How GOP election denial thrives in 2024

Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election with false charges that the election had been stolen from him. Now one of his lawyers from that effort is laying the groundwork for a similar push in 2024.

The lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, leads the Election Integrity Network, which is spearheading efforts to take "Mr. Trump's falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action," said The New York Times. (Mitchell advised Trump in 2020 when he pressured Georgia officials to make up his shortfall of votes in that state.) The group has lobbied for new state election laws and "fanned out" in the hunt for election fraud, working closely with the Republican National Committee while doing so. That work has helped "debunked theories to jump from state to state," said the Times.

Mitchell and her allies are using election lawsuits to paint a picture of "rampant voting fraud without offering hard evidence to support their claims," said The Intercept. The lawsuits are designed not to be won, " but to confuse the public," said legal ethics professor Scott Cummings. But Mitchell says she is trying to stop Democratic efforts to fraudulently subvert the election. "They're literally getting people to lie," she told one conservative radio host.

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Controlling 'the gears of the system'

The Trump campaign's efforts in 2020 were largely improvised. This time around, the former president's allies have "mounted a much more coordinated attack on the system," Eric Lutz said at Vanity Fair. They have "sought more control over the gears of the system" — most notably through efforts to control the Georgia elections board and pass new voting rules in that swing state. Those efforts also run through the House of Representative, where Democrats fear Speaker Mike Johnson "could scramble the rules of the electoral vote count in January."

Mitchell and her allies say Democrats rely on the illegal votes of non-citizen immigrants to win, said The Huffington Post. Democrats help migrants access "the very porous voter registration system, and collect their votes," Mitchell said during congressional testimony last month. There's very little evidence to support her claims. Migrant voting "is exceedingly rare," Allison Anderman said at The Brennan Center for Justice. Attempts to purge voter rolls of noncitizens instead have mostly "resulted in the removal — or attempted removal — of U.S. citizens."

Conspiracy theories 'thriving online'

Election conspiracy theories "are already thriving online," said Wired. False stories — about ballots being destroyed in Pennsylvania, or the Pentagon authorizing "lethal force" against election protesters — are part of the "flood of voting-related disinformation narratives" spreading across X, Instagram and Facebook, usually shared by "right-wing election denial networks, the Trump campaign, and Russian propaganda groups." That worries observers. American society is "much less equipped to be proactive in the face of election lies," said Nina Jankowicz, CEO of the American Sunlight Project.

There could be a backlash. One recent poll shows American voters are leery of candidates "who say former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election," said NBC News. Election denialism was the "least popular position tested in the survey." Self-described "MAGA Republicans" and other conservatives respond positively to such candidates. But voters in "swing groups" — including "suburban women, independents, moderates and seniors" — are turned off by such claims, said NBC. The election may depend on voters who reject election conspiracies.