and the state’s vote-by-mail system and use of electronic voting machines are set by statute. But notably, Heap has voted to get rid of both of those things, while also voting to mandate hand-counts. (At the same time, Heap is running to be Recorder on the promise of speeding up the counting of votes, which a hand count is not likely to accomplish.)
With support from independents and hard-earned respect from some Democrats, Richer was in a decent position to win a second term if he managed to survive the primary. One Indivisible activist from Scottsdale, who took an election-facility tour with Richer, told me that Richer was going to be the first Republican she ever voted for. But Heap’s victory is far from guaranteed in a county where Democrats have won a succession of key races by appealing to independents and moderate Republicans. On Tuesday, Democrats nominated Tim Stringham, an Army and Navy veteran who previously served as a JAG attorney.
When we spoke in June, Stringham told me that he had entered the race reluctantly, after being nudged by the county Democratic party. But he cited Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a pivotal moment in his decision to become more involved in politics.
“And as a veteran, somebody who’s gone 10,000 miles and risked being blown up to defend democracy, you start feeling a little bit silly. My wife is back in Arizona, what the hell am I doing?”
“Watching on TV, and being like, holy cow, the President of the United States is really trying to overthrow the republic here,” Stringham said. “And I always tell people that it’s like, you know, if there’s just a riot, there’s just a riot, those things happen. But somebody actually handed fake electoral votes to Mike Pence and said we want you to read these votes. They no-shit tried to overthrow the Constitution. And as a veteran, somebody who’s gone 10,000 miles and risked being blown up to defend democracy, you start feeling a little bit silly.”
“‘My wife is back in Arizona, what the hell am I doing?,'” he said, recalling his thought process at the time. “‘I’m clearly not in the right place to actually protect American democracy.'”
Stringham did not believe there was a “huge philosophical difference” between he and Richer on how the recorder’s office was run, but he was adamant about wanting to preserve the availability of ballot drop-boxes and protect vote-by-mail from Republican legislators’ attempts to end it.
The incumbent’s defeat is a setback for election officials who have faced threats and tried to clarify the process amid a deluge of misinformation. Scores of election workers across the country, and particularly in Arizona, are leaving their jobs in part due to the added strain of dealing with sometimes-armed conspiracy theorists and endless lawsuits. In Maricopa, Republican county supervisor Bill Gates, who joined Richer in defending the election process in 2022, chose not to run for re-election this year and has talked publicly about suffering from PTSD. Another Republican supervisor who has been a target of election deniers, Jack Sellers, lost his primary on Tuesday too. It’s tough to see how things might have played out differently in recent years if the people screaming about stopping the steal also had allies in some of the most important election administration positions in the land. But it probably wouldn’t have been great.
Richer’s loss won’t, at least, have much of an effect on how the 2024 election is conducted. The recorder’s term won’t end until January—meaning that the lame-duck Republican will still be around to do one last job this November.
On March 19, Staci Lindberg, the elected clerk of Nevada’s Lyon County, was hit with some unsettling news: She was being sued for the first time in her life. The plaintiff? Her own political party.
The Republican National Committee had filed a lawsuit against Lindberg and five other Nevada election officials, alleging they had failed to follow a 1993 federal law requiring they maintain accurate voter registration rolls. As evidence, the RNC pointed to three counties it claimed had more people on their rolls than voting-age residents.
Lindberg, who in 2022 campaigned for the clerk position as a “patriotic, hardworking, conservative Christian,” says she was “shocked” by the accusation. The RNC hadn’t even inquired about her voter roll maintenance processes before wielding such a serious allegation. “It hurt my feelings,” Lindberg, a soft-spoken grandmother of nine, told me. And she notes: “I truly feel we’re one of the most secure and safest counties when it comes to election integrity.”
Lindberg shouldn’t take the lawsuit too personally. Three of the other election officials sued alongside her were also Republicans. One, Jim Hindle, was such a Donald Trump diehard in 2020 that he was indicted last December for serving as one of Nevada’s fake Trump electors. (The case was dismissed; Hindle declined to comment.) Lindberg and her fellow Republican clerks are just collateral damage in an aggressive and far-flung RNC strategy to contest the 2024 election before a single vote has been cast.
In Lyon County—which is located in western Nevada and has not favored a Democrat for president since FDR—the RNC initially asserted that 105 percent of voting-eligible residents were registered, an “impossibly high” percentage, suggesting “an ongoing, systemic problem with its voter list maintenance efforts.” The RNC made similar claims for nearby Douglas (104 percent) and Storey (113 percent) counties.
More curious than these alarming numbers—and the implications of voter fraud—was how the party came up with them. To estimate registration rates in each county, the RNC compared voter data from the secretary of state to a US census dataset that averaged populations over five years. The census data does not account for the tens of thousands of people who migrated to Nevada during the pandemic. More crucially, it often misses people who are lawfully registered to vote but temporarily residing elsewhere—such as college students and military service members. The RNC’s lawyers also, at one point, projected what they thought Nevada’s voting registration should be by extrapolating from a census survey of 54,000 Americans nationwide, not Nevadans specifically.
“They take one measure of one thing in one place, purport to compare it with another measure of another thing in a different place, and arrive at a conclusion that does not follow,” says Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor and former adviser in the Biden administration. “It’s a little bit like saying, ‘My clock doesn’t match my thermometer, so that means I need to fill up my car.’” Or as Laena St-Jules, Nevada’s senior deputy attorney general, put it in a letter responding to the RNC’s allegations: “This is comparing apples to orangutans.”
Illustration by Tyler Comrie
However math-challenged, the RNC’s organized and well-financed legal approach is a sea change from 2020, when the party’s effort to hijack the Oval Office was frenzied and reactionary. The previous attempt was marked by a bevy of postelection lawsuits brimming with outlandish claims, and surreal press conferences headlined by the party’s legal frontman, Rudy Giuliani, who once famously addressed reporters outside a Philadelphia landscaping business next to a porn shop; in another briefing, black hair dye oozed from the former New York City mayor’s scalp as he stammered on about widespread fraud that he could never prove. (Giuliani was disbarred in July by a state appeals court that said he “baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.”)
Even those incoherent efforts had a notable effect. Just before the 2020 election, 55 percent of Republican voters expressed confidence in the electoral process, according to a Monmouth University poll. Two weeks after the election, as Giuliani, Trump, and other Republicans flooded the courts and the airwaves with baseless allegations of fraud, only 22 percent did.
The party’s recent maneuvering suggests a far more sophisticated—and more dangerous—strategy. Co-led by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, the RNC is mobilizing what it has called the “most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history,” which will involve “100,000 dedicated volunteers and attorneys.” Spearheading this effort is Christina Bobb, the former One America News personality and Trump lawyer who has been indicted in Arizona for her alleged involvement in Trump’s fake elector scheme.
“This is comparing apples to orangutans.”
The RNC says it is already involved in at least 78 election-related lawsuits in 23 states, often working with white-shoe law firms—including Consovoy McCarthy, which employs multiple former clerks to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who may eventually be called upon to hear the merits of some of the cases. Several of them focus on longtime GOP bugaboos, like signature verification laws and absentee voting protocols. Others are dressed-up versions of Trump’s wilder conspiracies, including his claim that a “tremendous number of dead people” cast ballots in 2020. Importantly, the buckshot legal onslaught is preemptive, not defensive, and appears intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results. (After Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the ticket, Republicans expanded their aim to question the legality of Harris becoming the presumed Democratic nominee. Republicans provided no basis for their argument; the RNC did not respond to broader questions about the legal strategy.)
“These claims are designed not to change policy between now and November, or to change administrative procedure in elections between now and November,” says David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, “but to seed the ground or claims that an election was stolen.”
Multiple timesa month, Ingham County clerk Barb Byrum sits down at her desk in a stone-clad government building southeast of Lansing, Michigan, and compares the recent death certificates her office has received against the county’s Qualified Voter File. Each death gets her condolences—and a distinct marking on the QVF: “CHALLENGED. DECEASED.”
This same process plays out in all 83 of the state’s counties and is just one of many ways the state maintains its voter rolls. After this county-level review, city and township clerks verify and finalize the county clerk’s markings. In Michigan, Nevada, and almost every other state, secretaries of state and county clerks share the responsibility of keeping their master rolls accurate. In addition to checking the lists against death certificates and Social Security data to cull deceased voters, state election officials cross-check with DMV data to identify changes of address. Further, election mail returned as “undeliverable” allows clerks to mark a voter “inactive” and—if that person doesn’t respond to mailings or vote for two more election cycles—remove them from the rolls.
Despite these safeguards, Byrum has received multiple emails from so-called election integrity activists urging her to purge batches of purportedly dead voters. Two of the lists she’s received in the last four months contained the same names, which the office investigated, but it found that the voters in question did not have death certificates.
Activists have besieged clerks around the state with similar lists, prompting Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to twice write to clerks to reiterate the proper rules and procedures for updating the QVF. The lists people send in “do not constitute permissible challenges and clerks should not reject or challenge ballots on the basis of these emails,” she wrote in one missive.
Such tactics extend beyond Michigan. In March, the New York Times reported that a “network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump” was “quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states.” In some cases, this cabal “pressed local officials,” even cautioning that clerks may be breaking the law if they did not remove the flagged names. In Michigan, these self-appointed fraud watchdogs nicknamed their efforts “soles to the rolls,” a riff on the “souls to the polls” events some Black churches hold to encourage parishioners to vote.
The attempts may seem bush league, but the underlying allegation that state rolls are teeming with dead people is buttressed by a much more official effort, an RNC lawsuit against Benson this past spring alleging that “impossibly high” registration rates throughout Michigan “indicate an ongoing, systemic problem with its voter list maintenance efforts.”
If that language sounds familiar, it should: It’s the same phrasing the RNC’s lawyers from Consovoy McCarthy used in their lawsuit against the Nevada clerks. The RNC claims that the fraud it alleges in Nevada is even more pervasive in Michigan—that at least 53 Michigan counties have “more active registered voters than they have adult citizens who are over the age of 18,” and that an additional 23 have registration rates exceeding 90 percent of their adult populations. By this accounting, the rolls in all but seven of the state’s 83 counties would be crowded with voters who have died or moved away.
“These claims are designed not to change policy between now and November…but to seed the ground for claims that an election was stolen.”
Both RNC lawsuits rest on disingenuous interpretations of the National Voter Registration Act, says historian Alex Keyssar, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. The bipartisan 1993 law was intended to increase public participation in elections. The Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, had previously outlawed explicitly racist hurdles such as literacy tests, but until the NVRA was enacted, registering to vote remained challenging. “You had to go down to a voter registration office,” Keyssar says. “You had to figure out, depending on the state and sometimes even the city or county, where the office was, what hours it was open, and what identification materials they would need.”
Also known as the Motor Voter Act, the NVRA made the process more accessible by requiring state governments to offer voter registration to people applying for driver’s licenses. It stipulated that states must make a “reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters,” but officials also must protect voters from arbitrary or partisan purges by waiting two full federal election cycles before removing anyone they have flagged as inactive.
The claim of inflated voter rolls in Michigan, according to the secretary of state’s motion to dismiss the RNC lawsuit, is based on a figure that includes inactive voters who cannot yet be removed legally, per the NVRA. The motion also counters that the RNC doesn’t “identify a single voter in any Michigan county that is ineligible to be registered but nonetheless appears as an active voter.”
Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, says the RNC is “misunderstanding the difference between active voter records and inactive voter records, and often conflating the two, possibly intentionally, to create the impression that there’s some massive fraud on the horizon when that’s of course not the case at all.”
What’s more, Michigan and Nevada each backstop their voter roll maintenance with help from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonpartisan information-sharing nonprofit whose 24 member states (plus DC) compare voter registrations against DMV data to identify people who are registered in multiple states, who have duplicate registrations within a state, who have died, or who, in extremely rare cases, have cast ballots in more than one state. In 2020, ERIC flagged the registrations of 1.5 million voters who may have moved between states, 1.2 million who may have moved within a state, 135,000 potential duplicate registrations, and 73,000 possibly deceased voters. Many had already been flagged, but ERIC is helpful as a fail-safe to ensure necessary fixes get made.
Yet in a wildly ironic twist, ERIC has itself become a right-wing target. Since 2022, nine GOP-led states have withdrawn from the compact based on unfounded claims that ERIC is a “left-wing voter registration drive” designed to boost Democratic candidates. This conspiracy theory was promulgated by the Gateway Pundit blog, which also claimed that survivors of the Parkland high school shooting were crisis actors and that Dr. Anthony Fauci planned an avian flu outbreak to promote vaccines. Never mind that ERIC’s mission is to improve the accuracy of the rolls and make elections more secure—or that the top election officials in four of the seven states that founded ERIC in 2012 were Republicans. The withdrawal of those nine states leaves ERIC with less data to cross-check.
Right-wing fantasies of voter rolls packed with dead and ineligible voters are nothing new, especially in Michigan. In September 2020, a conservative group calling itself the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) and chaired by Cleta Mitchell, an Oklahoma lawyer at the forefront of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, began claiming that Michigan’s rolls may have contained more than 27,000 dead people. According to court records, PILF never produced the crossmatching information it supposedly used in its determination. The group couldn’t even prove all of the names it cited belonged to registered Michigan voters. It finally filed a lawsuit in November 2021. The case was dismissed this past spring, and the RNC filed a similar action two weeks later.
The federal judge who tossed the PILF case pointed to US Election Assistance Commission data indicating that Michigan election officials are actually quite good at keeping their rolls up to date: For the 2018 cycle, Michigan ranked fourth out of 50 states for purging the largest number of dead voters from its rolls; in 2020, it ranked fifth, removing 187,608 deceased people.
Michigan’s Senate, then controlled by Republicans, debunked similar 2020 claims that the dead were voting en masse. In June 2021, after hearing 28 hours of testimony from almost 90 people and reviewing thousands of pages of subpoenaed government documents, three Trump-supporting GOP lawmakers and one Democrat released a 55-page report proclaiming they’d found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election,” in which Joe Biden beat Trump by more than 154,000 votes.
“Is the drive to discredit the election process part of the plan? Absolutely.”
Court cases and investigations often drag on for months or years as fabricated allegations harm voter confidence and even incite violence, like Michigan experienced after Election Day 2020. Court records detail how staffers at the Bureau of Elections began receiving an onslaught of emails and calls, many threatening violence. Over the next few weeks, the bureau shut down its phone lines and closed its offices due to bomb threats. Officials had to hold meetings at undisclosed locations and even be provided with police protection. Dozens of gun-toting protesters showed up at the home of Benson, the secretary of state, as she was putting up Christmas decorations with her 4-year-old son.
In Maryland and Pennsylvania, the United Sovereign Americans, a far-right group that has claimed to measure “the effect of millions of instances of apparent election fraud,” is pursuing voter roll lawsuits similar to the PILF case. But experts say the Michigan and Nevada lawsuits, with their RNC imprimatur, could prove more dangerous. “We now have a major political party bringing these lawsuits, and what that does is strengthens this narrative that there’s something wrong,” says Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters, which has filed motions to intervene in several suits initiated by the RNC, including the Michigan case. “Regardless of whether they win, whether the case is dismissed, as they usually are, it still has the impact of creating mistrust.”
Democrats and Republicans alike have long engaged in legal battles over election rules. Some cases challenging new voting procedures are “legitimate efforts by partisans,” says Becker.
Days before Wisconsin’s April 2020 primary elections, for example, a federal judge extended the state’s absentee ballot receipt deadline by a week at the request of the Democratic National Committee and other groups. Citing an unprecedented surge in absentee ballot demand and postal delays during the pandemic, the judge ruled that ballots postmarked after Election Day must be counted as long as they were received by the extended deadline. The RNC appealed the decision to the US Supreme Court, arguing the change was ordered too close to Election Day. The Supreme Court agreed. Fair enough.
More recently, voting rights groups sued to block a new North Carolina law that would have permitted officials to discard the ballots of same-day registrants if a single notice sent to their mailing address had been returned as “undeliverable.” Following a January court injunction striking down part of the law, the state elections board issued a memo requiring that election officials reach out to the registrants by mail, email, and phone to allow them an opportunity to “cure” their ballot and have it counted if they could provide proof of address. Makes sense.
But another category of lawsuits—the sinister type—is abounding this cycle. These lawsuits, Becker says, are “not designed to win” but are regurgitating previously rejected arguments or challenging years-old election laws in hopes of gaining an edge, if only by manufacturing distrust. “They are premised on a view of the world that does not comport with reality,” says Loyola’s Levitt.
In addition to the voter roll cases in Michigan and Nevada, the RNC is recycling allegations over absentee ballot receipt deadlines that have been rejected repeatedly by the courts. This serves two purposes: Regardless of the outcome, the legal claims will inspire doubt in every state where they are filed. And the RNC may eventually find a conservative court willing to accept its argument.
That’s the approach that appears to be playing out in deep red Mississippi, where the RNC asked a federal court to strike down a state deadline on absentee ballots. A 2020 law passed nearly unanimously in the Republican-controlled state legislature allows the counting of absentee ballots that arrive up to five days after the election, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. (This differs from the Wisconsin case, which involved ballots postmarked after Election Day.) In its complaint, filed in a conservative division, the RNC argues the Mississippi law “extends the election” in violation of federal law and dilutes “honest votes” in a way that “specifically and disproportionately harms Republican candidates and voters.” (Trump’s baseless attacks on absentee voting have alienated some Republicans from that voting method.)
More than a dozen states have similar deadlines for mail-in ballots. It’s an important policy that safeguards the rights of voters whose ballots arrive late through no fault of their own, said Greta Martin, the litigation director of Disability Rights Mississippi, which filed an amicus brief in the case. These voters include overseas service members casting ballots from their deployments. As with the lawsuits challenging voter roll maintenance, the RNC’s claims in the Mississippi lawsuit have been previously debunked. Federal judges in Illinois and North Dakota—both Trump nominees—dismissed challenges to the post-election receipt deadlines, with the judge in Illinois writing: “Plaintiffs’ votes here are not diluted by other valid, lawfully cast votes.” (An appeal is pending.)
A federal judge also dismissed, in 2020, an RNC lawsuit challenging a New Jersey provision that allows clerks to accept nonpostmarked ballots up to 48 hours after polls close. (To arrive within that window, they would have likely been mailed before Election Day.) Here the claims of vote dilution were deemed “too speculative.” But this past spring, the RNC challenged Nevada’s similar policy on nonpostmarked ballots received no later than three days after Election Day. (The case is ongoing.) The Trump campaign is a plaintiff in both cases.
“Is the drive to discredit the election process part of the plan? Absolutely,” says Levitt.
Back in Nevada, Lindberg, the Lyon County clerk, is a little less cynical. She came to see the RNC’s lawsuit against her and the other clerks as an opportunity for election officials to build some trust and “share information” in a court setting. “I have an open-book policy,” she says. If any local voter wants to come watch her do voter roll maintenance, she says she’ll “get him a chair and a cold water.”
A judge dismissed the Nevada case on June 18, but some locals are still riled up. “We get a lot of people yelling at us, calling us names, saying that we’re trying to cheat them,” Lindberg told me after the court ruled in her favor. (On July 2, the RNC filed a last-ditch effort to revive its claims.)
Byrum, the Ingham County clerk, thinks the RNC’s Michigan case, too, will eventually be dismissed, but she doesn’t believe winning was the group’s primary objective. “The court cases,” she says, “are an attempt to divert attention and resources away from election management and election administration, with the added bonus of sowing additional seeds of doubt in the integrity of our election.”
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