Trump Plots to Declare 2024 ‘Rigged’ — Using GOP Efforts to Slow the Vote Count
With just weeks left in the 2024 presidential contest, Donald Trump already has plans in place to aggressively challenge the election results if he fails to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris. According to four conservative attorneys and other sources who’ve spoken to the former president on this matter, Trump intends to declare — as soon as on election night — that the race is being “rigged” or “stolen” from him, by pointing to slow vote counts of mail-in ballots in crucial battleground states as his evidence for supposed Democratic shenanigans afoot.
“He has mentioned many times that this is what we have to watch out for on Election Day, because that’s where [the steal is] going to happen,” one of the Trump-aligned lawyers tells Rolling Stone. Trump, in these private conversations with close allies and advisers in recent months, has stressed that “you gotta call them out very early in the process, like that night, otherwise they can get away with it and cover their tracks,” this source adds.
But the reason that slow counts are expected in key states is precisely because Trump and his elite Republican allies in those states want it that way. As a result, Americans can expect a replay of what happened in 2020, when Trump lost.
During the 2020 contest, laws in several states prohibited election officials from processing or counting mail-in ballots until Election Day. With Republicans more likely to vote in person, election night 2020 kicked off with what became known as the “red mirage” — a false vision of a Trump victory based on in-person returns. Then came the mail-in ballots, overwhelmingly filled out by Democratic voters seeking to avoid exposing themselves at polling locations to a pandemic many Republicans simply didn’t believe was real.
“STOP THE COUNT,” Trump proclaimed on social media, egging his followers into showing up at election offices in places like Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Detroit to demand that officials stop tabulating remaining votes.
Michigan addressed the issue, allowing election officials to begin processing mail-in ballots before Election Day — thus reducing the window for Trump and his election denier followers to claim fraud. But Republicans blocked similar efforts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — two of the most important states in determining whether Harris or Trump wins the presidency.
In May, Democrats in the Pennsylvania state House passed legislation to allow election officials to begin processing mail-in ballots up to a week before Election Day. The Republican-controlled state Senate has not brought the bill up for a vote.
This year, Trump personally called GOP allies in Pennsylvania to urge them to block the Democratic efforts to allow mail-in ballots to be processed earlier, a source with direct knowledge of the matter tells Rolling Stone.
A similar scenario played out in Wisconsin, where conservatives in the state Senate helped kill a bill that would have allowed election officials to start processing ballots ahead of Election Day.
More recently, MAGA officials on Georgia’s State Election Board passed a rule that will require officials to hand-count ballots on election night before they are submitted to be tabulated. Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has said the rule will result in delays in counties providing vote tallies to the statewide total, and that it’s unlikely to withstand legal challenges from Democrats.
The rule was passed 3-2 by Republican members of the State Election Board — whom Trump has publicly praised as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.” The move came after Trump and his Republican allies purged the board of Republican voices who were deemed insufficiently subservient to the former president.
As Rolling Stone reported in June, Trump and many of his influential conservative allies in and outside of Georgia have been working for years to turn the newly purple state into a model for cementing his anti-democratic lies into public policy.
“Georgia is our laboratory,” a source close to Trump bluntly told Rolling Stone. “If you can get this up and running in Georgia, you get a road map for other states, maybe the country as a whole.”
As a part of this sprawling operation in the Peach State, which President Joe Biden won in 2020, Trump worked the phones earlier this year, calling lawmakers and other Republican figures in Georgia, pressuring them to force out State Election Board member Ed Lindsey, a Republican who drew Trump’s rage by opposing an end to no-excuse mail-in voting.
“He’s got to go,” Trump said privately of Lindsey.
It wasn’t long before Lindsey was out, and Trump’s people further solidified control of the board. They quickly moved to slow the vote count.
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