Trump’s GOP moves to dramatically revamp election rules

Republican allies of former President Trump have embarked on a sweeping effort to restrict voting and purge voter rolls across the country since the 2020 election, something critics fear could stymie participation in the November contest and aid Trump in challenging its outcome if he loses.

A review of the voting landscape by The Hill shows the breadth of efforts carried out at the state and local level, where GOP officials have adopted a number of measures to increase partisan control of elections and secure greater opportunities to audit results and hinder certification.

They’ve also launched a series of lawsuits or other challenges seeking to cull voter rolls, sparking fears that bids to remove tens of thousands from the list will inevitably remove qualified voters.

“It’s become this game of like whack-a-mole to try and track all of these efforts to undermine election processes and to create opportunities to delay the certification of election results, so that if the tabulation isn’t going their preferred candidate’s way, they can throw sand in the gears and slow down the whole process to give whatever schemes they’re hatching to overturn the results time to play out,” said Jonathan Diaz, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan legal group that has challenged some of the new policies.

Democrats and Republicans have squared off for decades over finding a balance between election security and access to the ballot, crafting policies that make it simple to vote but guard the system against abuse.

But the landscape has grown more complicated since Trump’s 2020 election loss.

Though study after study has contradicted Republican assertions that widespread fraud plagues U.S. elections, Trump has made claims of election malfeasance a central tenet of his campaign.

The accelerating efforts have alarmed Democrats, who believe Trump allies are not just limiting voting but laying the groundwork to contest another Trump loss.

“If and when Trump loses, he always tries to question the authenticity and the reliability of election results in order to block certification. So there’s not much mystery in what they will do,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who previously served on the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

“We don’t know exactly where they will do it and how they will do it, but that’s their basic game plan.” 

Republicans backing the tougher rules are unapologetic, saying they’re necessary to secure elections.

That includes the Republican National Committee (RNC), which has led a number of efforts to challenge various voting procedures in court, and has asked prospective hires whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen.

“We have engaged, and won, in record numbers of legal battles to secure our election,” Claire Zunk, the RNC’s election integrity spokesperson, said in a statement to The Hill. 

“We have stopped Democrat schemes to dismantle election safeguards and will continue to fight for a fair and transparent election for all Americans.”

A growing role for election skeptics 

An increasing number of local figures are questioning the validity of election results and demanding reviews of voting procedures in the wake of Trump’s efforts to overturn an election he lost. And in some cases, they’re being backed by new policies allowing them to do so.

The Georgia State Election Board in August rolled out a policy that gives local election officials the ability to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before they certify election results.

It’s a process with few guidelines, but one that clearly opens the door to delaying the certification of results.

It was a change pushed by the board’s three MAGA-aligned Republican members, whom Trump praised as “pit bulls” when they attended one of his rallies. They hold the majority on the board, which Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) was ousted from earlier this year.

The investigative powers came after several Republican election board members in the metro Atlanta area last year refused to certify local election results, despite little doubt about the vote’s outcome.

“Ever since 2020, we’ve seen a pattern of local officials, primarily, but not exclusively, in swing states, invoking disinformation narratives — things like, ‘The voting machines can’t be trusted,’ or, ‘I’ll only certify the results once they’ve been hand-counted’ — and withholding certification of local election results,” said Jessica Marsden, a director at Protect Democracy.

Marsden said her group has tracked at least 40 threats or actual refusals to certify election results since 2020 — raising questions about what pushback to certification might arise this year.

In 2022, the New Mexico secretary of state had to go to court to force the Otero County Commission to certify the primary election, noting it failed to provide any evidence there were issues with vote tabulators as claimed. Even after external pressure, Commissioner Couy Griffin, who was charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack, remained the lone “no” vote.

Similar fights have taken place in Nevada, where GOP county commissioners reversed course after facing pressure from the secretary of state, and in Michigan and Arizona.

Diaz said the dynamic is part of a broader effort to “open the door a little crack to let them refuse to certify election results.”

“One of the broad trends that we’ve seen is a real focus from election deniers on county election administration, on either getting people who question the validity of the 2020 election in positions on county boards of election or elected as local election supervisors,” Diaz said, adding that “a lot of people were radicalized by the aftermath of the 2020 election.”

Trump continues to assert he did not lose the 2020 election and to fan the flames around those false claims.

“We did great in 2016, and a lot of people don’t know that we did a lot better in 2020. We won. We won. We did win. It was a rigged election,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan last week. 

Creating ‘a ton of work’ for election officials

The scrutiny of election processes isn’t just coming from officials but from volunteers and activists across the country, organized through various right-wing groups.

Some of those efforts have been directed at challenging names on voter rolls, pushing officials to cut names from their lists of registered voters.

In Georgia, anyone can challenge a name on the state’s voter rolls, if they have the person’s birthday, driver’s license number and last four digits of their Social Security number. That exact information, however, was briefly autopopulated in the portal just as it was rolled out, heightening concerns the tool could be easily abused.

In recent years, nearly 100,000 Georgians have had their voter registrations challenged, something ProPublica found was largely the result of just six right-wing activists.

Just a fraction of the challenges have succeeded in removals — 2,350 names were cut from voter rolls, the outlet found. But another 8,700 were placed in an intermediate status, meaning they could be forced to vote on a provisional ballot.

“The reason that that is a risk to the election is one, the databases that these activists are using, the ways that they are identifying potentially ineligible voters, are not very good,” Marsden said.

“What this has done is created a lot of paperwork for election officials to have to process and reject these requests that don’t have sufficient grounding.”

While Georgia’s portal is unique in its ease for providing a way to challenge individual voter registrations, other states also have processes for doing so, including Texas, which launched a tip line for any suspected voting violation.

Those efforts have been aided by a tool put to use by various conservative-leaning election groups, including one founded by Trump ally Cleta Mitchell, who was on the call with Raffensperger when the former president asked him to “find” additional votes to overturn his loss in the state in 2020.

Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has been among those to use EagleAI to find voter registrations they may want to challenge. Contrary to its name, the platform doesn’t use artificial intelligence, but it does scrape data from the National Change of Address database and criminal records, and it flags other addresses, such as those at homeless shelters or nursing homes.

“Basically, they are using computer programs to generate these lists of potentially ineligible voters using unreliable data sources that usually are just mismatching names or relying on outdated information. So all they’re really doing is creating a ton of work for election officials and risking the wrongful removal of eligible voters from the rolls,” Diaz said. 

A popular, but divisive, GOP issue

Efforts to change the rules to vote have generated enthusiasm among GOP grassroots groups and voters as Trump has urged the party on.

This is best reflected in figures from the RNC’s “Protect the Vote” effort, which deploys volunteers across the country to make it “harder to cheat.” The project more than doubled its goal of recruiting 100,000 volunteers.

The effort was billed as a plan “to stop Democrat attempts to circumvent rules,” with a press release for the plan vowing that “tricks from 2020 won’t work this time.”

Some Republicans, like Raffensperger and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, have defended the integrity of the elections they oversee — even fighting Trump’s efforts to overturn the results. But many state and local GOP officials have cited Trump’s baseless fraud claims in adopting tougher voting rules.

That’s left Raffensperger at odds with the board he used to chair, saying its members are “destroying voter confidence” and that “any great conspiracy theory they hear, they buy into it.”

The fixation on voting practices has also trickled down to the local level, where officials have seen a surge in complaints about their policies that have sometimes led to threats, including against Republicans.

Clint Hickman, a Republican who serves on Arizona’s Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, said public attendance has “wildly changed in the last four years.”

He said many of those attending the meetings rehash voting conspiracies popular on social media, especially in the days after elections — “They definitely show up after their candidate didn’t win.”

Hickman, a two-time volunteer for Trump’s campaign, has faced a barrage of threats, including from one man ultimately sentenced to jail time. It’s a factor in his decision not to seek reelection this year.

“The threats have been there since Donald Trump lost the election that I tried to help him win, and the ire and the focus has been on people that just want to stay [within the bounds of] the law,” he said.

A policy push

Since 2020, there’s been a surge of policies enacted by state legislatures and election boards to limit absentee voting, increase partisan oversight of elections and impose new restrictions around casting a ballot.

Georgia’s GOP-led State Election Board last month issued a new rule requiring the hand-counting of ballots for the election in November. It’s a factor that could increase human error and seriously slow vote counting — potentially even butting up against the Jan. 6 certification deadline.

Across the country, GOP-led states have restricted mail voting, enacted stricter ID requirements and taken actions to limit polling places and ballot drop boxes.

Both Florida and Texas have also stiffened criminal penalties around voting and overseeing elections.

Marsden described a transition from long-standing efforts to restrict access to the ballot, to laws that could limit what ballots are even then counted.

While votes to expand access to the ballot have also passed in large numbers, the Brennan Center for Justice, a civil rights group housed within New York University’s School of Law, noted a “stark divide” in how states approach the topic.

“Many states passing new restrictive laws are the places where it is already hard to vote,” the center found. 

And at the national level, House Republicans this year pushed a bill that would bar noncitizens from voting, even though doing so is already illegal — and exceedingly rare.

Noncitizens risk being booted from the country by unlawfully casting a ballot. Various studies have found just a handful of possible incidences of such behavior, with one Brennan Center study of the 2016 election finding just 30 suspected cases.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) pointed to intuition when making a case for the bill.

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number,” he said.

A swell in litigation

While Democrats and voting rights groups have sued over much of this legislation, GOP-affiliated outlets have launched their own litigation. The RNC alone has been involved in 125 suits across 26 states.

Many of the GOP actions challenge various voter practices or argue the lists of registered voters are bloated and outdated or could contain noncitizens.

The RNC launched a suit in Nevada that claimed as many as 6,000 noncitizens were registered to vote, pushing the secretary of state there to verify their immigration status.

The Arizona Supreme Court rejected a similar effort, declining to bar 97,928 registered voters who did not have proper proof of citizenship from voting in state-level elections, writing that the court would not “disenfranchise voters en masse.” 

“What they’re meant to do is further this narrative — which is totally unsupported by evidence — about widespread noncitizen voting, and to kind of set the stage for claims in the future after the election, that the results can’t be trusted because of this taint of non-U.S. citizens or otherwise ineligible voters being registered in casting ballots,” Diaz said. 

Republicans have also brought suits challenging the minutiae of election administration, in some cases with success.

They’ve recently filed challenges related to mail voting in Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. 

The RNC likewise sued to block Nevada from counting mail ballots sent on Election Day that, as state law permits, are received within four days after the election. That case was dismissed.

But the party got an initial win in a North Carolina suit seeking to bar students from using digital university IDs at the polls.

Democrats, meanwhile, have challenged a recent rule from the Georgia State Board of Elections requiring counties to hand-count ballots rather than do so by machine, something the Democratic National Committee argues “changes the rules of the game in the ninth inning.”

The party has also sued over Georgia’s rule allowing a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying votes, with the judge overseeing the matter calling the policy “on its face vague.” The same judge on Tuesday in a separate case ruled against a Fulton County election board member who refused to certify the election.

Wendy Weiser, vice president of the democracy program at the Brennan Center, said there’s been a “giant proliferation” of frivolous lawsuits that feed concerns over election security.

“They’re more like press releases than they are real legal complaints. Many of them are being summarily dismissed,” she said.

“You still use the fact that you filed a lawsuit to sow a conspiracy theory, even if you lost in that lawsuit. So I think that there is a lot of abuse of the legal system to try to spread conspiracy theories.”

Updated at 9:46 a.m. Oct. 15.