Donald Trump has made his self-serving “rigged election” lies something like scripture for Republicans—an organizing principle for the party, an oath prospective Republican National Committee staffers apparently must swear before they’re hired, glue that binds the MAGA faithful. Now, the Trump campaign and the party apparatus—which have essentially become one and the same—may be planning to use the doubts he sowed about the democratic process in 2020 to undermine it again in 2024.
On Thursday, Trump and the RNC announced a “historic” program to ensure “election integrity” in November: It will deploy “100,000 dedicated volunteers and attorneys,” they said, to serve as poll watchers in battleground states to monitor the process and report “any irregularity.”
“Having the right people to count the ballots is just as important as turning out voters on Election Day,” Trump said in a statement. “Every ballot. Every precinct. Every processing center. Every county. Every battleground state. We will be there,” added his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who now serves as co-chair of the RNC.
There is nothing inherently nefarious or illegal about partisan election monitoring, which is subject to state regulations. But this particular initiative is troubling, coming as it does in the context of Trump’s efforts to subvert the democratic process last cycle—including through the violent insurrection he instigated at the Capitol in 2021—and the way his “election fraud” conspiracy theories continue to animate his base.
Indeed, Trump’s lies about the 2020 election—which began well before voters went to the polls that year—served as the basis for his desperate attempts to overturn his loss, which involved legal efforts to discount votes in swing states. He ultimately failed to thwart the election process, but his Republican allies succeeded in using his lies to chip away at voting rights. “There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today,” President Joe Biden said in a 2021 speech, as states like Florida and Georgia enacted new restrictive voting laws. “An attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in free and fair elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are—who are as Americans.”
That assault is ongoing. As I reported last month, election deniers have not only sought to get their hands on the levers of the election system; they have sought to inflict chaos on it by harassing election workers and gumming up the process with frivolous records requests and challenges. “It’s really this death by a thousand cuts strategy,” as Jill Habig, founder of the Public Rights Project, a legal advocacy nonprofit supporting election administrators, told me at the time.
Even if the Trump campaign’s so-called “Election Integrity Program” doesn’t bring about significant voter intimidation, it could help them throw “sand in the gears” of the process, Habig warned. And, as Politico’s Alex Isenstadt pointed out, “should Trump once again attempt to overturn the election, he will already have in place tens of thousands of workers who could help with that effort.” All told, it points to the extraordinary stress test our system will face this fall—an even greater one, perhaps, than that we faced four years ago.