Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud and widespread voter fraud in key battleground states that could determine the White House are raising fears that the results of November’s presidential election will be disrupted.
A new survey of eight key battleground states finds that at least 239 election deniers who subscribe to Trump’s “election legitimacy” conspiracy theories — including his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged — are actively participating in this year’s campaigns. The deniers are running for Congress and state seats, holding Republican leadership positions, and overseeing elections on state and county election boards.
The report by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a watchdog group focused on special interests distorting American democracy, reveals the extent of denial in eight key states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and shows that corrosive efforts to undermine public confidence in elections are widespread in these states, even as election denial efforts suffered major setbacks in the 2022 midterm elections.
The deniers identified by CMD include 50 Republicans running for Congress, six Republicans running for state executive office, 81 leaders of local Republican organizations, and 102 current members of state and county election boards. All of them have supported attempts to delegitimize the election and, in some cases, went so far as to participate in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“What’s shocking about our research is the extent to which election denialism and voter fraud lies have infiltrated and hijacked the Republican Party apparatus in these crucial states,” said Arne Pearson, executive director of CMD.
The dangers of election denialism spreading in battleground states are compounded by the disastrously close nature of the presidential race: A new New York Times/Siena College poll finds Trump and his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, essentially neck and neck in seven states (the poll does not include New Mexico).
The margin of victory in at least some of these states is expected to be slim, leaving plenty of room for bad actors to wreak havoc as the vote counting takes place. Meanwhile, Trump continued to add fuel to the fire with his inflammatory rhetoric during Tuesday’s presidential debate, repeating his lie that he won in 2020.
CMD’s most disturbing finding is that there are now more than 100 election deniers serving on election commissions across 61 counties across all eight battleground states who could potentially influence how votes are counted and certified.
Of those, 14 counties have majority power on the election boards of the Democratic presidential nominees, including six in Pennsylvania, a battleground state that offers both sides perhaps more of a path to the White House than any other.
“When you have 102 naysayers on election boards in battleground states, the potential for chaos is enormous,” Pearson said.
The most likely way election officials could disrupt the vote count would be to refuse to certify the results in an attempt to delay or overturn Harris’ narrow victory. Two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Elections, which covers Detroit, Michigan, briefly refused to certify the results in 2020.
By 2022, the practice of decertification had snowballed into elections boards in five of the eight battleground states, raising concerns that similar attempts to destabilize the smooth process of vote counting could become more widespread after Election Day on November 5.
“The nightmare scenario is that they delay the certification. They force state officials to go to court to force the certification of the results while spreading disinformation about widespread voter fraud and foreign voting,” Pearson said.
“The big threat is that this will create a similar, or even more, tense atmosphere that led to the January 6th riots,” he added.
The crisis is especially acute in Georgia, the only battleground state where denialists control the statewide elections board. At a recent rally in Atlanta, Trump singled out the three denialists who make up the majority on the Georgia Election Board, calling them Rick Jeffers, Janice Johnston and Janelle King “pit bulls who fight for honesty, transparency and to win.”
Among the innovations the trio introduced was a new rule that would allow them to suspend vote certification pending an “investigation” into unspecified irregularities — a rule that Marc Elias, a leading election lawyer who now advises the Harris campaign, called “somewhere between insidious and outrageous.”
Elias told The New Yorker Radio Hour that it’s the same as “giving the scoreboard operator the opportunity to find out for himself whether a touchdown was scored” at a football game.
Deniers with power at local election boards could disrupt November’s federal elections, including the presidential one, by blocking the certification of county election results. In Cochise County, a Republican stronghold in southern Arizona, two election officials, Tom Crosby and Peggy Judd, are scheduled to go on trial next month on criminal charges related to delaying the certification of the 2022 election results. Both have pleaded not guilty.
Rick Hazen, an election law expert at the UCLA School of Law, said the new study highlights how election denial has become a belief on the right: “To identify yourself as a Trump Republican, you have to say the last election was stolen.”
Hasen added that while widespread conspiracy theories could have caused confusion and delays in vote counting, the election system is better prepared. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 clarified the process for certifying electoral votes in presidential elections, making it less susceptible to problems at the state level or in Congress.
“As Trump prepares to contest the election and invalidate the Democratic victory, he will have a harder time tinkering with the rules this time around,” Hasen said.
In numerical terms, the state most affected by the scourge of election denial is Pennsylvania, with 49 deniers in influential positions, including 29 in the electoral commission.
The state’s importance — offering a generous 19 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win — is underscored by the fact that 10 of the last 12 presidents have won Pennsylvania. Biden won the state by 80,555 votes, beating Trump by 1.2 percentage points.
The 10 deniers running for Congress from Pennsylvania include David McCormick, who has repeated Trump’s false claims about voter fraud during his campaign for Senate, and incumbent Rep. Scott Perry, who has been deeply involved in plots to overturn Biden’s victory in the 2020 election and has asked Trump for a presidential pardon.
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