# Republican Party efforts to disrupt the 2024 United States presidential election

The Republican Party's efforts to disrupt the 2024 United States presidential election involve a series of coordinated actions intended to influence election outcomes at both federal and state levels. These efforts, which were preceded by Republican efforts to restrict voting following the 2020 presidential election, are characterized by legislative, legal, and administrative strategies that sought to affect voter access, election oversight, and post-election certification processes. This initiative grew out of widespread claims within certain Republican Party circles about election integrity, many of which trace back to the 2020 United States presidential election and Trump's false claims of a stolen election, including the election denial movement in the United States, despite a lack of substantial evidence supporting these allegations.
Key elements of these strategies include attempts to modify voting laws, with a focus on restrictions that could disproportionately impact demographics more likely to vote for the Democratic Party. Additionally, Republican-led states saw a push to place partisan figures in election oversight positions, which may influence how election laws are interpreted and enforced. There is also a significant legal component, with numerous court cases challenging aspects of the voting process and aiming to set precedents for handling election disputes. These efforts sparked intense debate across the political spectrum, with proponents arguing that the measures "are necessary to ensure election security", while critics contend that they could undermine democratic processes by restricting voter access and eroding public trust in election fairness.

## Background

For decades, Republicans sought evidence of what they allege is rampant voting fraud in the United States. Multiple studies during this time found that election fraud is extremely rare. An election fraud database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation showed in 2024 evidence of 1,513 instances of fraud over the preceding 42 years, although many of those instances have been challenged as dubious. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he falsely asserted the election had been rigged and stolen from him; the false allegations came to be known as his big lie. Many of his followers developed an election denial movement to advance this false narrative. As of August 2023, a large majority of Republican voters and Republican-leaning independents continued to believe Joe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020.
In a 1980 speech, conservative Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich said, "I don't want everybody to vote ... our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." As president, Trump falsely claimed that millions of undocumented migrants illegally voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 United States presidential election, depriving him of the popular vote victory. As a result, Trump established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May 2017; the commission was disbanded several months later, with member Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state, writing to commission chair Mike Pence and vice chair Kris Kobach that, contrary to public statements by Trump and Kobach, the commission did not find "substantial" voter fraud. Dunlap alleged the true purpose of the commission was to create a pretext to pave the way for policy changes designed to undermine the right to vote in the United States. Critics said the commission's intent was to disenfranchise or deter legal voters. Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, had a history of making false or unsubstantiated allegations of voting fraud to advocate for voting restrictions. The commission did not find a single instance of a noncitizen voting.
Conservative news outlets, such as Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN promoted false election fraud allegations during the weeks following the 2020 election, including conspiracy theories that voting machines had been rigged to favor Biden. Voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic filed defamation lawsuits against those three cable networks, some of their employees and others. Fox News agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement to Dominion in April 2023 after it was revealed that top on-air personalities and executives knew the allegations were false but continued to promote them anyway. The 2022 Dinesh D'Souza film 2000 Mules falsely alleged that Democratic Party operatives engaged in an illegal ballot harvesting operation across five swing states during the 2020 election.
By April 2024, dozens of Republicans in four states were under indictment for their alleged involvement in the Trump fake electors plot and related Pence Card conspiracy, parts of wide-ranging efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Those indicted included Trump and several of his close associates, including Christina Bobb who leads the Republican National Committee (RNC) election integrity legal efforts in the 2024 presidential election. In September 2024, Hanna Rosin published an article about the aftermath of the January 6 attack in the lives of the insurrectionists, which mentions how they have created "a new mythology on the right", which could lead to a new attempt at overturning the election should Trump lose it. The Justice Department planned to monitor compliance with voting rights laws on Election Day in 27 states.

## Activities
### Allegations of rigged elections

During the 2024 campaign, Trump often referred to "election integrity" to allude to his continuing claim that the 2020 election was rigged, as well as predictions of future mass election fraud. As he did during the 2020 election cycle, Trump claimed that Democrats would try to rig the 2024 election. Many Republicans reported to believe that Democratic Party have and continue to engage in systemic election fraud, with some being concerned regarding election integrity. By 2022, Republican politicians and conservative talk radio cable news outlets echoed the statement of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon that "if Democrats don't cheat, they don't win".
The Heritage Foundation has been closely aligned with the Republican Party since its founding in 1973 and in 2023 published Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump's second presidency. In July 2024, Mike Powell, the group's executive director for its Oversight Project, said that "as things stand right now, there is a zero percent chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America", adding, "I'm formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election." Heritage released a report predicting without supporting evidence that Biden might try to retain power "by force" if he were to lose in November. Election law expert Rick Hasen remarked that "this is gaslighting and it is dangerous in fanning flames that could lead to potential violence."
The Heritage Oversight Project produced videos for distribution on social media and conservative media outlets that made false or misleading claims about the extent of noncitizen voting registrations. In one video that was sent viral by an Elon Musk repost, Heritage falsely claimed that 14% of noncitizens in Georgia were registered, concluding that "the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy". Heritage based their findings on an extrapolation of hidden camera interview responses from seven residents in a Norcross, Georgia, apartment complex. State investigators found the seven people had never registered. During the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump's campaign and its allies revived allegations from 2020 that voting machines were rigged. The claims were widespread on social media and were frequently mentioned in lawsuits filed by Republicans. Trump and Musk repeated baseless claims of fraud and "cheating" in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in the days before Election Day.
Claims by Trump and Republican allies of election fraud persisted up to Election Day on November 5. After Trump was declared the winner, these claims had largely stopped, with his "election integrity" allies crediting his victory to their efforts.

### Seeking vulnerabilities in the election system

The New York Times reported in July 2024 that "the Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system" by systematically searching for vulnerabilities. The effort involves a network of powerful Republican lawyers and activists, many of whom were involved in the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It involves restricting voting and short-circuiting the certification process should Trump lose. The Republican strategy involved first persuading voters that the election is about to be stolen by Democrats, despite lacking evidence. After the election, if Trump were to lose, lawyers would attempt to challenge decades of settled law as to how elections are certified. The New York Times reported the efforts had "been quietly playing out in courts, statehouses and county boards for months, and is concentrated in critical battlegrounds". In October 2024, The Washington Post identified as vulnerabilities leading to a possible attempt at overturning the election's results the following: widespread false information, weeks-long recounts, lawsuits delaying final results, breakdown in certifying results, disruptions at elector meetings, Congress stalling the certification, and a wild card ("something new could be tried that attorneys and election officials haven’t yet gamed out").
Nebraska is one of two states that does not have a winner-take-all system of awarding electoral college votes but rather allocates the votes by its three congressional districts. One district contains the Omaha metro area, which can tend to lean Democrat (Obama won the district in 2008, as did Biden in 2020), while the other two are more rural and vote solid Republican. During 2024, some Nebraska Republicans sought to change the state's 1991 law that created its electoral college allocation system to winner-take-all and remove the likely elector for Kamala Harris. The proposal was blocked by Republican state senators; by September 2024, it was revived with pressure brought by Trump, all of the state's Republican representatives, and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham.
During the 2024 Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump revealed that he and House Speaker Mike Johnson had a "little secret", stating: "I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over." Johnson confirmed the existence of the plan. Commentators speculated that they were referring to a contingent election, in which the United States House of Representatives elects the president; or a plot to convince Republican state legislatures or Republican governors in states that Trump would lose to not certify the results or submit slates of electors before the deadline, reducing the number of electors needed to win the electoral college vote.

#### Breaching and attempted breaching of voter machines

At an August 2021 event organized by Mike Lindell, copies of software from Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Colorado and Michigan were distributed and posted to the public Internet. Election security experts warned that the release undermines trust in election security and allows for hackers to conduct vulnerability assessments, counter defenses, "sabotage the system, alter ballot design or even try to change results". Three vendors dominate election technology in the United States, limiting the ability for election officials to replace an existing system. Mike Lindell stated that his goal is to remove voting machines entirely and switch to paper ballots, a process that election officials warned would be tedious, time-consuming and prone to errors.
CNN reported that in text messages to Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, which conducted the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit, Michael Flynn expressed a goal to "fundamentally change the way votes are counted at the state level".
In August 2023, Matthew DePerno, the former Republican nominee for the 2022 Michigan Attorney General election, and former Republican state representative Daire Rendon were charged with "undue possession of a voting machine, willfully damaging a voting machine and conspiracy". DePerno spread false claims about the 2020 United States presidential election.
Election denial activists had spread a password that they alleged to be used in Dominion voting machines in Georgia, including wearing the alleged password on t-shirts.
In 2020, J. Alex Halderman, a computer science and engineering professor, discovered a software vulnerability in Georgia's voting machines which made it possible for hackers to change votes. While Dominion developed a patch to address these vulnerabilities, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that the machines would be updated after the 2024 election, dismissing Halderman's findings as "theoretical and imaginary."
In December 2022, election experts sent a letter to the United States Department of Justice that described a "multi-state conspiracy to copy voting software" that was at least partially funded by notable Trump supporters such as Sidney Powell and asking for a federal investigation. In December 2023, a follow-up open letter from computer scientists, election security experts and voter advocacy organizations listed repeated attempts by allies of Donald Trump to access voting system software in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada and Colorado, again calling for a federal investigation, noting that the software is used nationwide. Entire election databases from multiple counties were also copied. At least one breach had also occurred in North Carolina. In at least four cases, election officials had to decertify or replace voting equipment. Voting experts expressed alarm over the breaches due to their breaking of the chain of custody over ballots and tabulators; as well as invasion of voter privacy. On November 13, 2024, a third open letter was sent by the same organization, Free Speech for People, to Kamala Harris, warning her of "serious election security breaches that have threatened the security and integrity of the 2024 elections" and urging her to request hand recounts in at least four swing states. The letter noted that voting system breaches have allowed for access to main servers, tabulators and election databases for both Dominion Voting Systems and Election Systems & Software, election vendors which collectively count approximately 70% of votes across the United States.
Between at least June and October 2024, partial passwords for election machines were exposed in a hidden tab in a spreadsheet on the Colorado secretary of state's website. According to the secretary of state's office, the machines are still protected by requiring two distinct passwords for each system, which are stored separately, by not connecting the machines to the Internet, and by storing the machines in rooms that can only be accessed with ID badges and are continuously monitored by video cameras. An investigation by a law firm concluded that the hidden tab was created by an employee who worked in the office between 2020 and 2023. A second employee, who, according to the office, was unaware of the hidden tab, posted the spreadsheet online. As a witness in a lawsuit by the Libertarian Party of Colorado, a co-founder of election vigilante group U.S. Election Integrity Plan (see Election vigilante groups below) testified that he had viewed the hidden tab three times between August and October 2024, before the state was aware of the breach.
In October 2024, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced that voter access terminals (VAT) from Dominion, which assist persons with disabilities with ballot marking, had an issue with split ticket votes. She said that this issue affected Dominion machines nationwide.
The Voting Machine Hacking Village at DEF CON 32 in 2024 discovered "new vulnerabilities ... in several widely-fielded ballot-marking and DRE voting machines." Due to the complexities of upgrading election equipment, election and cybersecurity experts found it unlikely that vulnerability findings from the conference would have been fixed prior to Election Day.
SMART Elections (a nonpartisan election integrity advocacy group that includes academics and activists) noted that Pro V&V, a voting system test laboratory, had approved software and hardware updates for Dominion and Election Systems & Software voting systems between March and September 2024, categorizing those updates as de minimis, which do not require testing. SMART Elections warned that this lack of testing for what it described as comprehensive updates risked malware entering the voting systems. Since at least July 2024, the website for Pro V&V had error messages, and by February 2025, the site had been nonfunctional.

#### Vulnerabilities from ES&S

Election Systems & Software (ES&S) was founded by Republicans, was financed by the families of Howard Ahmanson Jr. and Nelson Bunker Hunt, is owned by a private equity firm, McCarthy Group, and its investors are unknown as of December 2019. Chuck Hagel was chairman of a predecessor company to ES&S, and the treasurer for Hagel's campaign during the 1996 United States Senate election in Nebraska, Michael McCarthy, was the founder of McCarthy Group. According to Bev Harris' book on black box voting, ES&S is tied to Kiewit Corporation, which as of 2004 was involved in a number of bid rigging scandals; advocated for privatization of highways in the United States; owned CalEnergy, and was heavily involved in telecommunications via its ties to Level 3 Communications and installations of fiber-optic cables underneath highways and video surveillance cameras on roads. The Omaha World-Herald newspaper owned a stake in ES&S between 1986 and 2011. The Peter Kiewit Foundation in turn owned the Omaha World-Herald as of 2004.
As of October 2019, ES&S controls about 50% of the election system market of the United States; makes most of its money from long-term maintenance contracts; has filed lawsuits when it fails to win contracts or has them taken away; hired former election officials as lobbyists; donated to political campaigns and lobbied politicians; and threatened lawsuits against voting rights activists and security researchers. Between 2013 and 2020, ES&S has donated at least $30,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee.
Various issues with ES&S systems have been reported since at least 1998, including missing votes, potential duplicate votes, poor calibration of touch screens leading to misinterpreted votes, names missing from voter rolls, incorrectly printed ballots and outdated technology. Concerns have also been raised by Ron Wyden about the security of its supply chain, as many parts were made in China and the Philippines. ES&S claimed that they had worked with Idaho National Laboratory for vulnerability testing, but as of December 2019, those findings have not been made public. In August 2018, Kamala Harris, Mark Warner, Susan Collins and James Lankford sent a letter to ES&S asking about their stance on independent security research after the company dismissed and discouraged such research on their systems. After the 2016 election, Jill Stein alleged that ES&S machines were vulnerable to hacking and difficult to audit, points supported by researchers. Issues with ES&S machines have also been reported during elections in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
For example, during the 2024 elections, ES&S voting machines in Cambria County, Pennsylvania had issues scanning ballots due to a "ballot printing error", "[causing] voter confusion, long lines of voters, and many individuals [leaving] the polling locations without casting a ballot". The county's election director had retired on the same day that the election results were certified. State Representative Frank Burns called for an investigation by the Pennsylvania Department of State, and had asked for records about the ballots, voting machines, testing and internal communications, but his right to know request was denied by county election officials.
The Navajo Nation in Apache County, Arizona reported issues with voting machines and ballot printers on Election Day, leading to long lines that resulted in some voters being turned away. According to the Verified Voting Foundation, all voting equipment used in that county on Election Day 2024 was manufactured by ES&S. Similarly, there were issues with voting machines on Election Day in Queens, New York, a county that also used ES&S at the time.
In January 2020, NBC News reported that election security experts found at least 35 voting machines that were connected to the Internet as of the summer of 2019. While ES&S, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic have all admitted to adding modems in some of their tabulators and scanners (for the purpose of quickly sharing unofficial election results), all of the voting machines that were accessible online were manufactured by ES&S and located in 11 states (including Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan) and Washington D.C. Some of these machines have been connected for months or possibly years at a time. Critical systems connected to the Internet via a firewall include vote tabulators and "the election-management system that is used in some counties to program voting machines before elections." Other security vulnerabilities - including missing firewall security patches, outdated SFTP server software, remote-access software, outdated operating systems, exposed passwords, exposed data of registered voters, no logging of some events, hash verification issues (noting that the hash verification was performed by ES&S instead of its customers), ballot marking device/scanner "hybrid" systems that can be changed with fake votes on machine-marked ballots after those ballots are cast, accessible SD and USB ports, plain text encryption keys for voter data, no set BIOS passwords, disabled Secureboot, presence of bloatware, no tamper-evident seals, immediate root access, unencrypted hard drives, use of simple default passwords, and "poor physical security protections that could allow undetected tampering" - were also reported.
A December 2020 investigation by DCReport found that the 2020 re-elections of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins had all occurred in states where votes were primarily tabulated by ES&S, arguing that their wins were improbable due to low or close pre-election polls. In the case of McConnell, DCReport found large vote leads in counties that had typically voted for Democrats (including in counties in which he had not previously won); discrepancies related to split-ticket voting; and issues with Kentucky voter records. McConnell had blocked legislation in the Senate for election security in 2019, the same year that his campaign committee received at least $2,000 from ES&S. A further investigation by the same outlet later that month found that multiple ES&S executives and lobbyists are connected with Republican party politicians and election officials (such as Sandra Mortham, Marci Andino and the office of Brian Kemp); that Chris Wlaschin, the former chief information security official at the United States Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration, had joined ES&S to lead their security team; that 40 out of 50 states partially use ES&S for casting and counting votes; and that during the 2020 election, all but three of the 25 states that Trump had won had partially or fully used ES&S voting machines. A 2021 article also noted that several Republican officials had refused to purchase equipment from Dominion due to false claims of fraud during the 2020 United States presidential election, alleging that ES&S would benefit by increasing its market share. Similarly, The Daily Dot reported that election security advocate Jennifer Cohn accused Republicans who falsely alleged that Dominion had helped commit fraud in the 2020 election of attempting to put Dominion out of business.
The Institute for Southern Studies reported that, during the 2000 Venezuelan general election, Hugo Chávez and Venezuelan election officials accused ES&S of interference due to widespread issues with the company's voting machines.
Beth Clarkson, a Wichita State University statistician, filed an open records lawsuit for paper tapes from electronic voting machines in Sedgwick County, Kansas from the 2014 election, naming then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as a defendant. She alleged that there were statistical anomalies that favored Republican politicians in vote counts in large precincts in multiple elections across the United States, assessing that this pattern was due to either voter fraud or a demographic trend unexplained by polling. According to the Verified Voting Foundation, all voting equipment used in that county on Election Day 2014 was manufactured by ES&S.

#### Vulnerabilities in mail-in voting

Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general since June 2020, has donated at least $685,230 to the Republican Party between 2018 and 2020, has donated $1.2 million to Trump, and implemented policies that were primarily responsible for the 2020 United States Postal Service crisis.
Between 2020 and 2024, the United States Postal Service (USPS) changed its goals for first-class mail delivery from a three-day maximum to a five-day maximum, and had raised the price of first-class postage by 33%. The Washington Post stated that these changes had little impact on the service's finances, which included a $2.1 billion net loss during the first quarter of fiscal 2024. Gerry Connolly stated in response to these changes that "any effort to degrade service while raising prices is a recipe for a death spiral at the Postal Service".
In July 2024, the USPS inspector general published a report noting that some service workers were not following proper procedures for mail-in ballots in some places, and that some mailed ballots were missing postmarks, which are required in many states. The report further warned that some ballots were at risk of not being counted due to both current USPS policies for processing mail as well as changes by DeJoy's Delivering for America plan. Some changes were made within days of the 2024 primary elections in Georgia and Virginia.
Lawmakers such as Mark Pocan were concerned about plans by the USPS to consolidate regional hubs, arguing that mail delivery would slow down. Significant slowdowns had been observed throughout the United States as of April 2024. Some of these regional hubs were located in states such as Virginia, Oregon, Texas and Missouri as well as swing states Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin. These consolidations have been paused until January 2025, following criticism from lawmakers.
In September 2024, the National Association of State Election Directors and National Association of Secretaries of State sent an open letter to DeJoy supporting the inspector general report, warning that the USPS has marked election mail to voters as undeliverable at "higher than usual rates, even in cases where a voter is known not to have moved" and that ballots that were processed in some places arrived at election offices 10+ days after the postmark date. In some states such as Utah, dozens or hundreds of ballots for 2024 primary elections had arrived over 10 days after being postmarked. Other problems highlighted in the letter include "lost or delayed election mail, and front-line training deficiencies impacting USPS's ability to deliver election mail in a timely and accurate manner". These issues have been described as "systemic". There is the risk that, if mail is returned to the original sender, voters may miss their mail-in ballots or removed from voter registration rolls.
Republicans have filed lawsuits to stop states from counting postmarked mail-in ballots that are received by election officials after Election Day. About 20 states, plus Washington, D.C., accept and count mail-in ballots received after Election Day as long as they are postmarked on or before that day. As of August 2024, these lawsuits have been filed in Nevada, Illinois, North Dakota and Mississippi. Plaintiffs include the Republican National Committee, Mark Splonskowski (the Burleigh County Auditor who is supported by Public Interest Legal Foundation), the Mississippi Republican Party and a county election commissioner.
Several issues were reported during the 2024 election with mail-in ballots, including discarded ballots, stranded or delayed ballots, undated ballots (which were not counted in Pennsylvania following lawsuits by the Republican National Committee, the Pennsylvania Republican Party and David McCormick), stolen and/or forged ballots, ballots misdirected between and within states, unprocessed ballots, and destroyed ballots.
Issues had also occurred with voter registration forms, including damaged or incomplete forms and potentially fraudulent forms or mail-in ballot applications.

### Challenging registrations, ballots and certifications

Following Trump's 2020 loss amid his false allegations of fraud, Republican lawmakers initiated a sweeping effort to make voting laws more restrictive in several states across the country and to take control of the administrative management of elections at the state and local level. By 2023, organizations funded by dark money had met quietly with officials in Republican-controlled states to create an incubator of policies that would restrict ballot access and amplify false claims that fraud is rampant in elections. Led by the Heritage Foundation, the groups include the Honest Elections Project, which is among a network of conservative organizations associated with Leonard Leo, a longtime prominent figure in the Federalist Society.
The Washington Post reported in June 2024 on indications that county-level Republicans in swing states might be preparing to challenge and delay their certifications of voting results in 2024. Such delays might cause a state to miss deadlines that ensure its electoral college votes are counted in Washington on January 6, 2025. In four state elections since 2020, county election officials withheld certifications, citing mistrust in voting machines or ballot errors, though they could not produce evidence of actual voting fraud; the certifications proceeded after state interventions, which included warnings of potential criminal charges. Two Cochise County, Arizona, officials were criminally charged for refusing to certify, not because of doubts about Cochise results but as a protest against other counties voting for Democratic state candidates. Project Democracy found that since 2020 members of state and local election boards had voted against certification more than twenty times in eight states. Voting rights activists were concerned that the continuing false allegations of election fraud since 2020 might lead to social unrest if efforts to delay certifications at the local level were overruled by state officials or courts. The failure of a state to have its electoral college votes counted on January 6 could result in neither presidential candidate reaching the minimum 270 electoral votes, causing the election to be thrown to the United States House of Representatives. In that scenario, the election outcome would be determined by a simple majority count of state delegations; Republicans hold a majority in 28 of 50 delegations in the 118th United States Congress and thus Trump would win in such a scenario. The Guardian confirmed that "experts have been particularly alarmed by efforts to try and halt certification at the local level – something that could cause delay and chaos after the presidential vote in November."
Republican elections activist Cleta Mitchell said "the only way [Democrats] win is to cheat". She was a key figure in Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, participating in the January 2021 Trump–Raffensperger phone call that attempted to change the certified 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. That year, in association with the RNC, she launched the Election Integrity Network (EIN) to recruit, train and deploy election deniers as poll workers in eight key states for the 2024 presidential election. In recordings of spring 2022 organizing meetings obtained by Politico, RNC National Election Integrity director Josh Findlay, referencing EIN, was heard to tell others that the RNC would support efforts to provide staff, organization, and "muscle" in key states. The New York Times reported that the EIN "has done more than any other group to take Mr. Trump's falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action". Gaining access to over 400 hours of Zoom meetings, The New York Times reported that EIN had closely coordinated with the RNC, four Republican secretaries of state, and a dozen state legislatures. The group was funded by multiple Republican megadonors associated with Trump, and had successfully spread conspiracy theories about voting with several right-wing media outlets and had installed activists on election boards and thousands as poll monitors and workers. EIN has also been collaborating with other groups to challenge voter rolls, including VoteRef (run by Gina Swoboda and funded by Restoration PAC, a Super PAC predominantly funded by Richard Uihlein) and Check My Vote. EIN has also been collaborating with the Election Transparency Initiative, headed by Ken Cuccinelli. The Pennsylvania Department of State described these voter registration challenges as "an attempt to circumvent the list maintenance processes that are carefully prescribed by state and federal law," which would result in "disenfranchisement, unnecessary litigation, and a harassing diversion of already-stretched county resources."
The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a bipartisan nonprofit that helps elections officials in some 30 states manage their registration rolls with the use of software to maintain election integrity. In 2022, ERIC faced criticism from election deniers and right-wing media after the far-right blog The Gateway Pundit published a series of stories falsely suggesting it is part of a left-wing election conspiracy funded by George Soros to register Democrats. Several Republican-controlled states soon severed their association with ERIC. Members of the EIN had lobbied to have the system removed, and their activism was publicized by The Gateway Pundit and other right-wing media outlets. To supplant ERIC, Mitchell led an effort to deploy the EagleAI NETwork election software in the 2024 presidential election. NBC News reported in August 2023 that "election experts and voting rights advocates warn that an activist-led strategy risks overwhelming election workers with reports of problem registrations generated by amateurs using unreliable data. And those reports may, in turn, intimidate voters or require them to jump through hoops to maintain their voting rights." After months of testing, by July 2024 some conservative activists found the EagleAI system was unreliable. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law called EagleAI "a vehicle to disenfranchise voters and spread disinformation". The Associated Press reported in June 2024 that EagleAI "is funded and used by supporters of Trump, some of whom worked to overturn the 2020 vote, and entwined with the Republican's campaign." AP reported EagleAI was pursuing deployment in several states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Nevada and Ohio. During an internal meeting about the system, Cleta Mitchell said, "The left will hate this — hate this. But we love it." Despite its name, the software does not employ artificial intelligence, and though it is pronounced "eagle eye", its creator denied it was named after Operation Eagle Eye, a 1960s Republican Party voter suppression effort. As of July 2024, at least one county in Georgia signed a contract to use EagleAI for voter roll maintenance.
EagleAI is funded by Ziklag, an American Christian organization which includes the Uihlein family and whose goals include as part of "Operation Checkmate": "[securing] 10,640 additional unique votes in Arizona (mirroring the 2020 margin of 10,447 votes), and [removing] up to one million ineligible registrations and around 280,000 ineligible voters in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin." Citizen AG, a group self-described as part of Operation Checkmate, announced its intention to file lawsuits against counties that do not accept voter challenges from EagleAI. Ziklag also funded an effort by the American Legislative Exchange Council to share talking points about "election integrity" with Republican party state lawmakers in 2022. Ziklag has also funded right-wing Christian groups and televangelists such as Lance Wallnau to increase turnout of evangelical voters for Trump, especially in swing states.
Julie Adams, an EIN regional coordinator, sits on the Fulton County, Georgia, elections board and has promoted the use of EagleAI in Georgia. In May 2024, she abstained from certifying the recent county primary results, though no issues of error or misconduct had been raised. State law says that election boards "shall" certify elections if no problems were identified; the four other board members voted to certify. Adams started a lawsuit, backed by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute (AFPI), seeking a court ruling to grant election board members more discretion in certifications. Congresswoman and Georgia Democratic Party chair Nikema Williams alleged that Adams was attempting to set the stage to block certification of results in the November presidential election. Fulton is the most populous county in Georgia with a plurality of Black residents. A Fulton County superior court judge ruled against Adams in October 2024, finding that her actions were unconstitutional and violated state law. The legal arm of AFPI was led by former Florida attorney general and Trump attorney Pam Bondi who filed voting lawsuits in battleground states.
Omega4America, initially funded by Mike Lindell, has been promoted by election denial activists as a potential replacement for ERIC. The program has been touted by those activists as being computationally faster, but election experts have cautioned that, without motor vehicle department data, its reliability would be compromised.
In August 2024, the Trump-aligned majority of the Georgia State Election Board approved a new rule allowing county election boards, before certifying their election results, to conduct a "reasonable inquiry" to verify the results are "a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in that election"; another vote days later required that county election officials be given "all election related documentation" before certification. Opponents asserted the new rules violated state law and more than a century of state court precedent, and might lead to post-election delays or rejections of certifications in an important swing state. During a campaign rally three days before the board vote, Trump called out by name the three board members who later approved the rule, describing them as "pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory". One of them was in the rally audience and stood for recognition of Trump's praise. On August 26, Republican Georgia governor Brian Kemp said he had asked Republican Georgia attorney general Chris Carr if the governor had the authority to remove election board members, citing ethics concerns expressed by some. That same day, national and state Democrats filed a suit alleging the rules changes were illegal and would create chaos. The board majority also approved a rule in September requiring all counties to hand-count their ballots for comparison to machine counts, which critics said might cause errors and confusion while also disrupting the custody of ballots, which typically remain sealed unless a recount is demanded in a challenged election. The recounts could also significantly delay the reporting of election results. In October 2024, a Fulton County superior court judge temporarily blocked the board's hand counting rule, finding it was "too much, too late" to implement in the 2024 election. The next day, another Fulton County superior court judge found that seven new rules established by the State Election Board were "illegal, unconstitutional and void", ordering the Georgia State Election Board to inform all state and local election officials that the rules were to be disregarded. An appeal of the latter ruling by the RNC was unanimously rejected by the Georgia Supreme Court days later.
After joining the Tea Party movement of the Republican Party, Catherine Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010, seeking to expose voting fraud. The organization has long promoted debunked election fraud theories. She and her collaborator Gregg Phillips provided the source information for the 2022 D'Souza film 2000 Mules that falsely alleged a five-state Democratic voting fraud operation in 2020. In response to a state lawsuit, True the Vote admitted in a February 2024 court filing that it had no evidence to support its voting fraud claims in Georgia. Phillips originated the false allegation that millions of noncitizens voted in the 2016 presidential election. For the 2024 election, they introduced IV3, a software program which they claim compares U.S. Postal Service information to voter rolls so that anyone can challenge registrations. A Wired examination found the system unreliable, although Phillips said an updated version was rolling out that has close to "100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States". According to Catherine Engelbrecht, as of July 2024, IV3 has logged more than 700,000 challenges of voter registrations. As of April 2024, Gregg Phillips was also developing Ground Fusion, software "aimed at organizations and PACs looking to identify voting irregularities across larger geographic regions." The America Project, founded in 2021 by Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, said it would roll out "state-of-the-art election tools" that would include artificial intelligence technology.
In 2024, True the Vote launched VoteAlert, a social media application that allows users to report examples of what they perceive to be voter fraud. Wired had criticized a test version of the app for promoting unfounded conspiracy theories about the election. An election worker from Riverside County, California that was using the app claimed to demand identification from voters that she perceived as non-citizens, a plot that Wired described as "racist and illegal". As of November 2024, election workers from the county were investigating the incident.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington obtained months of emails among elections officials in at least five Georgia counties calling themselves the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition. The Guardian reported the communications included a "who's who of Georgia election denialists" who were "coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November's election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement." Some officials had ties to national groups like Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network led by Cleta Mitchell. By October 2024, Republicans were filing lawsuits in battleground states alleging potential fraud to challenge mail-in ballots received from American citizens living abroad. They sought to have certain ballots set aside until voter eligibility could be verified. With about 6.5 million eligible American voters living overseas, including hundreds of thousands of military personnel, the overseas vote was long considered sacrosanct by both parties, historically giving Republicans a voting edge but more recently that advantage had diminished or swung to Democrats. Judges in Michigan and North Carolina rejected RNC suits, ruling they were an "attempt to disenfranchise" voters and had "presented no substantial evidence" of fraud. Republican congressman Scott Perry played a key role among Republican House members in efforts to overturn Biden's election in 2020. He and five other Pennsylvania representatives filed suit in their state asserting that verification of overseas ballots was insufficient to protect the election from foreign interference. Perry said he "joined my colleagues to defend our election against the intrusion and interference of the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world: Iran." Pennsylvania federal judge Christopher Conner dismissed the suit in October 2024, citing its "phantom fears of foreign malfeasance".

#### Election vigilante groups

The Election Integrity Act of 2021 in Georgia (SB 202) allows persons to file an unlimited number of challenges to voter registrations in the state. As of November 2022, at least 149,168 challenges have been filed, primarily against young or Black voters, and no charges of voter fraud have been made. These lists of challenges have been created by True the Vote, which claimed to partially obtain them from the National Change of Address registry. Brad Raffensperger stated that "though federal law restricts our ability to update our voter registration lists, the Elector Challenge is a vehicle under our law to ensure voter integrity." Bee Nguyen accused the law of bypassing the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which forbids voter registration purges 90 days prior to an election. SB 202 in turn potentially violates that federal law as well as the Civil Rights Act and Ku Klux Klan Act.
By July 2024, conservative groups were systematically challenging large numbers of voter registrations across the country. Many of these efforts were driven by lawsuits, including from the RNC, and activists calling themselves election investigators. The groups' stated rationale was to purge voter rolls of dead people, noncitizens and others ineligible to vote. Several Republican secretaries of state were also examining the rolls themselves. The executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors said many of the challenges ignore or misunderstand the complexity and legal requirements involved in maintaining the rolls. Others said the efforts risked disenfranchising eligible voters and sowing distrust in the election system. The Michigan secretary of state had earlier in the year directed a suburban Detroit clerk to reinstate about 1,000 registrations of eligible voters that had been purged. The New York Times reported "it is difficult to know precisely how many voters have been dropped from the rolls as a result of the campaign — and even harder to determine how many were dropped in error."
In October 2024, investigative journalist Greg Palast published to YouTube a documentary, Vigilantes Inc., detailing voter suppression by "vigilante" challenges by self-appointed vote-fraud hunters, not government officials, who are targeting people to challenge and block the counting of their ballots. Many challenges disproportionately impacted Blacks, students, immigrants, and lower income voters. Some of the vigilante challenge groups, such as Soles to the Rolls in Michigan or the Pigpen Project in Nevada, are connected to Cleta Mitchell, True the Vote, Mike Lindell or EagleAI. The Pigpen Project is run by former Nevada GOP executive directors and endorsed by Paul Nehlen. The group is part of the Citizens Outreach Foundation, which attempted to purge 11,000 people from Washoe County, Nevada voter rolls in 2024, a move that the ACLU said violated state and federal law due to being requested within 90 days of the upcoming election. Other groups include the People's Audit, Look Ahead America (founded by a former Trump campaign staffer), Wisconsin's North of 29 (connected to Mike Lindell, and the founder's husband ran for Wisconsin State Assembly in 2024), Iowa Canvassing, Clean Elections USA (CEUSA), FEC United (founded by Joe Oltmann), the Liberty Center for God and Country (run by Steven Hotze), Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona (a.k.a. EZAZ, represented by America First Legal, and whose leader had ties to Kari Lake and an anti-immigrant hate group), United Sovereign Americans (represented by Bruce Castor), New York Citizens Audit (which shares a founder with United Sovereign Americans), Election Integrity Project California, Election Protection Project (led by Michael McCaul, and whose parent group is part of Project 2025) Michigan Fair Elections, Liberty Lions League, and the U.S. Election Integrity Plan (USEIP) (involved in a voting data breach in Colorado, and whose members were hired by Mike Lindell). In 2022, Wisconsin Voters Alliance, which spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and attempted to overturn the results, filed lawsuits in 13 counties in Wisconsin to get access to guardianship records in an attempt to remove people from voting rolls that they perceived to be ineligible. Another group, the Wisconsin Center for Election Justice, also used change of address data from the USPS to find perceived ineligible voters for purging. This approach was deemed problematic by election experts due to the data's lack of coverage. Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney used their information to charge five people for registering to vote with a UPS store address. The leader of the group was previously convicted of mail fraud and bank fraud, and was investigated by the Wisconsin Capitol Police for stalking behavior towards officials at the Wisconsin Election Commission. In 2022, voting rights activists in Arizona filed a lawsuit against CEUSA, alleging that its vigilantes have engaged in voter intimidation by appearing with military gear, weapons and drones at polling locations and ballot drop boxes, as well as by taking pictures of people attempting to use drop boxes with the threat of posting them online. In at least one case, vigilantism over a false claim of voter fraud had led to violence.
A 2023 ProPublica article reported that James O'Keefe was part of a group analyzing federal campaign data for "oddities" and that he has a media company enlisting "citizen journalists" to investigate election fraud.
As of August 2024, 40,000 vigilante activists from True the Vote had challenged 851,381 American voters in 43 states, almost all of whom were voters of color. The group's goal was to challenge 2 million voters by November 5.

### Attacking voting rights groups

In August 2024, under the direction of Ken Paxton, Texas state authorities raided the homes of Hispanic campaign volunteers from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), as part of an investigation into alleged "election fraud and vote harvesting". Those who supported the volunteers characterized the raids as an attempt to suppress the Hispanic vote, and LULAC asked the United States Justice Department to investigate.

### Allegations of noncitizens voting

A surge of migrants crossed the southern United States border beginning in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump and many of his allies alleged the Biden administration was intentionally welcoming migrants into the country so they could register and vote for Democratic candidates. Cleta Mitchell was instrumental in spreading this conspiracy theory nationwide by hosting Zoom calls advising volunteers to spread it. Many volunteers repeated rumors and conspiracies that NGOs aligned with Democrats were registering migrants to vote. Fox News host Maria Bartiromo told her X (formerly Twitter) followers that a friend of a friend told her they had seen tables set up outside Texas DMV offices to register migrants, though a Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman said "none of it is true". Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and organizations such as Tea Party Patriots and the Election Transparency Initiative, the latter led by former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, also advanced these false narratives. Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center, said during an August congressional hearing that he believed the false narratives were created "to set the stage for undermining the legitimacy of the 2024 election this year. The Big Lie is being pre-deployed." Lies about noncitizen voting have become the main focus of election denialism ahead of the 2024 election, which some experts say have been used to intimidate and suppress voters while laying the groundwork to try and overturn the election again, should Trump lose.
The New York Times reported in September 2024 that "the notion that [noncitizens] will flood the polls — and vote overwhelmingly for Democrats — is animating a sprawling network of Republicans who mobilized around" Trump after he claimed the 2020 election was rigged, and "the false theories about widespread noncitizen voting could be used to dispute the outcome again." The Heritage Foundation was particularly instrumental in spreading the false narrative. Appearing with Trump in April 2024, House speaker Mike Johnson baselessly suggested "potentially hundreds of thousands of votes" might be cast by undocumented migrants; as president, Trump falsely asserted that millions of votes cast by undocumented migrants had deprived him of a popular vote victory in the 2016 election. States have found very few noncitizens on their voting rolls, and in the extremely rare instances of votes cast by noncitizens, they are legal immigrants who are often mistaken that they have a right to vote. An April 2024 Cato Institute review of the Heritage Foundation election fraud database found 85 irregularities involving noncitizens over the preceding 22 years.
Elon Musk, owner of X, has used his account with 197 million followers to post false or misleading information about the election, notably the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, contending Democrats are intentionally "importing" undocumented migrants to vote. In one case, Musk reposted a false claim that as many as two million noncitizens had been registered to vote in three states. Analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that during the first seven months of 2024, fifty false or misleading Musk posts about the election generated 1.2 billion views; independent fact-checkers debunked the posts, though the Community Notes user-generated fact check feature on X did not note them. Musk endorsed Trump in July 2024.

### Monitoring of polling places in Democratic districts

Politico reported in June 2022 that the RNC sought to deploy an "army" of poll workers and attorneys in swing states who could refer what they deemed questionable ballots in Democratic voting precincts to a network of friendly district attorneys to challenge. In April 2024, RNC co-chair Lara Trump said the party had the ability to install poll workers who could handle ballots, rather than merely observe polling places. She also said that the 2018 expiration of the 1982 consent decree (Ballot Security Task Force) prohibiting the RNC from intimidation of minority voters "gives us a great ability" in the election. Republicans were recruiting poll watchers in suburbs to deploy in urban areas dominated by Democratic voters. Critics said the RNC plans created a risk that election workers might face harassment and undermine trust in the election process. The Republican governors of several states said that they would not allow the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to send poll monitors to ensure that there are no civil rights violations at polling places.
Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union that hosts the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), wrote election officials in at least three swing states in August 2024 to explain plans to monitor ballot drop boxes. Schlapp wrote the monitoring was intended to encourage rather than discourage voting. Election officials dismissed Schlapp's premise; Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes remarked, "the whole thing is an absurd sham to cover up direct efforts to intimidate voters by a bunch of CPAC-recruited vigilantes." True the Vote planned to team with sympathetic sheriffs to monitor polling places and drop boxes in Wisconsin. Catherine Engelbrecht said her group was "mainly focused" on Wisconsin but "we do have a scalable program". By 2022, True the Vote and others were seeking cooperation with "constitutional sheriffs" organizations such as Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association and Protect America Now (co-founded by sheriff Mark Lamb) to investigate 2020 election fraud allegations with an eye toward preventing future alleged fraud. Such constitutional sheriffs organizations contend sheriffs are the supreme law enforcement authorities in the nation. The Southern Poverty Law Center classified such groups as part of an "extreme antigovernment movement" associated with the American militia movement and the sovereign citizen movement.
Trump's political operation said in April 2024 that it planned to deploy more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers to polling places across battleground states, with an "election integrity hotline" for poll watchers and voters to report alleged voting irregularities. Trump told a rally audience in December 2023 that they needed to "guard the vote" in Democratic-run cities; at an August 2024 rally, he said he already had enough votes and "our primary focus is not to get out the vote, but to make sure they don't cheat". He had complained that his 2020 campaign was not adequately prepared to challenge his loss in courts; some critics said his 2024 election integrity effort is actually intended to gather allegations to overwhelm the election resolution process should he challenge the 2024 election results. Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer who defeated every Trump court challenge after the 2020 election, remarked, "I think they are going to have a massive voter suppression operation and it is going to involve very, very large numbers of people and very, very large numbers of lawyers."
The America Project founded by Flynn and Byrne is staffed by prominent election deniers and funds another project, One More Mission, that seeks to recruit tens of thousands of people with military and law enforcement experience to monitor polling places. The Intercept reported in April 2020 that during a February strategy session attended by conservative donors and activists, Englebrecht said that "you get some SEALs in those polls and they're going to say, 'No, no, this is what it says. This is how we're going to play this show.' That's what we need. We need people who are unafraid to call it like they see it." Several attendees specifically cited this need for "inner city" and predominantly Native American polling precincts. The National Fraternal Order of Police, representing some 375,000 police officers nationwide, endorsed Trump in September 2024. Addressing the group's board, he urged officers to "watch for voter fraud" because "you can keep it down just by watching, because, believe it or not, they're afraid of that badge." Such police activity might violate multiple state laws and raise concerns of voter intimidation. The next day, Trump posted on social media that, if he were to win, "those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country."
As election workers faced threats and harassment, The Washington Post reported in February 2024 it had interviewed more than a dozen election officials around the country who said they were "preparing for the types of disruptions that historically had been more associated with political unrest abroad than American elections". This included planning to quickly debunk misinformation, deescalate conflicts and improve coordination with federal, state, and local law enforcement to better respond to harassment, threats and potential violence. Fontes said his office was preparing for worst-case scenarios, saying "we recognize the real and present danger that’s presented by the conspiracy theories and the lies." A May 2024 poll by Reuters and Ipsos poll found some 68% of Americans — 83% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans — said they were concerned that political violence might follow the election. Olivia Troye, a former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism aide to former vice president Mike Pence, remarked that "the potential for anger, division, political violence — all of that groundwork is being laid out again".
Ivan Raiklin, a close Michael Flynn associate, addressed an October 2024 Rod of Iron Ministries Freedom Festival, urging attendees to "confront" their state representatives with "evidence of the illegitimate steal" should Trump lose. He told attendees he was planning for a range of scenarios following the election, saying, "I have a plan and strategy for every single component of it. And then January 6 is going to be pretty fun." He added, "We run the elections. We try to play it fair. They steal it, our state legislatures are our final stop to guarantee a checkmate." Raiklin had previously characterized himself as Trump's "Secretary of Retribution" and said he had a prepared a "Deep State Target List' of over 350 people he would go after in a second Trump administration. Raiklin claims to have 80,000 recruits prepared to be deputized by constitutional sheriffs. Asked by Fox News host Maria Bartiromo on October 13 whether he was "expecting chaos on Election Day" by "outside agitators" such as migrants or terrorists, Trump replied, "I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within", referencing "radical left lunatics". He added, "It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen."
On at least five occasions during the election cycle, Trump has told his supporters that "we don't need the votes." MSNBC argued that Trump was pushing for voter intimidation to handle false claims of electoral fraud on behalf of his political opponents.

### Challenging the legitimacy of Kamala Harris

Trump repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of his opponent, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election by falsely claiming she orchestrated a "coup" against Biden in what The Washington Post described as an attempt to delegitimize Harris if she wins and undermine confidence in the result of the 2024 election. It further noted Trump's long insistence that "his political failures are the result of some malevolent force trying to keep him out of power", echoing right-wing conspiracy theories and rhetoric about a deep state in the United States.

### Blue shift and use of polling to suggest victory

Trump pointed to the known voting phenomenon known as a "blue shift" or "red mirage" to make baseless allegations of voting fraud. Trump frequently made unfounded claims that he is ahead in the polls and winning in deep blue states such as California, alleging the only reason he loses such states is because of voter fraud. By October 2024, Trump made several rallies in blue states such as at Coachella, California and Madison Square Garden in New York, and CNN reported that Trump believes holding rallies in blue states helps "show how deep his support runs across the nation" and also "set the groundwork for Trump to question the election results should Harris win".
In October 2024, The New York Times reported on a number of polls commissioned by right-wing firms, most showing a Trump victory and standing out "amid the hundreds of others indicating a dead heat in the presidential election" and that they were seen as "building a narrative of unstoppable momentum for Mr. Trump". It further said that the polls were "cementing the idea that the only way Mr. Trump can lose to Vice President Kamala Harris is if the election is rigged" and that they "could be held up as evidence of cheating if that victory does not come to pass". The report noted that by October 2020, Republican-aligned pollsters had only released 15 presidential polls in swing states compared to 37 in 2024, and that of the 37 all but seven had Trump in the lead. Several of the polls were also accepted in influencing the polling averages by RealClearPolitics, which were widely shared among Republican circles. The New York Times also reported on betting markets Polymarket and Kalshi as strongly favoring Trump over Harris, and that part of the surge appeared in part due to a small number of individuals betting $30 million on a Trump win, and that Trump and Musk had pointed to the betting markets as evidence of their strength. Other data, including early-voting numbers were also "cited by Trump supporters as further evidence of his impending triumph".
Joshua Dyck of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts Lowell said that "Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger." The increase in partisan polls were criticized by Simon Rosenberg, who alleged that Republicans were "flooding the zone" to shift polling averages, create media buzz and deflate Democratic enthusiasm. G. Elliott Morris of FiveThirtyEight stated that such low-quality polls would not impact their polling averages, which are weighted by the quality and reputation of the pollster, as did Nate Cohn of The New York Times, who calculated only a small shift in the averages. Polling strategists for both parties criticized seeing the use of polling "weaponized" to decrease faith in the entire system. Republican strategist Mike Madrid stated that "the main reason you float data like that is because you're trying to convince your supporters there's no way Trump can lose — unless it's stolen".

### Blocking federal election monitors

In early November 2024, the secretaries of state for Missouri, Florida, and Texas have stated their intention to block federal election monitors from accessing polling places on Election Day. The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has historically been responsible for enforcing federal voting rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

### Precinct strategy

Precinct strategy is a political strategy - advocated by Tea Party activist and Oath Keeper member Daniel J. Schultz, promoted by Mark Finchem, Steve Bannon, Turning Point Action and Michael Flynn, and endorsed by Donald Trump - for supporters of the election denial movement to join local level committees or become poll workers. Precinct officers collectively can affect the election process due to their ability to elect party officers, influence which candidates are on a ballot, and encourage voter turnout. In some states, they can also choose poll workers or members of election oversight boards. As of September 2021, at least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers or locally equivalent officials joined in counties across the United States, particularly ones that were seen as politically competitive. Not all district chairs screen their applicants. Some of the new officers openly supported the QAnon conspiracy theory and participated in the January 6 United States Capitol attack. Schultz had previously defended the American militia movement in an article and advocated for new officers to be armed with weapons, considering the precinct strategy to be the last alternative to violence. Once empowered, some officers have attempted to push out higher-ranking officials who do not support false claims about the 2020 United States presidential election and elect those who do, with varying degrees of success. Christian right activists, alongside True the Vote and the Election Integrity Network, have also participated in efforts to recruit poll workers in swing states. By June 2022, this strategy was used by the Republican National Committee to connect new poll workers with local party attorneys. By April 2024, the Republican Party was largely controlled by the election denial movement, especially as several Trump campaign personnel took leadership roles in the RNC.
Robert Beadles, an investor of Gab, is a supporter of precinct strategy who has funded election denialists in political campaigns, spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, promoted narratives about Black American communities and COVID-19 that have been criticized as offensive, and was suspected of hiring private investigators to harass local election officials. Former Reno City Councilman Paul McKenzie filed a complaint accusing Beadles of not filing political expenses made by Beadles' PAC Operation Sunlight.
In 2021, a group of persons knocked on doors in Yavapai County, Arizona, falsely claiming to be working on behalf of local election officials and asking residents about their votes in 2020, sparking concerns about identity theft.
In August 2024, two election officials in Michigan alleged that the Holton Township clerk (a co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party who previously ran in the 2024 primary as a Republican for the Muskegon County Commissioner) did not turn in the votes from her town on the night of the primary, and then publicly accused them of losing the town's results.
In September 2024, the Center for Media and Democracy released a report identifying 239 Republican election administrators, candidates and party leaders in swing states that were part of the election denial movement. In October 2024, the RNC and Trump campaign co-hosted a training event for poll workers in Wisconsin and across the United States. Republican officials refused to make training materials public, with the exception of the point that poll workers were encouraged to report perceived suspicions to state RNC lawyers.
During elections in 2020, 2022, and 2024, several county commissioners in multiple swing states (Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Arizona), along with New Mexico, had voted not to certify the elections. Election experts were concerned that administrators could refuse to certify if Trump had lost the 2024 presidential election, potentially leading to results being decided by majority votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
In addition to precinct officers or poll workers, many election deniers have also been appointed as presidential electors for Trump in swing states for the 2024 election, including at least 13 who participated in the Trump fake electors plot in 2020. Election deniers have also ran in local school board elections.
An October 2024 bulletin from the state threat assessment center in Colorado warned of insider threats, "in which people with authorized access to the election process might attempt to derail it."
Follow the Law, an organization with ties to Election Integrity Network, has published ads in swing states encouraging election officials to treat election certification as optional. Some ads disclosed that they were paid by organizations that were tied to groups to which Richard Uihlein has provided funding.
Two election judges in Minnesota were criminally charged for their actions on Election Day, one for serving in the same precinct where her husband was on the ballot for city council (who won the election), and the other for allowing 11 people to vote without registering.

### Attacking free press

Trump and other Republican politicians have repeatedly attacked journalists and media organizations, including lawsuits (including lawsuits to reveal anonymous sources), a complaint through the Federal Election Commission, threats of imprisonment, threats to revoke broadcast licenses, threats of violence, proposing laws that directly challenge New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, threats of lawfare, and designation as "enemy of the people" or similar insults.
Commentators have expressed concerns that these threats could make a chilling effect on editorial decisions of media outlets (self-censorship), especially if they make unintentional mistakes while criticizing political figures. These lawsuits and threats of lawsuits were characterized as attempts to punish outlets that criticize politicians by ultimately forcing those outlets to close through multiple, slow-moving damage claims. Journalists speculated that the withdrawal of editorial board endorsements for Kamala Harris in October 2024 by the owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times were an attempt to appease Trump if he won the election.

### Spreading false information and suppressing disinformation researchers

Several Republican Party politicians and operatives have ties to websites that have been considered by misinformation researchers and journalists to spread false information, especially about climate change, prejudice against marginalized groups, COVID-19 or the 2020 United States presidential election, including The Epoch Times, The Western Journal, and Breitbart. Some of these websites had lost advertisers in response to boycotts or were banned from being shared on some social media platforms such as Facebook or Google News, reducing their web traffic. Other conservative figures, most notably Donald Trump in the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol attack, were deplatformed from social media for incitement of violence or hate speech. As such, "Republican politicians and activists have alleged that the tech companies are unfairly censoring the right, threatening conservatives' ability to sway public opinion and win elections."
In 2021, Republican legislators in Texas and Florida passed laws to limit the ability of social media organizations to moderate content on their own platforms. These laws were supported by Republican attorneys general from 19 states. Republican-introduced bills in many states allowed for civil lawsuits against social media companies over perceived "censorship" of posts, especially those related to politics or religion. As of March 2021, research has not supported the allegation that social media companies are biased against conservative viewpoints.
In 2022, under pressure from Republican politicians and right-wing activists, the United States Department of Homeland Security shut down the Disinformation Governance Board and canceled a project with a non-profit to track death threats targeting election workers.
Starting in 2023, academic and private researchers of disinformation have been subject to subpoenas, lawsuits and public records requests by the House Judiciary Committee (led by Jim Jordan) and America First Legal (led by Stephen Miller), respectively, "accusing them of colluding with the [United States federal] government to suppress conservative speech online." These efforts, described as an "attempt to chill research", have not produced evidence "that government officials coerced [social media platforms] to take action against accounts" as of June 2023. America First Legal's efforts had been funded by conservative donors that are allied with Trump and have spread false claims of fraud during the 2020 elections, including $27 million from the Bradley Impact Fund and $1.3 million from the Conservative Partnership Institute. Lawsuits have also been filed against the federal government by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, The Daily Wire and The Federalist. Researchers had been subject to increased time demands, legal costs and online harassment. Lawyers involved in Murthy v. Missouri have alleged that Jordan's subcommittee partially leaked closed door interviews to America First Legal for use in its own lawsuits, an allegation evidenced by the Stanford Internet Observatory. Subpoenas (including threats of contempt) were also sent to large technology companies by the committee, alleging that they had a liberal bias. These actions, combined with reduced content moderation by social media platforms and progress in generative artificial intelligence, have occurred alongside an increase in online misinformation and disinformation. These actions also had a chilling effect on social media companies and federal government agencies sharing information with each other, including about foreign interference and medical misinformation. Mark Warner characterized the committee as a "concerted effort by partisan actors to intimidate and silence" misinformation researchers and expressed concern that its actions could hamper countering foreign disinformation and interference in the 2024 elections.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is responsible for protecting critical national infrastructure (including election security), has been repeatedly targeted by conservatives and Republican politicians, including the committee. Under Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation recommended that CISA be dismantled and that it stop addressing election misinformation. These attacks had the indirect impact of discouraging collaboration with cybersecurity experts, including research that did not involve disinformation or elections. Election security researchers at DEF CON were also harassed by election denial activists in 2022. By September 2024, Director Jen Easterly stated that the agency would not request for social media organizations to remove posts containing election misinformation.
By January 2024, researchers, technologists and political scientists warned that "disinformation [posed] an unprecedented threat to democracy in the United States in 2024", especially from social media. By March 2024, The New York Times reported that Trump and his allies had "unquestionably prevailed" in their efforts to stop collaboration between social media companies, the Biden administration, and academic researchers to protect against election disinformation. By June 2024, one of the research groups targeted by the committee, the Stanford Internet Observatory, had refocused its work and its Election Integrity Partnership project had ended. In July 2024, several Republican lawmakers threatened against re-authorization of the Global Engagement Center, which had closed in December 2024 after Republicans had removed it from a funding bill. False information, including AI slop, conspiracy theories about the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, the Springfield pet-eating hoax, false claims about the 2024 United States elections, misinformation related to abortion, vaccine misinformation, anti-trans rhetoric, promotion of raw milk, climate change denial and propaganda from the Russian government had been spread online repeatedly by Republican politicians during the 2024 election cycle.

### Stochastic terrorism

Between 2021 and 2024, high-profile Republican figures and supporters such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, the Republican National Committee, Colton Moore, Matt Maddock and Mark Robinson; right-wing outlets or social media accounts such as Fox News, One America News Network and Libs of TikTok and organizations such as Gays Against Groomers have been repeatedly accused of promoting or enabling on mass media conspiracy theories (including false claims of fraud during the 2020 United States presidential election), lies, dehumanization (such as anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, xenophobia and antisemitism), demonization of political opponents and/or threats of violence (including threats of assassination and civil war), all as a form of stochastic terrorism.
Kurt Braddock, a communications researcher, notes that stochastic terrorism is largely based on disinformation that viciously attacks political opponents; is significantly more common in the form of right-wing violence than left-wing violence; and the words of those accused of perpetrating violent attacks are very similar to the rhetoric of political figures accused of inciting stochastic terrorism.
In addition to physical violence, this rhetoric has also directly inspired legislation. For example, a Tennessee bill that proposed banning gender-affirming care for trans children was sponsored by legislators who credited Matt Walsh for inspiration. In Scientific American, author Bryn Nelson noted how disgust has been weaponized by instigators of stochastic terrorism against their targets.
As part of one of the 2022 break-out sessions, the Dallas CPAC conference displayed a banner across their main stage with the phrase "We are all domestic terrorists."
In the aftermath of the attack on Paul Pelosi in 2022, Hillary Clinton stated: "The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories. It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result."
A June 2024 article from Salon argued that Trump and his allies have gone beyond the indirect language of stochastic terrorism towards direct orders for their followers to engage in violence. Experts and former United States government officials had previously come to similar conclusions, with Juliette Kayyem describing Trump's rhetoric as "true incitement" and "promoting terrorism."
An October 2024 Joint Intelligence Bulletin from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned that domestic extremists – motivated by election denial conspiracy theories, immigration, abortion, the LGBTQ community, and the two assassination attempts of Trump – posed a significant threat of violence during the election against politicians (incumbents and candidates), election staff, media staff and judges who are overseeing cases involving elections.

### Interference by Elon Musk

Elon Musk contributed at least $260 million to efforts to re-elect Trump, including through three super PACs (America PAC, RBG PAC, and the MAHA Alliance). Steve Bannon had credited Musk financing Trump's campaign as "the reason we won." During the election campaign, Musk had established a "war room" in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, believing that the state was crucial for Trump to win the election. Musk had promoted Trump's campaign to his (Musk's) followers on X/Twitter, and had spread unfounded conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party. X had colluded with the Trump campaign to block links to a dossier of JD Vance, suspending the account of the journalist who published the dossier. Musk had repeatedly shared deepfake media of Kamala Harris, including with the use of Grok-2, a text-to-image model created by xAI. He has claimed without evidence that, if Trump did not win, the 2024 election would be the last in the United States.
Academic researchers had found that, shortly after Musk tweeted his endorsement of Trump in July 2024, Musk's X/Twitter account had received a strong and sustained increase in engagement compared to other high-profile political accounts; and that right-wing accounts had higher post visibility compared to left-wing accounts during the same time period. An analysis from the Washington Post also found that, between July 2023 and October 2024, tweets from Republican politicians had significantly more virality compared to those from Democrats.
In July 2024, Jerry Nadler wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee asking for an investigation into whether X/Twitter had limited users from following Kamala Harris' official presidential campaign account, with Nadler and NBC News noting that at least 16 accounts had posted that they were unable to follow the account.
In August 2024, Musk donated $1 million to Early Vote Action, a PAC founded by Scott Presler.
Shortly after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Florida in September 2024, Musk published and then deleted a tweet stating that "no one is even trying to assassinate" President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson on October 6, 2024, Musk claimed, jokingly and then seriously, that if Trump lost the election, that he would be imprisoned: "If he loses, I’m fucked. ... How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Do you think? Will I see my children? I don’t know." He further claimed that a hypothetical Harris administration would imprison him and shut down X/Twitter.
Musk had funded the dark money network Building America's Future, and has also given money to Citizens for Sanity through that network.
During town hall events in Pennsylvania in October, Musk spread false conspiracy theories about voting machines, linking voting machines from Dominion to election losses for the Republican Party. He advocated for elections to be run with only hand-counted paper ballots, stating "I'm a technologist, I know a lot about computers. And I'm like, the last thing I would do is trust a computer program, because it's just too easy to hack." He further advocated for only in-person voting with identification, despite America PAC supporting mail-in voting and absentee ballots.
At a rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on November 5, 2024, Donald Trump stated: "[Musk] really is watching this whole voting process. ... He looked at some that were just shipped in, some of these vote-counting computers. He knew it before it even came in the door. He looked like at the back of it, 'Oh, I know that one.' He knows this stuff better than anyone."
On his podcast shortly after Election Day, Joe Rogan told Theo Von that Musk had "created an app" to know what the election results were four hours in advance. As of November 2024, how the app worked and what data it used are unknown.
The day after the election, an election official in the Tulare County, California Elections Office stated that the office used Starlink, which improved "access to connectivity". A few days later, another official stated that Starlink was only used to connect office laptops to the Internet to access their election database, solely for the purpose of checking in voters or verifying their registration status. Verified Voting confirmed that Starlink was used in several jurisdictions for electronic pollbooks during the election, but that it was not involved in counting votes. AFP reported that most, if not all, ballot marking devices and vote tabulators are not connected to the Internet, and that Starlink had been used in elections since at least 2022 without controversy.
At a Turning Point USA conference in December 2024, Ken Paxton claimed that during a meeting on November 3, 2024 (two days before Election Day), Elon Musk told him that he was "now involved in every battleground state, and we're going to win every battleground state." During the conference, Paxton said that he was "convinced that whatever rocket science thing [Musk] did made a huge difference in this election".
During Donald Trump's pre-inauguration rally on January 19, 2025, Trump credited Musk for his contributions to the campaign in Pennsylvania, stating "[Musk] knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide." Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett questioned whether Trump had admitted that he and Musk had committed electoral fraud, while Newsweek reported that Dan Goldman urged an investigation.
Ethan Shaotran, a member of the Department of Government Efficiency, participated in a 2020 hackathon at Devpost to build software with the stated purpose of helping voters check their ballots for issues that may prevent those ballots from being counted, using street address and ballot images as input. The team wrote a Python script that used OpenCV to generate "semi-randomized ballots that fit certain satisfiability criteria" to test their work. In October 2024, xAI announced a team that included Shaotran as a runner-up for the company's hackathon. The team's project documentation stated that they used Grok and tweets from X/Twitter as a multi-agent system to "simulate entire communities' raw reactions to any topic (politics, consumer behavior, etc)."
During a meeting with state governors on February 21, 2025, Trump stated: "If that were a close election, you'd have to wait for weeks and weeks and weeks. You've got to finish fast, Brian [Kemp]. Thank you for your help. We did very well in Georgia. It was very nice." He also said, "I did ask Elon [Musk] because he knows more about computers than anybody, and I said, 'What do you think of the voting system?' He said, 'Computers are not meant for voting. It's just not a good, it's too many transactions taking place too quickly. It's just not', he said".
On the same day, People reported that Ashley St. Clair filed court petitions against Musk for full custody of her son and for Musk to be acknowledged as the father. In a 2024 text message exchange submitted as part of the filings, Musk said regarding death threats to himself: "The threat level will reach insane levels until the election is decided" and that "loose lips sink ships".

#### America PAC

America PAC had posted digital ads asking viewers to register to vote, but viewers in swing states were asked to submit their address, cell phone number and age, without directing them to a voter registration page. The PAC's privacy policy allows it to use this data for "other [political] activities and/or fundraising campaigns" such as door-to-door canvassing. As a result, the Michigan Secretary of State's Office and the North Carolina Board of Elections have opened investigations into the PAC in August 2024, while the North Carolina Attorney General's Office started to informally review the PAC. As of October 2024, Michigan had not found evidence of the PAC violating state campaign finance law.
At least 18 Pennsylvania residents – mostly registered Democrats - have received checks from America PAC Petition despite not having signed the petition or no knowledge of family members or friends who signed them up. The petition's stated goal was to sign up 1 million registered voters in swing states to show support for the First and Second Amendments, giving away $1 million to one petition signee every day until Election Day (in addition to $100 per petition referral), and had asked for their full names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses. Voter registration data in Pennsylvania - which includes names, addresses, registration status, and political affiliation – can be purchased from the Pennsylvania State Department for $20. While America PAC stated that it would verify the information of the check recipients for accuracy, many of these recipients stated that no verification process had occurred. As of December 2024, about 20 complaints have been sent to the Pennsylvania Attorney General Office's Bureau of Consumer Protection. The majority of petitioners who were selected as winners of the $1 million sweepstakes were from Pennsylvania. One of the sweepstakes winners had worked on the Trump campaign between June and October of 2024. Another sweepstakes winner had the same name and lived in the same town as a person who ran for county supervisor in 2022.
On Election Day 2024, Musk stated that he planned for America PAC to be involved in the 2026 United States midterm elections, "any intermediate elections, as well as ... elections at the district attorney level." Larry Krasner, the Philadelphia district attorney, had filed a lawsuit against Musk and America PAC a week prior on October 28 over the PAC's $1 million giveaway scheme.
Over 1 million people in seven swing states had signed up with the petition, with Krasner arguing that they were "scammed for their information." On November 4, a judge dismissed the lawsuit, arguing that Krasner "failed to provide any evidence of misuse beyond mere speculation."

#### Contacts with Russia and national security concerns

The Wall Street Journal reported in October 2024 that Musk had been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin, Sergey Kiriyenko, and other high ranking Russian government officials since late 2022, discussing personal topics, business and geopolitical matters. On November 15, Democratic senators Jack Reed and Jeanne Shaheen asked the Pentagon and Department of Justice to investigate these contacts, citing national security concerns. Musk has a security clearance with the United States federal government, and several federal agencies such as the Pentagon, the Space Force and NASA depend on technology from Musk's company SpaceX.

## Funding

The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and The American Prospect reported that, between 2020 and 2022, over 3,500 foundations and high net-worth donors provided over $1 billion to about 150 nonprofit organizations that supported voter suppression activities. Donors included the Bradley Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Charles Koch Foundation. Public charities with donor-advised funds (DAF) that also provided funding include DonorsTrust, Fidelity Charitable, Goldman Sachs, National Philanthropic Trust, and Schwab Charitable. The specific donors to these DAFs are unknown as of March 2025.
Other known funders of the above activities include the Uihlein family, Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell, Rebecca Dunn, Robert Beadles, the Conservative Partnership Institute, and Elon Musk.

## Analysis
### Allegations of the impact of voter suppression

On The Mark Thompson Show in November 2024, Greg Palast said that election vigilante challenges caused voters to be removed from the voter rolls, and that the only way for voters to reverse their challenge was to physically visit their voter registrar's office with an ID proving their citizenship and residence. Some voters may have been challenged on Election Day or the day after Election Day, and they may not have known. If a voter is challenged, they may be provided a provisional ballot. He estimated that there were 15-20 million provisional ballots during the 2024 election, and that 2.7 million of them were rejected. None of the 2.7 million people were arrested for registering or voting illegally. Palast alleged that, by adding back a fraction of the voters who were challenged and/or removed, Kamala Harris would have won both Nevada and Arizona.
In December 2024, Palast alleged that at least 2 million mail-in ballots were discarded. In January 2025, Palast further estimated that 4,776,706 voters were incorrectly removed from voter registration databases (per data from the US Election Assistance Commission), at least 2,121,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified, at least 585,000 in-precinct ballots were disqualified, 1,216,000 provisional ballots were rejected, and that 3.24 million new voter registrations were either rejected or not added to the voter rolls in time for the election. He described a technique that both Democratic and Republican politicians have used to purge voters from the voter rolls: targeted voters that do not sign and return postcards, which are mailed by state elections officials and appear as junk mail, are removed. He estimated that at least 2.3% of all votes cast in the election were suppressed, costing Kamala Harris at least 3,565,000 votes, which would have led to her winning the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, winning the election by both the popular vote and 286 Electoral College votes.

### Allegations of anomalies in election results

In January 2025, Newsweek reported that two election integrity organizations, SMART Elections and Election Truth Alliance, had alleged voting irregularities during the 2024 election cycle, emphasizing that the allegations were speculative and not concrete proof of fraud. Both groups had analyzed "drop-off rate" - the difference in vote count between the presidential race and the next-highest down ballot statewide race (such as the United States Senate) on the same day. SMART Elections found that Trump had a significantly larger number of votes than the corresponding Republican Senate candidate or major down-ballot race, while Harris had significantly fewer votes compared to the corresponding Democratic Senate candidate or major down-ballot race, and that these findings primarily were observed for the six swing states analyzed. SMART Elections further broke down the data by county and found that, in North Carolina, Harris received less votes than the Democratic candidate for attorney general in every county in the state, while Trump received more votes than the Republican candidate for attorney general in every county in the state. Similar patterns were observed in eight other states (including Arizona and Wisconsin).
Election Truth Alliance had observed results in Clark County, Nevada that were "consistent with vote manipulation." The group analyzed cast vote records for that county (defined as an anonymized spreadsheet that shows how votes were cast) and alleged that early voting records were similar to a "Russian tail" (a statistical phenomenon commonly observed in Russia where election results deviate from a Gaussian distribution and may be an indicator of election fraud).

## Reactions
### Media

Media coverage during the immediate aftermath of the election focused primarily on the conspiracy theory that Elon Musk used Starlink to hack the election results, which Snopes described as "unfounded". Allegations from left-wing social media users of election fraud during the aftermath of the 2024 United States presidential election had been dismissed as "baseless", described as part of BlueAnon and compared to Stop the Steal.
Greg Palast criticized American mainstream media's reaction to voter suppression, writing, "The U.S. media will write about vote suppression tactics during an election. But never would the media report on the effect of suppression on the November 5 vote count."
Alternative media outlets The Canary and the Free Press called for an election audit or a hand recount, citing multiple bomb threats, voter roll purges and voting machine vulnerabilities.
Fact-checkers from PolitiFact and Newsguard denied claims that Trump's comments about "vote-counting computers" were an indication of election fraud, deeming those claims as false. Similarly, some American and international mainstream media outlets described reactions to his comments as conspiracy theories.

### Politicians and political officials

As of December 18, 2024, "no Democratic lawmaker or election official has promoted the idea that the 2024 election was stolen", and "[Kamala] Harris has ignored pleas to challenge the result."
In response to Trump's comments about "vote-counting computers" the day before the inauguration, Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett questioned whether Trump had admitted that he and Musk had committed electoral fraud, while Newsweek reported that Dan Goldman urged an investigation.
In February 2025, Raw Story reported that former Federal Election Commission chair Ellen Weintraub stated that out of 63 complaints that had been submitted against Donald Trump or his political committees, 31 were recommended by FEC staff for further investigation, but none of them received four or more votes from commissioners to investigate those complaints.
The Atlanta Black Star reported in March 2025 that Maxine Waters stated her intention to investigate Elon Musk with respect to his role in the 2024 election.

### Election and cybersecurity experts

Free Speech for People, a left-leaning nonprofit advocacy group for election and campaign finance reform, published three open letters between 2022 and 2024 to the United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Kamala Harris, urging either a federal investigation (pre-election) or a hand recount (post-election).
Stephen Spoonamore is a Republican who specializes in fraud detection and computer infrastructure cybersecurity. He testified in King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell that election fraud had occurred during the 2004 United States presidential election. He speculated that SmarTech, a GOP-associated company in Tennessee recruited by Michael Connell and that had received Internet traffic from county election offices by then-Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell's office, acted as a man-in-the-middle with the ability to alter vote totals. In 2008, Raw Story reported that Spoonamore had evidence of electoral fraud during the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial election and 2002 United States Senate election in Georgia based on a patch personally installed by then-Premier Election Solutions CEO Bob Urosevich (the founder of ES&S) in only two Georgia counties that primarily voted for the Democratic Party.
On November 15, 2024, Spoonamore published an open duty to warn letter to Kamala Harris, claiming that the 2024 election was fraudulent by hacking with about 600,000 "bullet ballots" (defined by him as votes solely for Trump that he claimed were then selectively added to swing state vote totals), urging her to request hand recounts in all of the swing states and to open a criminal investigation. He supported the 2024 letter from Free Speech for People and cited as evidence for his claims the $1 million lottery by America PAC, the use of Starlink by some jurisdictions for electronic pollbooks, and multiple bomb threats. Snopes disputed his calculations for bullet ballots, and described his claims of fraud as "unfounded", "a hypothesis grounded in mere speculation" and "unsupported by concrete evidence." By December 2024, he conceded that his terminology for bullet ballots may have been incorrect, but stood by his view that the election results were abnormal.