Arizona Attorney General Sues Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson over refusal to swear in newly elected Democrat Representative Adelita Grijalva, due to being afraid her vote will prompt the release of the Epstein files

Just another example of what dirty rotten, lawless bastards Republicans who are doing Trump’s bidding to protecting PEDOPHILES and RAPISTS

 

MAGA Mike SERVED with LAWSUIT as he RUNS OFF House Floor

 

 

 

Arizona Attorney General to sue Mike Johnson over refusal to swear in Democrat

 

 

Adelita Grijalva can force a vote on the Epstein files, but she’s still not sworn in

The Arizona Democrat would be the decisive signature on a petition to force a vote on releasing the records. But Speaker Mike Johnson says he will not swear her in until after the shutdown is over.

Per the above article: More than three weeks after winning her congressional race, Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva never imagined her fight to get sworn into office would take this long.

The Arizona Democrat has keys to her office, but not much else.

“I have no staff … The phones don’t work. There’s no computer,” Grijalva says from her sparsely furnished office on Capitol Hill. “We don’t have a government email.”

That bumpy start to Grijalva’s new political career in Washington is courtesy of the same intense, partisan tensions that have come to dominate the 119th Congress.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., says he won’t swear in Grijalva until the government shutdown is over.
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It’s a departure for Johnson, who has previously sworn in new members from both parties within days of winning their races.

The speaker had previously said he would swear in the winner of the Arizona race as soon as they wanted. He later said the winner should enjoy the “pomp and circumstance” that’s part of the ceremony, but only available when the government is open.

As a result, Johnson is facing accusations from both sides of the aisle that he’s trying to avoid a vote to compel the release of files from the Justice Department’s investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Grijalva won her seat on Sept. 23 in a special election to represent the state’s 7th Congressional District — a border district that includes parts of Tucson.

On the campaign trail, Grijalva promised to sign onto a bipartisan petition to force a vote in the House to release the Epstein files. Hers would mark the decisive 218th signature to trigger that vote — an effort that’s been led by Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif.

“I remember on election night, someone came up to me and said, ‘I don’t think they’re going to swear you in because of those Epstein files,'” Grijalva says. “And I thought, ‘oh my gosh, that’s very much a conspiracy theory. Like that’s not going to happen.’ And here we are.”

 

 

 

 

The only reason Trump holds the Whitehouse and Republicans hold the House & Senate is because they’re Lawless, Anti-Democrat Bastards who have Been Rigging Elections for  Years

 

Videos and info on this page show how Republicans have been using unscrupulous, treasonous tactics to rig and steal elections for over 50 years.

Trump is an illegitimate president, but he’s not the first. The last Republican who was elected president without fraud or naked treason was Dwight D. Eisenhower. And it’s past time that Democrats started telling the story.

 

Republicans have a history of voter suppression, voter purges, voter challenges, Gerrymandering and other unscrupulous anti-democratic tactics to rig and steal elections

 

GOP’s History of Treasonous Tactics to Win Elections

Members of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign covertly negotiated with Iranian leaders to undermine incumbent President Jimmy Carter by delaying the release of 66 American hostages detained in Iran. This deal with Iran caused the delay the release of American hostages for a year past the time they could have been released, to help Reagan win the 1980 election. This became known as the 1980 “October Surprise”.  The hostage situation, which began when Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, was one of the biggest news stories of 1980, and Carter’s inability to resolve it is widely believed to have contributed to his loss. We now know the reason President Carter was unable to negotiate the release of the hostages was due to Reagan’s presidential campaign covertly negotiating with Iranian leaders, promising not to release them until after Reagan was elected.

By the time of the election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks. Nixon feared a breakthrough at the Paris Peace talks designed to find a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam war, and he knew this would derail his campaign. In late October 1968 there were major concessions from Hanoi which promised to allow meaningful talks to get underway in Paris – concessions that would justify Johnson calling for a complete bombing halt of North Vietnam. To sabotage these efforts, Nixon set up a clandestine back-channel involving Anna Chennault, a senior campaign adviser, who convinced the South Vietnamese pull out of peace talks, with promises of them getting a better deal if Nixon was elected President. This helped Nixon get elected, resulting in the war dragging on years afterwards, causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands of U.S. Troops and the deaths of South Vietnamese.

 

 

RedShift: How The GOP Rigged Our Elections

Writer and author Thom Hartman discusses how Republicans have been rigging elections for the past 50 years and how exit polls in states like Florida showed Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 election.

 

Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook chronicles how our right to vote is being undercut by a decade of unscrupulous tactics by Republicans, including the partisan use of gerrymandering and voter purges, and the weakening of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. The film captures real-time voter purges in North Carolina and voter intimidation in Texas.

The documentary was principally filmed during the 2016 election and exposes the nefarious playbook of voter suppression tactics being used to subvert the growing demographic tide of non-white and younger voters from fully participating in America’s democracy.

 

In the above video, computer programmer (Clint Curtis) testified to a congressional committee that in October of 2000, he wrote a program for a prominent Florida Republican (Tom Feeney, who was Speaker of the House, per testimony in the above video) which could flip votes and be undetectable. In September 2006, Feeney was named one of the “20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress”.

This shows Republicans history of efforts to rig / flip elections so it would be undetectable.   Also, many voting machines and software is made by Republican owners.

 

Full testimony of veteran computer programmer Clint Curtis, at a U.S. Congressional Hearing about being contacted by a Florida Republican to rig elections

 

 

2016 ELECTION RIGGED

2016 Election Rigged for Trump

 

Cheri Jacobus, who worked in Republican politics for decades, was an RNC spokesperson & ran campaigns, a nationally recognized political strategist, pundit and writer says “Trump is an illegitimate President”.

Cheri discusses a host of bombshell issues, including; Trump never legitimately won a Presidential election (2016 & 2024), how COVID and mail-in ballots derailed Republicans plans to rig & steal the 2020 election, why right before the 2020 election expensive high speed mail sorting machines were trashed and Putin’s involvement in helping to put Trump in the White House.

 

Dr Beth Clarkson, a certified quality engineer with a Ph.D. in statistics, has analyzed election returns in Kansas and elsewhere over several elections that indicate “a statistically significant” pattern where the percentage of Republican votes increase the larger the size of the precinct.

While it is well-recognized that smaller, rural precincts tend to lean Republican, statisticians have been unable to explain the consistent pattern favoring the Republicans that trends upward as the number of votes cast in a precinct or other voting unit goes up. In primaries, the favored candidate appears to always be the Republican establishment candidate, above a tea party challenger. And the upward trend for Republicans occurs once a voting unit reaches roughly 500 votes.

“This is not just an anomaly that occurred in one place,” Clarkson said. “It is a pattern that has occurred repeatedly in elections across the United States. The pattern could be voter fraud or a demographic trend that has not been picked up by extensive polling, she said.

“I do not know why this trend is there, but I know that the pattern is there and one way to establish that it is or is not election fraud is to go and do a physical audit of paper records of voting machines,” she said.

Clarkson became more interested in the issue after reading a paper written by statisticians Francois Choquette and James Johnson in 2012 of the Republican primary results showing strong statistical evidence of election manipulation in Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, Louisiana, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Kentucky.

Clarkson said she couldn’t believe their findings, so she checked their math and found it was correct and checked their model selection and found it appropriate. And then she pulled additional data from other elections they hadn’t analyzes and found the same pattern”. [source: cjonline.com/story/news/politics/state/2015/04/01/wichita-state-mathematician-sues-kris-kobach-sedgwick-county-elections-commisioner/16633765007]

 

Note how this machine is rigged for Romney in 2012.

 

FLORIDA REPUBLICANS USE DIRTY TRICKS TO RIG STATE ELECTIONS

CNN reports how Republicans used “dirty tricks” to Rig Three (3) 2020 Florida State Senate Elections with Dark Money and 3rd Party Phantom Candidates.

(Per the article below from CNN) “A month before Election Day in Florida a mysterious company called Proclivity, Inc. contributed $550,000 to a pair of newly formed political action committees in the state. Two days later, the money flowed from the PACs to an Orlando-area print and advertising firm.

Shortly thereafter, came a torrent of nearly identical political fliers seemingly intended to siphon away support from Democratic candidates by tricking voters into casting their ballots for purported spoiler candidates who demonstrated no real interest in getting elected. None, for example, engaged in typical campaigning activities or raised significant funds.
In one case, the mailers appear to have helped a Republican—a co-founder of Latinas For Trump—unseat the Democratic incumbent in a state Senate race by a razor-thin margin of just 32 votes”.

 

A dark money mystery in the Sunshine State | CNN Politics

A dark money mystery in Florida centers on the campaign of a spoiler candidate who helped a Republican win by 32 votes.

 

Former FL GOP chair says ‘right-wing crazies’ want to suppress black vote

Former Florida Republican Party Chair Jim Greer testified in a lawsuit filed against his former party that “whack-a-do, right-wing crazies” wanted to suppress the black vote through Voter ID and tactics like current state Gov. Rick Scott’s efforts to purge voter rolls.

Jim Greer, stated “I sat in on many meetings where it was discussed how to make sure what happened in 2008, when Obama brought out the college-aged voters, the minority voters, never happened again”.

 

91-Year-Old Decorated WWII Veteran Targeted By Florida Governor Rick Scott’s Voter Purge

Florida Republicans took voter suppression to brazen extremes. After the 2010 election, Republican Gov. Rick Scott instructed Secretary of State Ken Browning to compile a massive database of alleged “non-citizen” voters. This resulted in a 91-year-old World War II veteran who won a Bronze star being told by the state of Florida to prove he is a citizen or be removed from voter roll.

 

 

REPUBLICANS RIGGING ELECTIONS BY GERRYMANDERING

Most Americans are unaware that Republicans has been rigging elections in their favor for years to come through gerrymandering. in 2009, Republicans injected $30 million, much of it from dark money, often targeting vulnerable blue state Democrats in races that wouldn’t otherwise draw a lot of national funding. This resulted in landslide state wins for Republicans. In 2010, they began hyper-gerrymandering every state they took control of. The plan was called REDMAP

 

Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook chronicles how our right to vote is being undercut by a decade of unscrupulous tactics by Republicans, including the partisan use of gerrymandering and voter purges, and the weakening of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court. The film captures real-time voter purges in North Carolina and voter intimidation in Texas.

The documentary was principally filmed during the 2016 election and exposes the nefarious playbook of voter suppression tactics being used to subvert the growing demographic tide of non-white and younger voters from fully participating in America’s democracy.

 

When the midterm elections were done, Republicans had gained unilateral control of 11 state legislatures, upping their total to 25. Between then and the 2012 elections, GOP lawmakers in these states had largely undisputed power over redrawing congressional districts. This helped allow Republicans to maintain control of the House, even though Democrats received over 1 million more votes.

The Republican State Leadership Committee issued a memo stating “Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn. Drawing new district lines in states with the most redistricting activity presented the opportunity to solidify Radical Right Wing policy making at the state level and maintain a Republican stronghold in the U.S. House of Representatives for the next decade.”

 

Through Gerrymandering, Republicans has made it almost impossible to be removed from office in some districts. Since they feel safe from being removed from office, they have no motivation to compromise. They are pursuing radical right wing agendas such as cutting assistance to the poor, cutting planned parenthood funding and passing anti-aborting “War on Women” legislation when the majority of Americans do not support these actions.

 

Republicans are destroying democracy by Gerrymandering districts. As you can see from the graph above, a disproportionate number of Republicans were “elected” in relation to votes cast.

 

 

GOP Gerrymandering: Democratic Votes Not Matched By Seats Gained

Rachel Maddow shows four states in which Democratic popular vote victories are not commensurate with representative legislative seats because Republican gerrymandering has tipped the playing field.

 

The Republican Dominated Supreme Court “Justices” Legalized Partisan Gerrymandering by making sure Republicans can cement their stranglehold in States they control and never be voted out of office. This is how Anti-Democratic Authoritarian Fascist take over counties (such as Hungary) and Eliminate Democracy.

 

How The GOP Manipulated Ohio Elections

After winning single-party control of the state in the 2010 elections, Ohio Republicans set out to redraw the state’s congressional map to their advantage. What unfolded is one of the most egregious examples of partisan gerrymandering in modern history. Rather than working through the official legislative process which involved a bipartisan task force, Ohio Republicans and national GOP operatives rented a secret hotel room in Columbus, known as “The Bunker.” They designed a map that would give Republicans a 12-4 advantage over Democrats, when it came to “winning” districts, and therefore, congressional seats. This unconstitutional, partisan advantage is locked in until 2022, unless stopped.

 

Why New 2021 Ohio Redistricting Maps Are An ‘Insult To Democracy’

CNN’s John Avlon breaks down how the “rigged” redistricting process in Ohio is engineered to help the Republican Party achieve an electoral majority.

 

Democrats won 20 million More Votes and Lost

The United States constitution is severely flawed when more often than not in the last few elections the majority of people voting for a particular party did not receive their relative representation. Democrats received 20 million more votes in the Senate than Republicans in 2014, yet Republicans won big.

The same occurred in the House of Representatives in 2012.

House Democrats out-earned their Republican counterparts by 1.17 million votes. Read another way, Democrats won 50.59 percent of the two-party vote. Still, they won just 46.21 percent of seats, leaving the Republicans with 234 seats and Democrats with 201.

 

 

Politicians picking their voters is unconstitutional. Gerrymandering is an assault on Democracy.

This is yet another example of how Republicans rig elections… how they don’t give a damn about the will of the American people and how they use tactics to win, regardless of how unethical and unscrupulous the tactics may be.

 

DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF VOTERS

Republicans continue to pass laws which make it difficult for Minorities, Young People, the Elderly and Women to Vote. A Judge who has been voting for 49 years couldn’t vote in her own courthouse where everyone knew her because of repressive Republican Voter ID Laws in Texas.

 

ELECTIONS RIGGED BY THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

The Electoral College Is A Plague On America

The Electoral College allowed two unpopular Republican candidates who received the least votes in 2 elections since 2000 to become President; George W. Bush who lost by almost 600,000 votes in the 2000 election and Donald Trump who lost by 2.84 million in 2016.

 

If we had a REAL democracy, the person who gets the most votes would be the winner. In every other country which has a democracy on this planet, the person who receives the most votes is the winner. The fact that we don’t elect our president by the most votes proves there is NO REAL DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES.

And the fault is 100% REPUBLICANS… because they REFUSE to eliminate the Electoral College because it put George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 in the White House against the will of the majority.

 

2000 and 2016  Elections Stolen By The Electoral Collage

The Electoral College has allowed two unpopular Republican candidates who received less popular votes in 2 elections since 2000 to become President; George W. Bush who lost by almost 600,000 votes in the 2000 election and Donald Trump who lost by 2.9 million votes. Neither of these incompetent Republicans should have been president. More people voted against them than for them.

 

Minority Rule Is Killing The United States

Lawrence O’Donnell looks at how the Electoral College is forcing Americans to live under a nation where a Supreme Court majority, mostly picked by presidents who lost the popular vote, is poised to take away a Constitutional right for the first time in U.S. history.

 

A video trip down memory lane shows how Trump Republicans of 2020 are as lawless as Nixon Republicans from 1972

 

To Republicans, winning at all costs is a “Zero Sum Game”. They know the only way they can win, is to cheat and play dirty

 

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Per the above article: NSA Analyst Proves GOP Is Stealing Elections

Analysis of recent election data has revealed a worrying pattern of potential fraud. In states where the margin of victory is less than 10%, the same mathematical formula has been found to consistently result in votes being flipped from Democrat to Republican. This has been the case in federal, senatorial, congressional and gubernatorial elections since 2008, and in the 2012 primary contests from other Republicans to Mitt Romney.

The five major voting machine companies have all been found to have close financial ties to the GOP, raising questions of conflict of interest. Tagg Romney, son of the former presidential candidate, has denied any such conflict, despite his investment in Hart Intercivic and Diebold.

A retired NSA analyst has applied a simple formula to election results in Arizona, and found evidence of systemic and coordinated election fraud on a large scale. However, this appears to be limited to larger precincts, as anomalies in smaller precincts are more easily detected.

“Easy to Cheat”

Michael Duniho, a retired NSA analyst, has spent the past seven years investigating voting anomalies in his home state of Arizona and Pima County. His research has focused on a 2006 RTA Bond issue election, which has been subject to much discussion in the media. According to Duniho, “It is really easy to cheat using computers to count votes, since you can’t see what is going on in the machine.”

Duniho applied a mathematical model to the voting results from the largest precincts in Arizona and found that the Republican candidate in every election since 2008 had gained 8-10% in the polls, while the Democratic candidate had lost 8-10%. This swing of up to 20 points could be enough to swing an election, unless the candidate was already losing badly.

Duniho, with decades of experience in deciphering large amounts of data for the NSA, was determined to understand why this pattern was only occurring in the largest precincts.

Nose Counting

Francois Choquette and James Johnson have uncovered an intriguing phenomenon in the February Republican primary contest in South Carolina. An unusually large number of votes were cast for Mitt Romney in larger precincts, while Paul and Santorum votes trended downward. This prompted Choquette to examine the results in all 50 states, where he found a 10% switch in votes from Democrat to GOP in all states except Utah. Further investigation revealed that Romney had used the same technique against John McCain in Maricopa County in 2008, although McCain’s lead was too large to be affected.

Given the sheer scale of the task, Choquette has provided a set of instructions to enable others to replicate the analysis in their own county or state. The implications of this research could be far-reaching and Choquette’s work is certainly worthy of further examination.

Stealing Votes

Analysis of voting patterns in Arizona has revealed a significant discrepancy between the size of precincts and the results of the election. According to Professor Duniho, if the percentages of votes remained consistent between precincts, the trend line would be flat. However, the reality is that the lines slope downwards for Democrats and upwards for Republicans. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the 2012 Presidential primary, where votes for Rick Santorum and Ron Paul were systematically bled off and credited to Mitt Romney. After Duniho’s spreadsheet was completed, the actual vote totals from other Arizona election contests were compared, further confirming the discrepancy.

Analysis of the 2010 elections in Arizona has revealed evidence of manipulation. From Governor Brewer to Senator McCain and Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, the trends lines all indicated that a single individual had inserted a program into the system’s central computer, flipping votes. The results were astonishing: Governor Brewer had actually lost her election and Gabby Gifford’s slim victory over Tea Party Conservative Jesse Kelly was much greater than the reported 1%.

John Duniho, a political analyst, has called for strong hand count audits to confirm the integrity of the elections. This would involve comparing hand counts to the official reports. Such measures are essential to ensure the legitimacy of the electoral process.

Ohio Precedent

For years, Republicans have been accused of vote tampering in elections. In 2004, the presidential election in Ohio and Florida brought these allegations to the forefront. In Ohio, GOP consultant Michael Connell was accused of creating a computer program with a trap door that shifted Democratic votes to the Republican Party. Connell was subpoenaed as a witness in a lawsuit against then-Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, and lawyers for the plaintiff asked the Department of Justice to provide Connell with security due to two threats made against his life by people associated with Karl Rove. Tragically, Connell was killed in a plane crash before the trial began.

In Florida, the University of California at Berkeley’s Quantitative Methods Research Team conducted a study that found anomalies between Florida counties using touch-screen voting and those using other methods that could not be explained statistically. The study showed that counties using electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. Michael Hout, a Berkeley professor who conducted the study, said that the evidence was too strong to ignore, noting that the probability of such evidence occurring where the true difference is zero is less than once in a thousand chances.

Don’t Trust, Verify

The integrity of the upcoming US election is under scrutiny after an analysis by statistician Richard Duniho found evidence of vote-flipping. This could only be possible if computerized voting machines were programmed to steal votes. Calls to conduct hand counts of ballots by precinct to verify the results have been unsuccessful in Pima County, Arizona, where anomalies were first detected in 2006. With the election just 12 days away, it is unclear whether a judge will be willing to reverse past trends and permit access to ballots.

The implications of this are concerning. More than 100 million Americans will cast their ballots, believing their vote will be fairly counted. If the analysis is correct, criminals could be stealing up to 10% of votes without consequence. This could have a significant impact on the outcome of the election, which is much closer than in 2008 when President Obama won by a large margin. It is essential that the American democratic system is not undermined by another election crisis, raising questions over the last three national Presidential election results.

Don’t Take Our Word

As the US election results continue to pour in, the need for accuracy and transparency has never been greater. In the UK, paper ballots are used and the final outcome can take up to three days to be finalized. This is because every ballot is transparently hand-counted, providing citizens with the assurance that their votes are counted accurately.

The Justice Department’s insistence that results must be reported by 11 pm for the television networks is not only misguided, but irresponsible. It is time for Americans to demand hand ballot counts, and to reject the notion of being victimized by vote fraud. The news that Serbia, Belarus and Kazakhstan are sending election monitors to watch the US election is a stark reminder of the need for accuracy and transparency in this process. It is time for Americans to take control of their own destiny and ensure that their votes are counted accurately.

 

 

Republican Party efforts to disrupt the 2024 United States presidential election – Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia During the 2024 United States presidential election, the Republican Party attempted to stunt voter access, election oversight, and post-election certification. They also attempted to use strategies to modify voting laws and to place partisan figures in Republican-led states in order to restrict demographics more likely to vote Democratic.

THE FOLLOWING IS DIRECTLY QUOTED FROM THE ABOVE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE:

“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”.

“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. In 2024, an election fraud database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, a Radical Right Wing think tank, showed 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, Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation 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.” 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”.

“The Conservative news outlets Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN promoted false election fraud allegations in the weeks following the 2020 election, including conspiracy theories that voting machines had been rigged to favor Biden; in response, voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic filed defamation lawsuits against those three 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. Since at least 2003, journalists, election security experts, and activists have repeatedly warned about security vulnerabilities and other flaws in the election infrastructure of the United States”.

Historical allegations of cheating by the Republican Party

“Commentators have repeatedly accused the Republican Party of applying deceptive methods in order to win elections. The New Republic alleged that Republican Party political campaigns have a history of applying “voter intimidation techniques, more direct threats of violence, foreign disinformation, and super PAC and dark money skullduggery” as strategies, citing the possible sabotage of Vietnam War peace talks during the 1968 election; the Watergate scandal during the 1972 election; the 1980 October Surprise theory; the tactics of Lee Atwater during the 1988 election; the “butterfly ballots”, actions of Katherine Harris, Brooks Brothers riot, and Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case during the 2000 election; the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal; and the swiftboating of John Kerry during the 2004 election. Truthout cited the Volusia error during the 2000 election; voter roll purges during the 2000 and 2004 elections (in Florida and Ohio, respectively); false information about voting logistics by election boards controlled by Republicans; voter intimidation; and voter ID laws. Truthout also cited “voter irregularities” in Ohio during the 2004 election involving a Republican-connected company SMARTech, and also noted that Anonymous claimed without evidence that Karl Rove unsuccessfully attempted to use Mitt Romney’s ORCA get-out-the-vote system to rig the 2012 election in Ohio in a similar fashion as alleged to have occurred in 2004″.

“In Al Jazeera America, Greg Palast warned in 2014 of the impact that the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which he accused of over-representing Black, Asian and Hispanic voters in its efforts to purge potentially millions of names from voter rolls, could have on the 2014 and 2016 elections. Palast assessed that 1.1 million voters were removed from voter rolls by the 2016 election, while the Brennan Center determined that nearly 16 million voters were removed by states between 2014 and 2016. Crosscheck had been criticized by journalists and researchers for poor accuracy”.

Historical connections between Russia and the Republican Party

“Craig Unger documented ties between the Republican Party and the Russian government dating back to at least 1997, including Tom DeLay visiting Moscow to meet Viktor Chernomyrdin, Ed Buckham’s U.S. Family Network being funded $1 million by Russians to influence DeLay’s vote on bailing out the Russian economy, and Paul Manafort’s ties to Russia (among others). Manafort had given polling data to a Russian intelligence officer in 2016. The Washington Spectator traced these ties back to a 1995 visit to Russia by Allan C. Carlson, who subsequently formed the World Congress of Families after observing commonalities between American and Russian Radical Right Wings. Nafeez Ahmed has also noted the ties between the Heritage Foundation and the Danube Institute, which is funded by the government of Viktor Orbán and is supportive of the Russian government. Paul Dans, the former leader of Project 2025, appeared on a podcast from Tenet Media, which was accused by the Department of Justice of being operated by Russian agents”.

“Tom Nichols theorized that the Republican Party’s overall affinity for Russia and Vladimir Putin in particular may be due in part to questions about the party’s long-term viability which could be addressed by “nationalist appeals, combined with electoral fraud and selective use of the prison system” that were modeled by Putin”.

Republican Party and the International Democratic Union

“The Republican Party is a member of the International Democratic Union (IDU), which The Tyee described as a global group that is “dedicated to electing right-wing governments around the world”. According to a 1985 CIA memo, the Republican Party and the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan had provided half of all funding for the organization at the time. Other members include the Conservative Party of Canada, the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, Fidesz in Hungary (led in 2025 by Viktor Orbán), Likud in Israel (led in 2025 by Benjamin Netanyahu) and (until 2023) the Bharatiya Janata Party in India. Several of their leaders had gained political power with help from Arthur J. Finkelstein, such as Orbán, Netanyahu and Trump. The IDU shares resources with its members on “campaign technology, fund-raising techniques, opinion polling, advertising and campaign organization”. The Conservative Party of Canada and the Republican Party had closely collaborated on resources and strategy during the 2000s and 2010s”.

“Under the leadership of Stephen Harper, Mike Roman was the treasurer and then assistant chairman of the IDU until Roman was indicted for allegedly participating in attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. During the 2008 United States presidential election, Roman had shared a video of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, which Richard Hasen had alleged to be an example of a false or exaggerated claim of voter fraud. Roman had written in a 2008 blog post, “If an election is worth winning, then there is someone willing to steal it.”

 

Allegations of rigged elections

“To sow election doubt, Trump escalated use of “rigged election” and “election interference” statements in advance of the 2024 election compared to the previous two elections—the statements described as part of a “heads I win; tails you cheated” rhetorical strategy.”

“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 Radical Right Wing 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. In 2023, the foundation 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 Radical Right Wing 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 Radical Right Wing 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. Electronic pollbooks, ballot scanners, servers for vote counting, USB flash drives, and memory cards were also copied in Coffee County, Georgia. 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 (a hacking event co-founded by Harri Hursti) 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 argued that this lack of testing for what it described as comprehensive updates risked malware entering the voting systems”.

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. By April 2025, the new county elections director had found a certification document stating that pre-election tests on voting machines were successfully completed in September 2024. Burns expressed concern why election officials were not aware of this document.”

“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, immutable passwords set such that “the same two passwords were used for every machine manufactured”, susceptibility of central scanners to vote flipping, and “poor physical security protections that could allow undetected tampering” – were also reported. Free Press also warned of multiple vulnerabilities from electronic pollbooks manufactured by ES&S, including the possibility of compromised network infrastructure, voting machines, registration servers, voter data and/or the privacy of votes, as well as the risk of voter suppression.”

“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.”

“Between February 26, 2024 and February 24, 2025, Chris Wlaschin was appointed as a member of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee as a technical expert.”

Vulnerabilities of electronic pollbooks

“Journalists have noted security vulnerabilities with electronic pollbooks (e-pollbooks) in the lead-up to the 2024 election, such as many being designed to be connected to the Internet, the lack of national standards for security and reliability, the lack of a system that tracks incidents with e-pollbooks, past efforts by hackers from Russia and Iran to obtain voter data, and the subsequent risk of voters being deleted from the voter rolls by unauthorized users.”

“They have also been blamed for delays in the voting process. As of 2018, they are used by 36 states. ES&S is one of the main manufacturers of e-pollbooks and they, along with Diebold Election Systems, had lobbied for election officials to use them after the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002. Free Press reported that some ES&S e-pollbooks could communicate via Bluetooth to voting machines.”

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 Radical Right Wing 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.”

 

Cleta Mitchell speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference

“Cleta Mitchell 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 Radical Right Wing 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.”