The closure of the polls across the US on Tuesday evening will mark the commencement of the Republicans’ strategy, a plan which they have been formulating over the past several months. The objective is to legally question results that contravene Donald Trump’s interests at all levels including local, state, and national. The approach this time differs from that during the aftermath of the 2020 elections. Previously, efforts to subvert the election outcome were disorganised and emerged from various lobbying groups. The Republican Party, however, currently has a unified commitment towards disputing “every lawful vote” by lodging numerous allegations related to illegal registrations, voter suppression, and procedural inconsistencies.
The Republican Party’s strategy includes mobilising 230,000 volunteers, featuring numerous law professionals, throughout critical ‘battleground states’ to scrutinise suspected deceit. Jerry Goldfeder, head of the voting rights and democracy project at Fordham law school, warned about their potential to hinder the election process.
However, Kamala Harris’s campaign also prepared, assembling a strong team including Dana Remus, a former White House counsel to combat election interference, particularly if Trump is narrowly defeated.
Despite unsuccessful efforts to enforce a complete hand count of voting slips in multiple states, similar to 2020, allies of Trump are prepared to scrutinise for anomalies in the counting of votes at various polling stations countrywide.
The US electoral system, with its complex mix of divergent laws where registration, counting methods, and technology vary widely, even between contiguous states and counties, can provide opportunities for troublemakers to raise issues.
Over 50 million Americans cast their votes before the actual election day. There have already been several claims raised around the authenticity of signatures on the paper ballots, fraudulent absentee voting, undated postal ballots and repeat voting, however, majority of these were largely unsuccessful. Further, little evidence has been found to back up the claims made by The Republican National Committee and its associated groups that lawsuits were lodged due to illegal aliens not being removed from the voters’ register.
The Strategic Dialogue Institute voiced concerns this week, citing that foreign individuals posing as US election voters on social media have generated millions of views on X. They stated that this seems to be an underhanded tactic to confuse voters regarding the reach of this phenomenon.
Accusations of “voter suppression” and “cheating” in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, have previously been alleged by Trump himself and his team. Their claims arose from an incident where a registration office for postal ballots had to be shut down whilst people were still queuing to vote.
In the voting aftermath, the concerning issue will be “whether there are believable claims that a significant number of legitimate votes were left uncounted or illegal votes counted, impacting the final result,” claimed Nate Persily, a renowned scholar on election law based at Stanford.
Refuting the certification of results
In the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 loss, a considerable number of local election officials have declined to certify their district’s election outcomes, citing voter fraud. Several courts have since emphasised that county-level administrators are not at liberty to cease certification. Moreover, federal law gives final authority to state governors to confirm results by the 11th of December.
The states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Arizona all have Democratic governors, while the Republican governors of Georgia and Nevada have acknowledged Biden’s victory in the last election, largely disregarding the push to declare a Trump win.
However, election deniers still hold important county-level positions in locations including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and other regions, according to the Washington-based pro-democracy group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (Crew). This organisation is preparing to take legal action against those refusing certification.
Nikhel Sus, a deputy chief counsel at Crew, alleges that attempts to obstruct or delay certification may be used as a pretext for election denial, with county officials citing thwarted investigations into voter fraud and irregularities.
Parliamentary efforts at the eleventh hour
In January 2021, an attempt to impede or derail the Capitol Hill ceremony – the final stage of the US electoral process – was made by several Republican Congress members and eight senators. They based their activity on unfounded claims of widespread election fraud.
There has been a robust reinforcement of the law to make the task of halting certification more complex for lawmakers. In the past, an individual senator and a member of Congress could unite to present an issue, but the current requirement is the consensus of one-fifth from both the Senate and the House for any contention to be validated and for the process to be suspended.
House speaker Mike Johnson, one of the congressmen who challenged Biden’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania four years earlier, has pledged to “uphold the law”. This follows insinuations by the Democrats that he might once more lend his support to Trump in January.
However, a note of caution has been sounded by Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University. He points out that if Congress attempts to impede the process, “the position of federal courts on intervention to enforce the law remains uncertain”.