The New York Times reported in July 2024 that "the Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system" by systematically searching for vulnerabilities. The effort involves a network of powerful Republican lawyers and activists, many of whom were involved in the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It involves restricting voting and short-circuiting the certification process should Trump lose. The Republican strategy involved first persuading voters that the election is about to be stolen by Democrats, despite lacking evidence. After the election, if Trump were to lose, lawyers would attempt to challenge decades of settled law as to how elections are certified.
The New York Times reported the efforts had "been quietly playing out in courts, statehouses and county boards for months, and is concentrated in critical
battlegrounds". 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."
Speeches During the 2024 campaign, Trump often referred to "election integrity" to allude to his continuing claim that the 2020 election was rigged, as well as predictions of future mass election fraud. As he did during the 2020 election cycle, Trump claimed that Democrats would try to rig the 2024 election. Many Republicans reported to believe that Democratic Party have and continue to engage in systemic election fraud, with some being concerned regarding election integrity. By 2022, Republican politicians and
conservative talk radio cable news outlets echoed the statement of former Trump advisor
Steve Bannon that Democrats can only win if they cheat. During town hall events in October, Musk spread false conspiracy theories about voting machines, linking voting machines from Dominion to election losses for the Republican Party. He advocated for elections to be run with only hand-counted paper ballots, At a rally on November 5, 2024, Donald Trump stated: "[Musk] really is watching this whole voting process. ... He looked at some that were just shipped in, some of these vote-counting computers. He knew it before it even came in the door. He looked like at the back of it, 'Oh, I know that one.' He knows this stuff better than anyone." On at least five occasions during the election cycle, Trump has told his supporters that "we don't need the votes."
MSNBC argued that Trump was pushing for
voter intimidation to handle false claims of electoral fraud on behalf of his political opponents.
Socials The
National Fraternal Order of Police, representing some 375,000 police officers nationwide, endorsed Trump in September 2024. Addressing the group's board, he urged officers to "watch for voter fraud" because "you can keep it down just by watching, because, believe it or not, they're afraid of that badge." Such police activity might violate multiple state laws and raise concerns of voter intimidation. The next day, Trump posted on social media that, if he were to win, "those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country."
Elon Musk, owner of X, has used his account with 197 million followers to post false or misleading information about the election, notably the
Great Replacement conspiracy theory, contending Democrats are intentionally "importing" undocumented migrants to vote. In one case, Musk reposted a false claim that as many as two million noncitizens had been registered to vote in three states. Analysis by the
Center for Countering Digital Hate found that during the first seven months of 2024, fifty false or misleading Musk posts about the election generated 1.2 billion views; independent fact-checkers debunked the posts, though the
Community Notes user-generated fact check feature on X did not note them. Musk endorsed Trump in July 2024. During the 2024 election, X (formerly Twitter) released "Election Integrity Community", a social media feed run by
America PAC that promotes posts that are alleged to support claims by users of voter fraud, "regardless of their accuracy." X/Twitter under Musk had previously softened its civic integrity policy, laying off
trust and safety staff, platform manipulation and disinformation. Claims of election fraud had spread on X/Twitter with little moderation. In July 2024,
Jerry Nadler wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee asking for an investigation into whether X/Twitter had limited users from following Kamala Harris' official presidential campaign account, with Nadler and
NBC News noting that at least 16 accounts had posted that they were unable to follow the account. Academic researchers had found that, shortly after Musk tweeted his endorsement of Trump in July 2024, Musk's X/Twitter account had received a strong and sustained increase in engagement compared to other high-profile political accounts; and that right-wing accounts had higher post visibility compared to left-wing accounts during the same time period. An analysis from the
Washington Post also found that, between July 2023 and October 2024, tweets from Republican politicians had significantly more virality compared to those from Democrats.
Websites Several Republican members have been tied to
fake news websites that
firehose misinformation during the campaign about: •
the hurricane season • the
Springfield pet-eating hoax •
the 2024 United States elections •
abortion •
vaccines •
LGBTQ •
pasteurization •
climate change Techniques include
AI slop and
Russian propaganda. The Center for Countering Hate has identified ten fringe publishers, many of which are connected to
Robert Mercer. Some of these websites had lost advertisers in response to boycotts or were banned from being shared on some social media platforms, reducing their web traffic. Conservative figures were
deplatformed from social media for
incitement of violence or
hate speech.
Biden putsch 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."
Nonvoting citizens registrations The Heritage Oversight Project produced videos for distribution on social media and conservative media outlets that made false or misleading claims about the extent of noncitizen voting registrations. In one video that was sent viral by an
Elon Musk repost, Heritage falsely claimed that 14% of noncitizens in Georgia were registered, concluding that "the integrity of the 2024 election is in great jeopardy". Heritage based their findings on an extrapolation of hidden camera interview responses from seven residents in a
Norcross, Georgia, apartment complex. State investigators found the seven people had never registered. During the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump's campaign and its allies revived allegations from 2020 that voting machines were rigged. The claims were widespread on social media and were frequently mentioned in lawsuits filed by Republicans. Trump and Musk repeated baseless claims of fraud and "cheating" in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in the days before Election Day.
Legitimacy of Kamala Harris Trump repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of his opponent,
Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election by falsely claiming she orchestrated a "
coup" against Biden in what
The Washington Post described as an attempt to delegitimize Harris if she wins and undermine confidence in the result of the 2024 election. It further noted Trump's long insistence that "his political failures are the result of some malevolent force trying to keep him out of power", echoing right-wing conspiracy theories and rhetoric about a
deep state in the United States.
Blue shift Trump pointed to the known voting phenomenon known as a "blue shift" or "red mirage" to make baseless allegations of voting fraud. Trump frequently made unfounded claims that he is ahead in the polls and winning in deep blue states, alleging the only reason he loses such states is because of voter fraud. By October 2024, Trump made several rallies in blue states, and
CNN reported that Trump believes holding rallies in blue states helps "show how deep his support runs across the nation" and also "set the groundwork for Trump to question the election results should Harris win". In October 2024,
The New York Times reported on a number of polls commissioned by right-wing firms, most showing a Trump victory and standing out "amid the hundreds of others indicating a dead heat in the presidential election" and that they were seen as "building a narrative of unstoppable momentum for Mr. Trump". It further said that the polls were "cementing the idea that the only way Mr. Trump can lose to Vice President Kamala Harris is if the election is rigged" and that they "could be held up as evidence of cheating if that victory does not come to pass". The report noted that by October 2020, Republican-aligned pollsters had only released 15 presidential polls in swing states compared to 37 in 2024, and that of the 37 all but seven had Trump in the lead. Several of the polls were also accepted in influencing the polling averages by
RealClearPolitics, which were widely shared among Republican circles.
The New York Times also reported on betting markets
Polymarket and
Kalshi as strongly favoring Trump over Harris, and that part of the surge appeared in part due to a small number of individuals betting $30 million on a Trump win, and that Trump and Musk had pointed to the betting markets as evidence of their strength. Other data were also "cited by Trump supporters as further evidence of his impending triumph". Joshua Dyck of the Center for Public Opinion at the
University of Massachusetts Lowell said that "Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger." Polling strategists for both parties criticized seeing the use of polling "weaponized" to decrease faith in the entire system. Republican strategist
Mike Madrid stated that "the main reason you float data like that is because you're trying to convince your supporters there's no way Trump can lose — unless it's stolen". Lies about noncitizen voting have become the main focus of election denialism ahead of the 2024 election, which some experts say have been used to intimidate and suppress voters while laying the groundwork to try and overturn the election again, should Trump lose.
The New York Times reported in September 2024 that "the notion that [noncitizens] will flood the polls — and vote overwhelmingly for Democrats — is animating a sprawling network of Republicans who mobilized around" Trump after he claimed the 2020 election was rigged, and "the false theories about widespread noncitizen voting could be used to dispute the outcome again."
The Heritage Foundation was particularly instrumental in spreading the false narrative.
Indictments By April 2024, dozens of Republicans in four states have been indicted for their involvement in promoting conspiracies, such as the
fake electors or the
Pence card plots. Those indicted included Trump and
Christina Bobb, who led the
Republican National Committee election integrity legal efforts in the 2024 presidential election. In September,
Hanna Rosin described how
January 6 insurrectionists have created "a new mythology on the right". The Justice Department planned to monitor compliance with voting rights laws on Election Day in 27 states. 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.
Phone calls Voter intimidation can be conveyed through text, robocall, AI-generated voice.
Exploits Machines 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. The Voting Machine Hacking Village (a hacking event co-founded by
Harri Hursti 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. Election deniers had spread a password that they alleged to be used in Dominion voting machines in Georgia, some wearing it on t-shirts.
Electronic pollbooks Journalists have noted security vulnerabilities with
electronic pollbooks (e-pollbooks) in the lead-up to the 2024 election the lack of national standards for security and reliability, the lack of a system that tracks incidents with e-pollbooks,
Mail 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. 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. 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". As of August 2024, these lawsuits have been filed in Nevada, Illinois, North Dakota and Mississippi. Mark Splonskowski (the
Burleigh County Auditor who is supported by
Public Interest Legal Foundation), the
Mississippi Republican Party stranded or delayed, undated (which were not counted in Pennsylvania following lawsuits by the Republican National Committee, the
Pennsylvania Republican Party and
David McCormick), stolen or forged, misdirected, unprocessed, and
destroyed. Issues had also occurred with voter registration forms.
Third-party Republican activists, lawyers, and operatives have supported third party campaigns, with the stated goal of taking away votes from Kamala Harris. In an April 5 meeting with
New York Republicans, Rita Palma, the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign director for
New York, said their top priority was to "get rid of Biden" and prevent a Biden victory by getting Republican voters to vote for Kennedy to defeat their "mutual enemy" by being a
spoiler and triggering a
contingent election. Plans included collecting signatures for Kennedy, volunteering with the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, and voting for Kennedy for president. as polling suggested that Kennedy's campaign would have taken votes from Trump.
Lawsuits Julie Adams 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.
Georgia State Election Board According to a September 2024
New York Times newsletter, Georgia seems the most likely state to overturn election results on unfounded claims of fraud in 2024 due to recent changes in who oversees elections. In August 2024, the
Georgia State Election Board enacted two new rules that could deputize local election officials more discretion on whether they certify the election, contrary to state and national precedent. The Board also approved a rule in September requiring all counties to hand-count their ballots for comparison to machine counts. Critics think this rule might cause errors and confusion while disrupting the custody of ballots, because ballots typically remain sealed unless a recount is demanded in a challenged election. The recounts could also significantly delay the reporting of election results. On October 16, another Fulton County Superior Court judge found that these new election rules were "illegal, unconstitutional and void", ordering the 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.
Georgia Election Integrity Coalition Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington obtained months of emails among elections officials in at least five Georgia counties calling themselves the Georgia Election Integrity Coalition.
The Guardian reported the communications included a "who's who of Georgia election denialists" who were "coordinating on policy and messaging to both call the results of November's election into question before a single vote is cast, and push rules and procedures favored by the election denial movement." Some officials had ties to national groups like
Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network led by
Cleta Mitchell. By October 2024, Republicans were filing lawsuits in battleground states alleging potential fraud to challenge mail-in ballots received from American citizens living abroad. They sought to have certain ballots set aside until voter eligibility could be verified. With about 6.5 million eligible American voters living overseas, the overseas vote was long considered sacrosanct by both parties, historically giving Republicans a voting edge but more recently that advantage had diminished or swung to Democrats. Judges in Michigan and North Carolina rejected RNC suits, ruling they were an "attempt to disenfranchise" voters and had "presented no substantial evidence" of fraud. Republican congressman
Scott Perry played a key role among Republican House members in efforts to overturn Biden's election in 2020. He and five other Pennsylvania representatives filed suit in their state asserting that verification of overseas ballots was insufficient to protect the election from foreign interference. Perry said he "joined my colleagues to defend our election against the intrusion and interference of the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world: Iran." Pennsylvania federal judge
Christopher Conner dismissed the suit in October 2024, citing its "phantom fears of foreign malfeasance".
Voter registrations In January 2024, two people (one who heads two "election integrity" groups and another who ran as a volunteer for the
Anne Arundel County Republican Central Committee in 2022) sued the
Maryland State Board of Elections for access to state voter records. They were represented by the group Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), which was founded in 2022 by
William Barr,
Karl Rove,
Steve Wynn, and Bobby Burchfield (a lawyer for the RNC and Trump's 2020 election campaign who
represented their efforts to halt mail-in ballots in North Carolina during that election). In June,
Gina Swoboda filed a lawsuit attempting to remove at least 500,000 registered voters from the voting rolls in Arizona. She was joined by
Steve Gaynor In July, Republicans filed a lawsuit against government officials in Michigan over the state expanding voter registration sites to offices of the
Small Business Administration and the
United States Department of Veterans Affairs. By July, conservative groups were systematically challenging large numbers of voter registrations across the country. Many of these efforts were driven by lawsuits. The groups' stated rationale was to purge voter rolls of dead people, noncitizens and others ineligible to vote. Several Republican
secretaries of state were also examining the rolls themselves. The executive director of the
National Association of State Election Directors said many of the challenges ignore or misunderstand the complexity and legal requirements involved in maintaining the rolls. Others said the efforts risked disenfranchising eligible voters and sowing distrust in the election system. The
Michigan secretary of state had earlier in the year directed a suburban Detroit clerk to reinstate about 1,000 registrations of eligible voters that had been purged.
The New York Times reported "it is difficult to know precisely how many voters have been dropped from the rolls as a result of the campaign — and even harder to determine how many were dropped in error." In October, the United States Supreme Court upheld the state of Virginia's attempts to purge 1,600 registered voters from the voter rolls. Many challenges disproportionately impacted Black, young, and unhoused people, as well as students, immigrants, and lower income voters. In Michigan, a Republican party official led a "field investigation" by visiting multiple homes to check voter registration. Republican politicians have discouraged electronic signatures for voter registration, filed lawsuits to prevent the use of university digital IDs for voting, directed restrictions on ballot drop boxes and proposed eliminating drop boxes altogether. Republicans have also filed lawsuits attempting to limit the right to vote for convicted felons.
Signaling refusal of an electoral loss Multiple Republican politicians, including Trump,
JD Vance,
Lindsey Graham,
Ben Carson,
Elise Stefanik,
Byron Donalds,
Tim Scott,
Doug Burgum,
Marco Rubio, and
Ted Cruz, when asked whether they would accept the outcome of the 2024 election, did not give direct answers or refused to accept the results unconditionally, repeating
false claims of fraud during the 2020 election.
Congressional authorities In August 2024, the RNC, alongside 24 states, sought an emergency
Supreme Court ruling that the United States Congress does not have the authority to administer presidential elections. Their goal was to enforce an Arizona state law requiring documented proof of citizenship to vote for president.
Robert Bauer warned that such a decision made within a short time before voting started could cause confusion about voting registrations, disrupting the administration of the election. He also warned that, regardless of whether they won or lost, the plaintiffs may have been building a legal case for claims of non-citizen voting after the election. The Supreme Court partially granted the request to enforce that law.
Army of poll workers Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the
American Conservative Union that hosts the annual
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), wrote election officials in at least three swing states in August 2024 to explain plans to monitor
ballot drop boxes. Schlapp wrote the monitoring was intended to encourage rather than discourage voting. Election officials dismissed Schlapp's premise; Arizona secretary of state
Adrian Fontes remarked, "the whole thing is an absurd sham to cover up direct efforts to intimidate voters by a bunch of CPAC-recruited vigilantes."
True the Vote planned to team with sympathetic sheriffs to monitor polling places and drop boxes in Wisconsin. Catherine Engelbrecht said her group was "mainly focused" on Wisconsin but "we do have a scalable program". Trump's political operation said in April 2024 that it planned to deploy more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers to polling places across battleground states, with an "election integrity hotline" for poll watchers and voters to report alleged voting irregularities. Trump told a rally audience in December 2023 that they needed to "guard the vote" in Democratic-run cities; at an August 2024 rally, he said he already had enough votes and "our primary focus is not to get out the vote, but to make sure they don't cheat". He had complained that his 2020 campaign was not adequately prepared to challenge his loss in courts; some critics said his 2024 election integrity effort is actually intended to gather allegations to overwhelm the election resolution process should he challenge the 2024 election results.
Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer who defeated every Trump court challenge after the 2020 election, remarked, "I think they are going to have a massive voter suppression operation and it is going to involve very, very large numbers of people and very, very large numbers of lawyers." In April 2024, RNC co-chair
Lara Trump said the party had the ability to install poll workers who could handle ballots, rather than merely observe polling places. She also said that the 2018 expiration of the 1982 consent decree (
Ballot Security Task Force) prohibiting the RNC from intimidation of minority voters "gives us a great ability" in the election. Republicans were recruiting poll watchers in suburbs to deploy in urban areas dominated by Democratic voters. Critics said the RNC plans created a risk that election workers might face harassment and undermine trust in the election process. The Republican governors of several states said that they would not allow the
United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to send poll monitors to ensure that there are no civil rights violations at polling places.
Suppression Workers As election workers faced threats and harassment,
The Washington Post reported in February 2024 it had interviewed more than a dozen election officials around the country who said they were "preparing for the types of disruptions that historically had been more associated with political unrest abroad than American elections". This included planning to quickly debunk
misinformation, deescalate conflicts and improve coordination with federal, state, and local law enforcement to better respond to harassment, threats and potential violence. Fontes said his office was preparing for worst-case scenarios, saying "we recognize the real and present danger that's presented by the conspiracy theories and the lies." A May 2024 poll by
Reuters and
Ipsos poll found some 68% of Americans — 83% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans — said they were concerned that political violence might follow the election.
Olivia Troye, a former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism aide to former vice president
Mike Pence, remarked that "the potential for anger, division, political violence — all of that groundwork is being laid out again". In early November 2024, the
secretaries of state for Missouri, Florida, and Texas have stated their intention to block federal election monitors from accessing polling places on Election Day. The
United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has historically been responsible for enforcing federal voting rights laws, including the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Officers Robert Beadles, an investor of
Gab, has supported the precinct strategy promoted narratives about Black American communities and COVID-19 that have been criticized as offensive, Former Reno City Councilman Paul McKenzie filed a complaint accusing Beadles of not filing political expenses made by Beadles'
PAC Operation Sunlight. In August 2024, two election officials in Michigan alleged that the
Holton Township clerk (a co-chair of the
Michigan Republican Party who previously ran in the 2024 primary as a Republican for the
Muskegon County Commissioner) did not turn in the votes from her town on the night of the primary, and then publicly accused them of losing the town's results. In October 2024, the RNC and Trump campaign co-hosted a training event for poll workers in Wisconsin and across the United States. Republican officials refused to make training materials public, with the exception of the point that poll workers were encouraged to report perceived suspicions to state RNC lawyers. During elections in
2020,
2022, and
2024, several county commissioners in multiple swing states (Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Arizona), along with New Mexico, had voted not to certify the elections. Election experts were concerned that administrators could refuse to certify if Trump had lost the 2024 presidential election, potentially leading to results being decided by majority votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate. In addition to precinct officers or poll workers, many election deniers have also been appointed as presidential electors for Trump in swing states for the 2024 election, among them at least 13 who participated in the
Trump fake electors plot in 2020. Two poll watchers enlisted by the
Georgia Republican Party had also participated in the Trump fake electors plot, while a third included the
Cobb County, Georgia GOP chair who had also spread false information about the 2020 election. Election deniers have also ran in local
school board elections. An October 2024 bulletin from the state threat assessment center in Colorado warned of insider threats, "in which people with authorized access to the election process might attempt to derail it." In October 2024, a precinct committeeman who was also a former Republican Congressional District candidate was arrested for stealing ballots. Follow the Law, an organization with ties to Election Integrity Network, has published ads in swing states encouraging election officials to treat election certification as optional. Some ads disclosed that they were paid by organizations that were tied to groups to which Richard Uihlein has provided funding. In January 2025, performance auditors for the state of Utah found that election officials in
Piute County, Utah and
Wayne County, Utah "failed to comply with state law and put the integrity of multiple elections at risk in 2024".
Researchers Starting in 2023, academic and private researchers of disinformation have been subject to subpoenas, lawsuits and public records requests by the
House Judiciary Committee (led by
Jim Jordan) and
America First Legal (led by
Stephen Miller), respectively, "accusing them of colluding with the [United States federal] government to suppress conservative speech online." These efforts, described as an "attempt to chill research", have not produced evidence "that government officials coerced [social media platforms] to take action against accounts" as of June 2023. America First Legal's efforts had been funded by conservative donors that are allied with Trump and have spread false claims of fraud during the 2020 elections, including $27 million from the
Bradley Impact Fund and $1.3 million from the
Conservative Partnership Institute. Lawsuits have also been filed against the
federal government by the
attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as by
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton,
The Daily Wire and
The Federalist. Researchers had been subject to increased time demands, legal costs and online harassment. and medical misinformation. The U.S.
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is responsible for protecting critical national infrastructure, has been repeatedly targeted by conservatives and Republican politicians. Under
Project 2025,
The Heritage Foundation recommended that CISA be dismantled and that it stop addressing election misinformation. Election security researchers at DEF CON were also harassed by election deniers in 2022. By September 2024, Director
Jen Easterly stated that the agency would not request that social media organizations remove posts containing election misinformation. By January 2024, researchers, technologists and political scientists warned that "
disinformation [posed] an unprecedented threat to democracy in the United States in 2024", especially from
social media. By March 2024,
The New York Times reported that Trump and his allies had "unquestionably prevailed" in their efforts to stop collaboration between social media companies, the Biden administration, and academic researchers to protect against election disinformation. which had closed in December 2024 after Republicans had removed it from a funding bill.
Attacks In August 2024, under the direction of Ken Paxton, Texas state authorities raided the homes of Hispanic campaign volunteers from the
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), as part of an investigation into alleged "election fraud and vote harvesting". Those who supported the volunteers characterized the raids as an attempt to suppress the Hispanic vote, and LULAC asked the
United States Justice Department to investigate. Many Congressional Republicans privately supported the
second impeachment of Donald Trump, but did not vote in favor of impeachment, citing threats to themselves or their families.
Vox viewed Trumpist threats as a form of discipline against elected Republican officials, "to force them to toe whatever line the Trumpists want them to walk, or else."
Rachel Kleinfeld wrote, "Violence and threats against elected leaders are suppressing the emergence of a pro-democracy faction of the GOP". Trump and other Republican politicians have repeatedly attacked journalists and media organizations, a complaint through the
Federal Election Commission, threats to revoke
broadcast licenses, proposing laws that directly challenge
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, threats of
lawfare, Experts and former United States government officials had previously come to similar conclusions, with
Juliette Kayyem describing Trump's rhetoric as "true
incitement" and "promoting terrorism."
Ivan Raiklin addressed an October 2024
Rod of Iron Ministries Freedom Festival, urging attendees to "confront" their state representatives with "evidence of the illegitimate steal" should Trump lose. He told attendees he was planning for a range of scenarios following the election, saying, "I have a plan and strategy for every single component of it. And then January 6 is going to be pretty fun." He added, "We run the elections. We try to play it fair. They steal it, our state legislatures are our final stop to guarantee a checkmate." Raiklin had previously characterized himself as Trump's "Secretary of Retribution" and said he had a prepared a "Deep State Target List' of over 350 people he would go after in a second Trump administration. Raiklin claims to have 80,000 recruits prepared to be deputized by constitutional sheriffs. On October 13 Trump expressed concerns about "radical left lunatics", and floated the idea of deploying the National Guard or the military. An October 2024 Joint Intelligence Bulletin from the
FBI and
Department of Homeland Security warned that domestic extremists – motivated by election denial conspiracy theories, immigration, abortion, the LGBTQ community, and the two assassination attempts on Trump – posed a significant threat of violence during the election against politicians (incumbents and candidates), election staff, media staff and judges who are overseeing cases involving elections. == Aftermath ==