Donald Trump has spent much of his presidential campaign planting seeds of doubt about the integrity of the voting process, laying the groundwork for challenging the results of the election should Kamala Harris win.
The former president and his allies have boosted their rhetoric in recent months and are already claiming that the Democratic party is trying to steal the election, echoing their attempt to overturn the results four years ago.
In 2020, Trump falsely claimed that Joe Biden had stolen the election, mounting legal challenges and pressuring election officials to reverse the result. His efforts culminated with a mob of violent supporters storming the US Capitol to try to prevent certification of the results on January 6 2021.
While Trump’s response to losing in 2020 was chaotic, this year the former president has crafted a plan to legally challenge results at the local, state and federal levels. The Republican party is deploying 230,000 volunteers to monitor alleged fraud in swing states. The party and its affiliated groups have also already filed dozens of lawsuits — many of which have failed — alleging that illegal migrants are on the voter rolls.
Here is what Trump could do during this year’s election.
Accuse the Democrats of cheating
Trump has made claims of cheating a central message of his recent campaign events, suggesting he will cry fraud if election night does not go his way.
“Demonic” Democrats are “fighting so hard to steal this damn thing”, Trump said at a rally in the swing state of Pennsylvania on Sunday. He also said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House when Biden won in 2020 since “we did so well”.
“The only thing that can stop us is the cheating. It’s the only thing that can stop us,” Trump said at a town hall hosted by conservative media personality Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Arizona, on Thursday. “If we can keep that cheating down, we’re going to have a tremendous victory.”
At a rally in North Carolina on Saturday, Trump said Democrats were against voter identification laws because “they want to cheat. There’s no other reason. They want to cheat. And they do cheat. They cheat like hell.”
Trump has encouraged his supporters to report any cheating they see at the polls, as has his billionaire backer Elon Musk. The ex-president’s election denying backers have continued to flood social media with conspiracy theories.
Question the integrity of slow vote counts
During his rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, Trump questioned the length of time taken to count votes, raising concerns that on election night he could say slow tabulations were a sign of fraud:
I’m hearing now they will take weeks [to finish counting ballots]. Can you imagine? They spend all this money on machines and they are going to say ‘we may take an extra 12 days’ and what do you think happens during the 12 days? What do you think happens? These elections have to be decided by 9pm, 10pm, 11pm Tuesday night.
Four years ago, Trump declared victory in the early hours of the morning after election day, before the race had been called. He also wanted ballot counting to stop, claiming that any more tabulated votes would be fraudulent because he was ahead in certain swing states.
The former president could also seize on the “red mirage”, in which a Republican is in the lead before all the votes have been tallied because in-person vote results are reported more quickly than mail-in ballots, which are typically more heavily used by Democrats and lead to a “blue shift”.
The Harris campaign expects Trump to declare victory on election night regardless of whether there is a result. “He wants to sow doubt about a loss that he anticipates is coming . . . I’ll just say it won’t work,” said a senior campaign official. “He did this before, it failed. If he does it again, it will fail.”
Focus on Pennsylvania
Trump and Harris have been campaigning fiercely in the swing state of Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral college votes making it the biggest prize on election night.
Trump has claimed at rallies and in social media posts that electoral fraud has already happened in the state. “If you have a mail-in ballot, get that damn ballot in, please, immediately, because they’ve already started cheating in Lancaster,” he told supporters in Allentown, Pennsylvania on October 29. “They’ve cheated. We caught them with 2,600 votes. Now, we caught them cold.”
He made the same claim a day earlier, posting on his Truth Social platform: “WHAT IS GOING ON IN PENNSYLVANIA???”
Election officials in Lancaster are examining approximately 2,500 suspicious voter registration applications, not ballots. If the former president loses Pennsylvania, he could build upon his claims about the city’s votes.
Trump’s ability to disseminate his election doubts has been helped by social media and prolific posts from his allies, particularly Musk. The Tesla chief wrote on Sunday that the Lancaster claims were “true” in an X post viewed nearly 20mn times.
Musk also took to X, his social media platform, on Sunday to say “Pennsylvania is on track for a major Republican victory” in a post seen 21.5mn times that could lead Trump’s supporters to question a loss in the state.
Go to court
If Trump wins, he has threatened multiple times to throw those who “cheat” during the election in jail.
“WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” he posted to Truth Social on September 7.
Voters, election officials and even donors were added to the list by Trump.
“Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behaviour will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
He reposted the same statement late last month.
If Trump loses, however, he will not be in a position to pressure election officials in the way he did as president in 2020.