Trump’s claim that 2024 was “rigged” capitalized on the Republican Party’s efforts to slow the vote count

With just a few weeks Donald Trump, who remains in the 2024 presidential race, already has plans to aggressively challenge the election results if he fails to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris. According to four conservative lawyers and other sources who have spoken to the former president on the matter, Trump intends to declare – as late as election night – that the race is being “rigged” or “stolen” from him by pointing out that it is slow Vote counts of mail-in ballots underway in key battleground states as evidence of alleged Democratic shenanigans.

“He mentioned many times that we need to pay attention to it on Election Day because that’s where it is [the steal is] “That’s what’s going to happen,” says one of the lawyers close to Trump Rolling Stone. Trump has stressed in these private conversations with close allies and advisers in recent months that “you have to call them very early in the process, like they did that night, or they can get away scot-free and cover their tracks,” this source adds.

But the reason 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 repeat of what happened in 2020 when Trump lost.

During the 2020 campaign, 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 began with what became known as the “red mirage” — a false vision of a Trump victory based on in-person electoral votes. Then came the mail-in ballots, filled out overwhelmingly by Democratic voters who wanted to avoid exposing themselves at the polls to a pandemic that many Republicans simply didn’t believe was real.

“STOP THE COUNT,” Trump declared on social media, urging his supporters to show up at election offices in places like Philadelphia, Phoenix and Detroit and demand that officials stop counting the remaining votes.

Michigan addressed the issue by allowing election officials to begin processing mail-in ballots before Election Day — reducing the amount of time for Trump and his election denial supporters to allege fraud. But Republicans blocked similar efforts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – two of the key states that will determine whether Harris or Trump wins the presidency.

In May, Democrats in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a law allowing 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 his GOP allies in Pennsylvania and urged them to block Democrats’ efforts to allow mail-in ballots to be processed sooner, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said Rolling Stone.

A similar scenario played out in Wisconsin, where conservatives in the state Senate helped defeat a bill that would have allowed election officials to begin processing ballots before Election Day.

Recently, MAGA officials on the Georgia State Election Board passed a rule that would require officials to hand-count ballots on election night before submitting them for tabulation. Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the rule would cause delays in providing counties’ vote counts for the statewide total and was 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 panel of Republican votes deemed insufficiently subservient to the former president.

As Rolling Stone As reported in June, Trump and many of his influential conservative allies in and outside Georgia have been working for years to turn the new purple state into a model for enshrining his anti-democratic lies in public policy.

“Georgia is our laboratory,” a source close to Trump said bluntly Rolling Stone. “If you can make this work in Georgia, it will give you a roadmap for other states, maybe the entire country.”

As part of this sprawling operation in the Peach State, which President Joe Biden won in 2020, Trump manned the phones earlier this year, calling lawmakers and other Republican figures in Georgia and pushing out State Election Board member Ed Lindsey Republican who drew Trump’s ire by opposing an end to no-excuse mail-in voting.

“He has to go,” Trump said privately of Lindsey.

It wasn’t long before Lindsey left and Trump’s people further consolidated control of the board. They quickly moved to slow down the vote count.