Trump escalates false claims of election fraud, setting stage to cry foul if he loses

Donald Trump, who blamed his 2020 defeat on false claims of vast election malfeasance, has spent much of the final week of his third presidential campaign trying to discredit the legitimacy of this year’s election.

His latest unsubstantiated claims could set the stage for an attempt to fight a potential loss not only in the courts but also by spreading falsehoods about the nation’s election systems. The former president and his allies have produced no evidence of widespread fraud or Democratic attempts to rig this election or the previous one, which he lost to Joe Biden. Election officials who have spent four years dealing with the fallout of his 2020 falsehoods fear his latest claims could lead to violence.

“They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing. ... Look at what’s going on in your state, every day they’re talking about extending hours; whoever heard of this stuff?” Trump, visibly frustrated, said in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Sunday. “We should have one-day voting and paper ballots.” He added: “It’s a damn shame, and I’m the only one that talks about it because everyone’s afraid to damn talk about it, and then they accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist. … The ones that should be locked up are the ones that cheat on these horrible elections that we go through in our country.”

In Salem, Virginia, on Saturday, he told the crowd: “I’d love to win the popular vote with them cheating. Let them cheat, because that’s what they do, they do it very well, they’re very professional. But I think we have a really good chance to win the popular vote.” Later at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, a prerecorded message from Trump encouraged attendees to vote and to “keep your eyes open because these people want to cheat, and they do cheat. And frankly it’s the only thing they do well.”

And in Milwaukee on Friday night, he falsely claimed to have won Wisconsin twice, saying that “these are minor details.” Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 but lost the state to Biden in 2020.

Trump’s preemptive warnings about election fraud, despite no evidence of widespread cheating, are part of a pattern that dates back to his 2016 presidential campaign, an election he also claimed was “rigged” before he won it.

But Trump’s latest statements are renewing concern among election experts who fear a repeat of the 2020 election, when the former president’s false claims of widespread fraud culminated in a pro-Trump mob storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During Sunday’s rally, Trump also said he “shouldn’t have left” the White House.

This election cycle, Trump has encouraged his supporters to make the election “too big to rig,” a slogan that insinuates that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Trump has also set the stage for broad disappointment among his supporters should the election results be anything other than a victory for him. He has repeatedly claimed he is leading in the polls and suggested that the only way Democrats can win is by cheating. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, leads Trump by about 2 percentage points nationally, according to The Washington Post’s average of high-quality public polls.

Trump has not committed to accepting the 2024 election results, saying he would do so only “if it’s a fair election” and claiming the only way he can lose is if there is fraud. Harris has said she is committed to free and fair elections and to the peaceful transfer of power.

Trump’s allegations have gone nowhere in court but have fostered a false belief among many of his supporters that fraud is rampant, said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that seeks to build confidence in elections.

Although polls show an extremely tight race, Trump’s rhetoric has convinced many of his backers that his victory is inevitable, Becker said.

“You can imagine the shock that some Trump supporters might feel if it turns out that he loses and how that shock could be leveraged into anger and even potentially violence in the post-election period,” he said. In 2020, “his allies aimed his supporters at public servants, and many of them had to go to alternate locations to be safe. They had to get security. They had to deal with doxing. … Now, we’ve seen many of his supporters infected with four more years of lies about the election.”

In an emailed statement, Claire Zunk, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, hailed “President Trump’s unprecedented election integrity operation … committed to defending the law and protecting every legal vote,” but neither she nor a Trump campaign spokeswoman directly addressed Trump’s insinuations that “cheating” could swing the race.

Harris urged Americans on Sunday to ignore Trump’s signals that he may prematurely claim victory on Tuesday night, arguing that they are intended to discourage people from voting.

“It is meant to distract from the fact that we have and support free and fair elections in our country. We did in 2020,” Harris told reporters. “He lost, and the systems that are in place for this election in 2024 have integrity. They are good systems, and the vote of the people will determine the outcome of this election. And everyone must know that their vote is their power to determine the outcome of the election, and their vote will count.”

In recent days, Trump has focused his allegations of voter fraud on Pennsylvania, a state that nonpartisan election experts see as a near-must-win for both him and Harris. According to The Post’s polling average, Harris is leading in the state by less than a point.

During a recent rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump claimed: “They’ve already started cheating in Lancaster.” And in a social media post, he claimed: “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”

[Harris vows unity in closing message while Trump lashes out]

Democratic officials and voting rights advocates vehemently dispute Trump’s claims. Lancaster County election officials said recently that they identified roughly 2,500 voter registration applications that were potentially fraudulent and that local law enforcement was investigating.

Trump has falsely claimed that there were ballots filled out with the same pen - ballots are not opened in Pennsylvania until Election Day. Officials counter that the identification of faulty registration applications shows the system is working, and they won’t give ballots to ineligible voters. Voting rights advocates say the suspicious applications are probably the fault of a sloppy canvasser and not a nefarious scheme to steal the election.

The Trump campaign and the RNC are highlighting allegations of voter fraud and voter suppression as part of an attempt “to ensure a safe and secure election for ALL Americans, regardless of who they are voting for,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said in an emailed statement.

Experts say some problems are inevitable during any election but are almost always resolved and affect only a tiny number of the tens of millions of ballots cast.

Rhetoric like Trump’s threatens the ability of many Americans to accept the results of a free and fair election, said Tammy Patrick, the chief executive for programs at the National Association of Election Officials. His language further erodes trust in the democratic process, she said, and lays a foundation for violence if the outcome is not what some may want it to be.

“This happened before - we all watched the television on Jan. 6,” Patrick said. “We all saw with our own eyes what the manifestation of this kind of rhetoric is. In this moment, many [election officials] are holding their breath to see what will happen in the next week or so.”

She said that American public officials and leaders should urge patience through the vote-counting process, which could last several days. In Maricopa County, home to most Arizona voters, officials have said it could take workers 10 to 13 days to finish processing ballots.

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Colby Itkowitz and Maeve Reston contributed to this report.