FILE PHOTO: Supporters of Republican presidential nominee former U.S. President Donald Trump look at screens showing Trump speak from the Palm Beach County Convention Center, as they attend the New York Young Republican Club watch party during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo
(Reuters) - Since winning the 2024 election, President-elect Donald Trump has gone quiet on his false claims of voter fraud. But the election denial movement he spawned isn’t going away – and appears to be strengthening in some areas of the country.
A faction of local and national Republican officials who amplified Trump’s claims of a rigged 2020 election say they will keep pushing for stark changes to how Americans vote ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. In interviews, they said they are responding to legitimate concerns about election integrity and suggesting appropriate reforms.
Election officials and voting-rights advocates see a different aim: to cement electoral advantages for Republicans with new rules that would make it harder for some voters to cast ballots, and to lay the groundwork for discrediting the results of future elections if their preferred candidates lose.
“The election denial movement has been evolving and shapeshifting in an effort to stay relevant,” said Lizzie Ulmer, a senior vice president at States United Action, a group that tracks candidates who attack the credibility of U.S. elections. As a result, she added, “the movement has held onto power and influence.”
The movement’s agenda focuses on many of the debunked claims of voter fraud that Trump and his allies advanced after his failed 2020 re-election bid. These include requiring voters to show proof of citizenship, despite scant evidence of significant voting by illegal immigrants, and restricting mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes, neither of which have been linked to systemic fraud.
Claire Zunk, a spokesperson for Trump and the Republican National Committee, said “commonsense” election reforms are needed and Trump is “committed to keeping his promises and securing our elections nationwide.”
Reuters interviewed more than 20 officials and advocates on both sides of the campaign for more restrictive voting laws, including figures in all seven battleground states, where even slight rule changes can influence turnout and elections.
The Nov. 5 election delivered victory for scores of Republican candidates who publicly supported Trump's false claim that his loss to President Joe Biden four years ago was due to voter fraud. As Trump tightened his grip on the party this year, that claim was central to his message. Trump often lashed out at party members seen as disloyal to him and his rigged election falsehoods. Echoing those claims was often a test of loyalty for Republicans.
Nationwide, a half-dozen candidates who denied the 2020 election results won statewide offices this year, and 143 won races for the U.S. House and Senate, according to data from States United Action.
Election deniers are also filling key roles in Trump’s new administration. Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a vocal supporter of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat, has been nominated as U.S. Attorney General. Kash Patel, who promoted false election fraud claims after serving in Trump’s first White House, was nominated on Saturday to head the FBI.
“People thought we were going to go away if Donald Trump won the election. They are wrong,” said Mark Finchem, a Republican state legislator in Arizona who has been a national voice in claiming fraud is rampant in U.S. elections.
“We have an opportunity here,” Finchem said in an interview. He and his allies will make changing state election laws “a top priority,” he said.
After the 2020 election, Finchem helped launch the election-denial movement in Arizona by organizing a meeting in which Trump’s allies planned an attempt to overturn the results. In 2022, he ran for secretary of state of Arizona, the official who oversees elections, and was among a wave of election integrity skeptics defeated at the polls that year. This year, he won an Arizona state senate seat.
At the national level, the Republican sweep of the White House and both chambers of Congress in November could pave the way for passage of a law mandating proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Most Democrats have opposed the bill, known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, saying it would disenfranchise eligible voters.
The bill passed the House last year but not the Democratic-controlled Senate. The lead House and Senate sponsors of the legislation told Reuters they will re-introduce it. “It’s certainly something we should prioritize,” U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Texas Republican who chairs the House subcommittee responsible for election law, said in an interview.
Roy himself has not disputed the the 2020 election results. But in an August interview on “War Room,” a right-wing talk show, he said that he drafted the bill with advice from conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell and Trump advisor Stephen Miller, both prominent figures in the election-denial movement. Roy told Reuters he expects a new Republican Congress to consider changes to existing federal election rules, including a possible rollback of a ban preventing states from changing voter rolls in the 90 days before an election.
The Election Integrity Network, a group of activists organized by Mitchell, will urge Congress and the Trump administration to overhaul federal election laws, said Mitchell, who has campaigned for changes to voting rules for more than two decades. In an interview, she said she would press for compulsory voter identification and tighter timelines for accepting mail-in ballots, among other changes.
Election officials and independent voting-rights advocates said many of the changes pushed by Trump’s allies are unnecessary and, in some cases, unconstitutional. Restrictions on early voting and mail-in voting, for instance, would make it more difficult for legitimate voters to cast ballots, they said.
“MORE EMBOLDENED”
Trump’s victory appears to have emboldened election skeptics in some battleground states that he won this year – such as Georgia, where Republicans have vowed to push for new voting rules.
In the lead up to the Nov. 5 election, Georgia’s state elections board, dominated by three Trump supporters, proposed new rules to grant local officials the right not to vote for election certification and to require hand counting of votes. Democrats said the changes could have significantly delayed election results and caused chaos. State courts blocked them, but the Republican Party has appealed.
Some Georgia Republicans said they want to enshrine those measures in state law. “We'll be going to the legislature and asking them to address some of these issues” in the next session in January, said Josh McKoon, head of the Georgia Republican Party. Such proposals are likely to face opposition from Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans who resisted pressure from Trump in the 2020 election “to find” him the votes that cost him Georgia.
McKoon said Georgia Republicans also want to increase funding to the state election board for investigations, which could result in the removal of local officials who they believe mismanage elections. He singled out Fulton County, the state’s most populous and a center of Black political power, as a possible target.
Democrats and voting rights groups say the attacks on Fulton are a cover for efforts to suppress Black and Democratic votes. McKoon dismisses his critics as blind to problems in the election system. “It's a position that is insulting,” he said.
Anita Tucker, a Democrat on the Forsyth County election board, said local conservative activists appear invigorated by the election, determined to uncover more evidence of fraud. “You would think after the results of this election that they would calm down, but they are now more emboldened,” Tucker said.
“BRING IT”
In other states, the push for significant changes in election law appears to face higher hurdles.
In Arizona, a hotbed of voting disputes and rigged-election conspiracy theories after Trump’s 2020 defeat, Finchem said he will seek sweeping voting rule changes, including restrictions on early voting and requiring hand-counting of ballots. But Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs, a former secretary of state, is expected to veto such legislation if it passes. Hobbs’ office did not reply to a request for comment.
In Wisconsin, another battleground state where Trump’s 2020 defeat spurred Republican claims of widespread election fraud, two of the most vocal leaders of that movement were defeated in Republican primaries for state legislative seats this year. And while Republicans retained control of both chambers of the state legislature, the Democratic governor could veto any legislation to revamp voting processes.
Similar hurdles exist in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Democrats will control the governor’s office and one chamber of the legislature. In Nevada, where the governor is a Republican, Democrats control both chambers of the legislature.
In parts of Michigan, however, 2020 election conspiracy theories continue to roil some local offices.
Days before the Nov. 5 election, state authorities removed a conservative clerk and his deputy in Rock River Township, a small community of 1,200 people, who wanted to count ballots by hand. The push for hand tallies appeared to be inspired by misinformation about insecure voting machines.
In rural Antrim County, where a clerical error fueled election conspiracy theories in 2020, newly elected Republican clerk Victoria Bishop campaigned on a promise to hand-count already-tabulated ballots, which the state says violates the law.
When a reporter asked if Bishop feared she'd also be removed, her spokesperson was dismissive: “Bring it.”
(Eisler reported from Phoenix, Parker reported from Atlanta, Layne reported from Detroit and Tanfani reported from Philadelphia. Editing by Jason Szep.)
