Opinion: In an unpredictable election, one thing is certain – Trump will lie about it

Early voting is under way in several states and mail ballots are already arriving in others for America's latest too-close-to-call presidential election.

I don't know if Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump will prevail after the polls close. But I can predict with unfortunate certainty how Trump will behave before and after Election Day because we've all seen it before. And that particular old dog isn't learning any new tricks.

Modern-day election denialism, with Trump as its most duplicitous practitioner, can be defined by three distinct phases.

First, unfounded claims are made about election integrity long before the ballots are printed. Trump loves to harp about mail ballots, even as the Republican National Committee urges voters to use them. Republicans this year have also leaned hard into unsubstantiated claims about widespread voting by noncitizens.

In the second phase – which we're in now – election deniers desperately try to link actual ballots being cast to their disinformation about voter fraud. Republicans, valuing fealty to election denialism over service for country, are now trying to disenfranchise the votes cast by military members deployed overseas.

The final phase, which starts when the polls close on Election Day, is a simple two-pronged plan – prematurely declare victory while claiming, without evidence, that ballots are being tallied in a dishonest manner. That's what Trump did in the early morning hours of the Wednesday after Election Day in 2020.

Trump never admitted that lie. Why wouldn't he try it again if he fears he is again losing the election?

Republicans attempt to go after military service member votes

Six Republican members of the U.S. House from Pennsylvania argued for an injunction in a federal lawsuit, filed Sept. 30 and updated on Oct. 7, claiming that their state election officials don't do enough to verify the identities of military service members and their spouses who vote from other countries.

You don't need to be a lawyer to see these congressional litigants are looking out for Trump, not their constituents. The former president howled in a Sept. 23 post on his website Truth Social about Democrats increasing voter outreach to military members serving overseas ? as if trying to persuade people to vote is somehow illegal.

Opinion: Harris needs Republican votes to win Pennsylvania. Trump is making that easier.

Matt Heckel, a spokesperson for Pennsylvania's secretary of state, called the lawsuit a "bad-faith argument" and "a continuation of the unfounded litigation" Republicans attempted to use to disrupt the 2020 election.

"This lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt to confuse and frighten people ahead of an important election," Heckel said.

The RNC and state Republican parties have filed similar lawsuits on Oct. 2 in North Carolina and on Oct. 8 in Michigan. It's no coincidence that the Republican fascination with unproven voter fraud is always focused on swing states.

Larry Norden, vice president for elections and government at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, said Republicans rely on and repeat familiar "tropes" about voter fraud in every election. Those abstract claims gain traction, he said, when they can be attached to actual voting by real people.

"There are people who are pushing these false narratives, and they are grabbing on to whatever they can whenever they see something to make it seem real," Norden told me.

The Brennan Center on Friday filed to intervene in the Pennsylvania lawsuit, casting the Republican request for an injunction as "part of a broader insidious strategy to leverage the courts to sow doubt, chaos, and confusion over the 2024 election."

Republicans are spreading voter disinformation through the courts

Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit, has published a guide to spotting election subversion that also breaks such efforts down into three parts – deceive the electorate, disrupt the election and deny the results.

Emily Rodriguez, an election security and litigation strategist for the group, has been tracking efforts in Ohio, Texas and Virginia, where state officials are claiming that noncitizens are registered to vote. Protect Democracy and other advocacy groups sued Virginia on Oct. 7 for voter roll purge they said "disproportionately – and discriminatorily – targeting naturalized citizens for removal."

Rodriguez pointed to more than 100 ballot access lawsuits the RNC has filed this year. That effort is designed more to spread unfounded concerns about voter fraud than to preserve election integrity.

"Now it's sort of a numbers game," Rodriguez told me. "They're spreading as many lies as they can and picking the ones that will catch on."

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This sort of sustained disinformation has a lasting impact. Gallup last month reported that, while 57% of Americans have confidence in our elections, that sentiment is disparately divided by politics. Just 28% of Republicans feel that way, compared with 84% for Democrats and 58% for independents.

And the Public Religion Research Institute's 15th annual American Values Survey found that 62% of Republicans think the 2020 election was stolen from Trump ? and that about 1 in 4 of his supporters now say they support Trump taking office "by force" if he loses the election.

Prepare for election challenges to get worse

Tom Corbett, a former governor of Pennsylvania and a Republican who started his career as a prosecutor, told me some members of his party have been talking for four years about election fraud without producing evidence.

"Show me the evidence," said Corbett, who now co-chairs with fellow attorney Rex VanMiddlesworth the 2024 anti-subversion task force for Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan civic education group. "You've got to have evidence."

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VanMiddlesworth sees all the lies about voter fraud that we hear before Election Day as designed to influence what happens after the ballots are counted.

"Election misinformation is the catalyst for massive resistance to an election result," he said. "It's a fuel for the fire. And the belief that election was stolen is what ultimately sends people to the streets and lawyers into the courthouse."

I started the day with a prediction so I'll end with another, informed by all that came after the 2020 election:

The guardrails of democracy held then. They will again.

Trump's campaign failed over and over again in legal challenges to overturn the election. Congress certified the results, even after Trump's supporters trashed the U.S. Capitol while assaulting police officers.

America is a great country exactly because it can withstand that sort of perversion of politics. We'll still be that way after Election Day.

Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Trump's lies about election results are already starting