Election officials brace for ‘little fires everywhere’ if Trump loses again

It’s Election Day again and America is on edge, not only about the vote but about what might follow.

For four years, Donald Trump and his allies have prepared to challenge the outcome if he loses again. They have spent months filing lawsuits, laying the groundwork to contest ballots, results and the eligibility of voters. They have recruited thousands of volunteers to monitor polling places, drop boxes and counting facilities.

And, without evidence, they have claimed that the cheating has already begun - priming their staunchest supporters for confrontation, intimidation and, in the worst case, violence.

State and federal authorities have been preparing, too. After Trump’s clumsy, chaotic and ultimately failed effort to overturn his loss in 2020, election officials, members of Congress and law enforcement agencies gamed out how someone might try again. They have changed laws to make it harder to challenge certified results, strengthened security at election facilities and launched massive message campaigns to encourage public trust in U.S. elections.

Now, the country is poised to find out if the guardrails are necessary - and whether they hold. Officials are less concerned about the kind of mass protests that Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement spawned in 2020, notably the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But they are worried, they say, about localized incidents spinning out of control.

“There is the potential for small flare-ups throughout our state and other states - little fires everywhere,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D), who was the subject of threats and harassment in the aftermath of the 2020 vote and pushed for new laws that make it more difficult to overturn a legitimate outcome. “Collectively they could become a massive firestorm that is more difficult to contain because the embers have been burning throughout the nation.”

A strict timeline

Authorities say they have minimized many of the risks. Judges and legislatures have limited the power of county-level officials to block certification. A new federal law governing the electoral college makes it harder to challenge the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2025. Federal monitors will fan out to more than half the states to watch for voter suppression. Security has ramped up everywhere. Criminal cases against Trump and his allies have become a deterrent against plans to try to repeat the scheme four years ago to convene Trump’s electors in states he lost.

“I would never do it again, knowing what I’ve been through,” Georgia lawmaker Shawn Still, who faces felony charges for serving as one of Trump’s electors in 2020, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week.

Yet the nation’s election administrators are jittery nonetheless, in part because none of those actions to strengthen the guardrails have stopped Trump or his allies from spewing even more false claims about election fraud this year than they did in 2020.

“They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing,” Trump said Sunday in Lititz, Pennsylvania. “... 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.”

The volume of misinformation has overwhelmed state election officials - and saturated the daily experience of voters.

MAGA-aligned podcasters and social media influencers - X owner Elon Musk chief among them - are pushing a nonstop stream of disinformation claiming that Vice President Kamala Harris intends to win by disenfranchising Republican voters. Much of the disinformation focuses on bogus claims that millions of undocumented immigrants are voting illegally and that mail voting invites widespread fraud. Harris has said she will accept the results of the election.

America’s foreign adversaries have also distributed misinformation online, U.S. authorities have said, citing fake videos purporting to show the destruction of ballots in suburban Philadelphia and another claiming that undocumented immigrants from Haiti are voting illegally in Georgia.

Such rhetoric has the potential to incite individuals to interfere with voting or counting on Tuesday. Last week, a poll worker improperly asked a voter in Virginia to prove her citizenship before she could vote.

The flow of falsehoods could also persuade millions of Americans that if Trump loses, it’s because the election was stolen. That in turn could prompt state lawmakers, judges or members of Congress to try to test those new guardrails by interfering with what’s supposed to happen after Election Day.

Under federal law, the presidential election must adhere to a strict calendar. States must send certified results to Washington by Dec. 11. The winning candidate’s presidential electors in each state must convene on Dec. 17 to cast their electoral votes. Congress must hold a joint session on Jan. 6 to count the votes of the electoral college, the final step of declaring the winner.

Lawsuits, protests or violence could interfere with that timeline.

“The Trump campaign has already begun pushing notions about rigged elections, stolen elections,” Liz Cheney, a Republican former congresswoman from Wyoming, said during an interview on ABC’s “The View” on Monday. “We’re in a much better place at the local level to help defend against those fraudulent claims, but people just to need to be aware.”

A deluge of lawsuits

Litigation and monitoring are the two central pillars of the preparations Trump and his allies have been making to contest the 2024 outcome if it doesn’t go their way.

In 2020, much of the litigation from Trump and his allies landed after Joe Biden had been declared the winner - and without actual evidence of difference-making fraud. This time, Republicans were determined to be far more aggressive with lawsuits ahead of the election, and to recruit thousands of observers to monitor voting and counting and collect evidence of wrongdoing to be used in post-election challenges.

The effort ramped up in March, when Trump installed new leaders at the Republican National Committee - including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump - with the explicit mandate to file more election-related lawsuits in pursuit of his unsubstantiated claims of widespread cheating.

Since the start of the year, the RNC has sued or formally joined plaintiffs in at least 24 election-related lawsuits as of Monday evening, a Post analysis found. Some of the suits have been intended to score legal wins ahead of the election and have targeted particular groups, such as those who vote by mail, that are more heavily Democratic. One legal success for the GOP has been to disqualify mail ballots with misdated envelopes in Pennsylvania.

Other legal actions, including numerous challenges to the eligibility of specific voters and others contesting the rules governing overseas voting, could become fodder for challenging individual ballots after Tuesday.

“We have stopped Democrat schemes to dismantle election safeguards and will continue to fight for a fair and transparent election for all Americans,” said Claire Zunk, spokeswoman for the RNC’s elections division.

The pace of new lawsuits has not slowed even in the final days ahead of the election. In Georgia, the state GOP sued last week in several heavily Democratic counties in metro Atlanta seeking to block local election officials from allowing mail ballots to be dropped off over the final weekend before Election Day.

The suits claimed that because early voting had ended, the counties had broken the law to give advantage to their Democrat-leaning populations. A judge in Fulton County tossed one of the suits, saying there is nothing in state law prohibiting county election offices from accepting ballots in person. More suits are pending.

The GOP’s record in litigation is mixed: The most recent decisions in about two-thirds of the RNC cases did not go Republicans’ way, according to a Post analysis. Critics have said all year that the GOP challenges are legally frivolous. But the cases are dangerous nonetheless, they argue, because they are meant to further erode public confidence in elections.

A network of right-wing advocacy groups is also poised to challenge results in court should Trump appear to be losing, a strategy that analysts say is meant to clog the process and plunge the nation into political limbo.

“What we’re seeing is this idea starting to unfold before there’s even any results that the election is stolen,” said Kyle Miller, Pennsylvania policy strategist of Protect Democracy. “So if Trump does not win, he will be able to claim there was fraud, there was a conspiracy against him.”

Promising early results

Trump and his allies have already seized on mistakes or errors to claim intentional malfeasance.

In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the local district attorney opened an investigation into around 2,500 potentially fraudulent voter registration applications that Trump falsely claimed amounted to evidence of widespread cheating in the state.

“Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before,” Trump posted on Truth Social. Voting rights experts said it was unlikely a nefarious scheme and more likely the sloppy work of a paid canvasser. Because they contained incorrect information, some of the registration applications were rejected.

Also in Pennsylvania, Trump allies sounded the alarm when some election offices became overwhelmed by the volume of voters who showed up in person to request mail ballots. Pennsylvania doesn’t have early in-person voting, but it does offer the option of requesting a mail ballot in person. Some Trump allies, who have claimed without evidence that mail voting is riddled with fraud, urged their supporters to show up in person to apply for a mail ballot, straining county offices in the weeks leading up to the election.

Scott Presler, a far-right election denier who had urged Republicans to vote this way, then cried foul on social media that long lines were disenfranchising voters and that Pennsylvania elections officials should be “ashamed.” The Trump campaign sued Bucks County on behalf of people who may have left the line, and a local judge ordered the county to extend the deadline for requesting a mail ballot.

“There is no intentional disenfranchisement, no one is trying to keep voters from voting,” said Jeff Greenburg, a former elections director in Mercer County, New Jersey. “Counties are overwhelmed by the volume of foot traffic.”

Presler, who has a large following online, posted an ominous message Friday night on X, warning boards of elections in Pennsylvania, “we have eyes, ears, & technology everywhere. Please note - peacefully - that everything you do is being monitored. We also have people on the inside feeding us information. Any illegal activities will be caught.”

Election officials say they find such rhetoric alarming - but they are also confident that their preparations will meet the moment. And the relatively smooth way in which early voting has unfolded is reason for hope, they said.

Many officials reported having no difficulty recruiting poll workers, despite all the talk of safety risks. And as of Monday, the eve of the election, more than 80 million Americans had already cast their ballots, either early in person or by mail, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida. That’s more than half the total vote of 2020 - and a heartening sign, officials said, that Americans do trust their elections.

“The turnout this year for people coming in person is a testament that they are not afraid of what they are going to experience,” said Karen Brinson Bell, the executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections. “They trust in our process.”

These officials are already busy putting out fires. In Maricopa County, Arizona, a center of election protests four years ago, government attorneys sent a warning letter to James O’Keefe, a conservative purveyor of misinformation, that he is at risk of prosecution for encouraging undercover video inside polling locations.

And in Michigan, Benson, the secretary of state, is in nearly daily verbal combat with Musk over his false claims about election fraud, accusing him last week of “spreading dangerous disinformation” that there are more voters than citizens in the state.

In an interview, she said she has no doubt that more is coming.

“We long ago stopped hoping or assuming that nothing would happen,” Benson said. “It’s a question of what is it going to be.”

- - -

Itkowitz reported from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Holly Bailey in Atlanta, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez in Phoenix, Patrick Marley in Madison, Wisconsin, and Marianne LeVine and Clara Ence Morse in Washington contributed to this report.