Organized Disruption: Trump’s 2024 Election Strategy
Most election campaigns organize “get out the vote” efforts to generate support on Election Day. For the 2024 election, however, the Trump campaign has largely refrained from these efforts (although Elon Musk has offered $1 million per day). Instead, the Trump campaign has orchestrated an elaborate effort to “get out the election monitors.”
In 2020, Trump made baseless claims about the election results with no clear plan or strategy. As the Department of Justice has noted in their recent January 6th motion, Trump’s arguments were never consistent. The number of alleged fraudulent votes swung from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands and back again. Mudslinging falsely targeted Dominion voting machines, voting drop boxes, and even election workers, two of whom in Georgia were recently awarded Rudy Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment, watch collection, and more in damages after a court ruled he defamed them in 2020.
By almost all accounts, Trump learned from the chaos of 2020. After reviewing the 2024 Trump campaign efforts to organize election monitors, coordinate a network of groups to scrutinize voter registrations at an industrial scale, and direct teams of lawyers to use differing intrastate rules for contested ballots to slow the count, I’m genuinely concerned for the 2024 U.S. election.
What Trump failed to accomplish following the 2020 election and through four years of baseless election denialism could prove successful in 2024. The Trump campaign is better organized this time, and a third of state and local election officials have resigned since 2020 (can you blame them?). Some of these officials have been replaced by MAGA loyalists, particularly in Georgia.
We must all be aware of these efforts and threats heading into the 2024 election. Only then can we mitigate them. And it starts with fact-checking election monitors.
Here come the 2024 election monitors
Political canvassing has historically been one of the best ways to get involved with a campaign. You can go door-to-door and talk to real people about a political candidate you believe in. You can also volunteer to hit the phone lines in an effort to generate support.
Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign has not prioritized canvassing (he’s outsourced it to Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk). They are barely making efforts to get-out-the-vote or register new voters in battleground states. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t organizing.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has been very busy. Not with the typical campaign organizing, but with organizing some 200,000 poll watchers, poll workers, and legal experts to monitor voting on Election Day. A network of conservative groups have trained this army of volunteers to watch for any anomalies, oddities, or any other perceived “election irregularities.”
These industrial scale “election integrity” efforts are despite the fact there’s no evidence of widespread election fraud (now or recently). One of the most recognized conservative groups, The Heritage Foundation, has published evidence of recent election fraud cases, and it’s hardly enough to swing an election, let alone even warrant discussion. Almost all of the instances of fraud were isolated events, and many of them were performed by registered Republicans.
Nevertheless, one conservative group has created an app for the 2024 election to allow this army of election monitors to post, comment, and share any “election irregularities.” They can file incident reports with the group. There are even funds with millions of dollars to reward anyone who reports election fraud or abuse.
A key part of this election monitor army is lawyers. The Trump campaign and the RNC has spent some $28 million from 2020 through August 2024 on lawyers who have filed over 100 lawsuits that seek, among other things: observer access to election facilities, and opportunities to review the security of mail-in ballots and the accuracy of voter rolls.
It should make you wonder — are they really trying to fix any problems with the election process or are they creating a pretext to challenge the 2024 election results?
Democrats have organized election monitors in the past, but their efforts hardly compare to the scale of those by the current Republican Party.
Scrutinizing voter registrations at an industrial scale
Open records laws have invited the scrutiny of voter registrations at a massive scale. Some tools like EagleAI pull data from existing property records and highlight names that might be improperly registered voters. Other tools rely on open record requests in an effort to identify registrations that may be potentially fraudulent.
Some of this voter registration scrutiny has been orchestrated at an industrial scale. For example, 30,000 challenges were made by a single volunteer in Fulton County, Georgia. Understandably, some counties have refused to consider these challenges, relying on their own internal processes to identify potential issues.
This widespread scrutiny of voter registrations strains the already minimal resources that state and local governments allocate to election administration. There’s simply no way anyone can reasonably expect a single county to process 30,000 voter registration challenges in a timely manner. Especially when the vast majority of challenges turn into fishing expeditions in ponds without fish.
Congress and states must pass laws to limit voter registration challenges to only those that can be substantiated. Otherwise, election officials and administrators waste countless hours combing through paperwork and defending against lawsuits when their time could be otherwise spent reasonably ensuring election integrity.
Different rules for contested ballots
A complicating factor for voting-related challenges is the county-by-county election rules within most states. They can all be different! For example, in Pennsylvania there are some 67 different partisan county boards that make unique rules on notifying voters about mail-in ballot mistakes and how to fix them.
If the 2024 election is close, and current forecasts suggest it will be, the outcome could come down to specific counties in battleground states. If those counties are run by extreme partisans, local decisions on which ballots to count could end up in court leaving the ultimate outcome in limbo for weeks or months past Election Day.
There must be consistent statewide rules for resolving all such disputes. Otherwise, political parties could compel favorable county boards to stall or exercise discretion they don’t have to challenge the results. Practically all county election boards have administrative authority to count the votes, not play referee on what votes should or should not be counted. The latter exercise is for the courts to decide, but given the partisan influence, especially from the Republican Party on county boards, many have seized the opportunity.
Consistent statewide rules could end such practices or at least make them harder to execute.
A third of state and local election officials have resigned since 2020
Adding to the election administration woes is the grim reality that many state and local election officials have resigned since 2020. And many of them have been replaced by Republicans loyal to Donald Trump.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on the Georgia State Election Board. They tried to push through new rules in recent months, with public encouragement from Trump, to require the hand counting of paper ballots at every Georgia polling site. Judges recently blocked those rules from going into effect, but it’s unlikely this will be their final attempt to slow or challenge the election results if they appear unfavorable to Trump.
In addition to Georgia, some 35 election officials in other battleground states have refused to certify election results since 2020. Even though they don’t have discretion to do it — as mentioned, their authority is administrative, not interpretive — there’s little checking their actions aside from courts (and litigation can take time!).
While there are still many great public servants who aim to administer American elections in a nonpartisan manner, the turnover since 2020 could lead to complications in the 2024 election, especially given the rise of partisan newcomers in some of these positions. They will likely attempt to manufacture any delay so Trump can capitalize on the uncertainty.
Trump will try to capitalize on any uncertainty in the 2024 election
Many people point to Bush v. Gore in 2000 as the first failed election in U.S. history, but compared to what we’re facing now, Bush v. Gore was a success. Gore conceded and there was a peaceful transfer of power. The U.S. Supreme Court had much more credibility and goodwill in the eyes of most Americans.
The situation in 2024 is vastly different. Not only has the U.S. Supreme Court lost any goodwill it had with many Americans, but Donald Trump has made baseless accusations about election fraud in the 2020 election for the past four years.
Yet Trump was still nominated as a major party candidate for President in 2024. And he’s already planted the seeds of election denialism to bloom on November 5, 2024 by making baseless claims, including illegal immigrants voting en masse.
Trump has refused to commit to accepting the election results. His Vice Presidential candidate this time around, JD Vance, has fully supported him.
One thing you can guarantee with the uncertain outcome of this election is that Donald Trump will feed off any uncertainty. Any delay for tallying votes. Any stalling by favorable county boards that try to challenge or audit results real time. Any reports of “election irregularities” via the apps deployed by conservative groups to their army of election monitors.
Donald Trump will be looking for anything he can hang his hat on so he doesn’t have to concede the 2024 election.
It’s why I don’t think we will know the answer of who won the election on November 5th. The only way we’ll know is if either candidate wins in a landslide, but as polls currently indicate, that outcome does not look likely.
So we’re in for a potentially long waiting game filled with uncertainty.
In the meantime, all you can do is make a plan to vote. Fact-check any election fraud claims from a wide variety of sources. And thank the great public servants who work tirelessly to help the greatest experiment of democracy to operate as accurately and efficiently as possible.
The vast majority of patriotic election officials who put country over party give me hope that what failed for Trump in 2020 won’t work in 2024. But we must be ever vigilant.
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