Trump’s Election Deniers’ Movement — Lies, Attacks, and Chaos

Former President Donald Trump told a lot of lies while in office — some 30,573 false or misleading statements, according to one count. Perhaps his biggest lie was that the 2020 presidential election was rigged and stolen from him.

Trump has repeated this election lie constantly, without a shred of evidence.

Trump’s false attacks on the integrity of our elections incited the violent Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and continues to undermine confidence in voting and in election results for the tens of millions of Americans who accept his lies at face value.

Trump’s lies have also spawned a dangerous election deniers’ movement of supporters who are actively challenging, harassing, and threatening local election officials.

This spring, the Justice Department warned of a “new era” in which election officials are being “scapegoated, targeted, and attacked,” including with death threats.

If Trump loses in November, there is no doubt that he will challenge the election results even more than last time and his army of election deniers are ready for the battle.

Attorney Cleta Mitchell sat by Trump’s side when he made his infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger requesting him to find just enough votes to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia.

Mitchell went on to become the founder of the so-called Election Integrity Network, a key part of the election deniers’ movement that has built a strong presence in swing states.

There’s no question that this Network is about making sure Republicans, starting with Trump, are declared the winners in elections no matter the actual results.

In Georgia, Julie Adams, a member of the Fulton County election board and a regional coordinator for Mitchell’s group, refused to certify the results of the state’s May primary. The four other members of the Board, including the other Republican, certified the election.

That, in a nutshell, is Team Trump’s plan for 2024 — create election chaos and conflict.

According to a new report from Rolling Stone, Georgia is providing the “road map” for election deniers. “Across the state,” Rolling Stone reports, “MAGA die-hards are devoting considerable resources to purging voter rolls, intimidating election officials, employing legal dirty tricks, and ousting Republican officials and election appointees who haven’t been initiated into the cult of Trump.”

Meanwhile, in Nevada, it apparently wasn’t enough for Trump to win one county in 2020 with 82 percent of the vote.

Cindy Elgin, a Republican election clerk in rural Esmerelda County, Nevada, was forced to fend off a recall effort, spurred by wild, unfounded conspiracy theories about voting software designed in Venezuela and voting machines made in China.

“This is actually insane,” Angela Jewell, the deputy clerk, told The New York Times. “This is how democracies end.”

Elgin withstood the recall challenge, The Times reports, but the election deniers behind the recall plan to appeal.

These kinds of attacks have been going on around the country.

In April, the Republican National Committee established a program to deploy 100,000 poll workers, monitors, and lawyers, to seek out voter fraud. Christina Bobb, the RNC senior counsel for “election integrity” and Trump loyalist, was expected to be part of that effort.

However, Bobb turned out to be one of the 18 people indicted in Arizona for their alleged scheme to use false fraud claims to overturn the results of Arizona’s 2020 presidential election.

While Bobb is entitled to the presumption of innocence, this nevertheless appears to symbolize what Republican “election integrity” in the Trump Era is about — attacking and undermining the results of elections that Republicans lose.

Trump’s own Homeland Security officials found that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”

There will have to be a strong and focused effort to counter the false claims, the attacks, and the chaos that Trump’s election deniers will stir up this election season if we are to maintain our country’s long history of fair, honest, and secure elections.

This was adapted from a piece that appeared in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter that’s published on Thursdays. Read this week’s and recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here to receive your copy each week via email.