 "Can Donald Trump challenge the results of the US president election if he loses?")
It’s D-Day.
After months of frantic campaigning, the race between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris all comes down to today.
Around 78 million people in the US have already voted early and tens of millions more will cast their ballots today as voters across America go the polls.
Due to the way ballots are counted in certain states, it is unlikely that we will know the winner of the polls immediately.
However, many people think Trump, regardless of the results, will prematurely declare victory – just like he did in 2020 even as the results remained unclear.
But can the former president actually challenge the results of the US election if he loses?
Let’s take a closer look:
Claims of fraud and conspiracies
Trump will likely cry voter fraud and tout conspiracies to try to overturn a defeat.
Republicans and Democrats expect that vote counting could drag on for several days after November 5 as mail-in ballots are tabulated and other votes are tallied and verified.
If it appears Trump is losing, the delay will give him an opportunity to claim fraud and attempt to undermine confidence in election officials, while also possibly encouraging his supporters to protest.
He has already threatened to jail election workers and other public officials for “unscrupulous behaviour,” although he would need to win the election first.
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Impact Shorts
More ShortsTrump and his allies have spent the past few months priming his supporters for just such an eventuality.
The former president has time and time again remarked that he can only lose if the election is ‘rigged.’
“If I lose - I’ll tell you what, it’s possible. Because they cheat. That’s the only way we’re gonna lose, because they cheat," Trump said at a Michigan rally in September.
Trump can take his case directly to the American public without waiting for proof, using social media, press conferences and interviews.
“If the fraud theme of 2020 was: ‘Covid is allowing ineligible people to vote or ballots to be manipulated,’ the 2024 theme seems to be ‘illegals are voting,’ and that fits in very much with the kind of nativist anti-immigrant language coming from the top of the Republican ticket,” Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The Guardian in October.
“This is sowing the seeds for attempts to overturn an election,” said Kyle Miller, a strategist with the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “We saw it in 2020, and I think the lesson Trump and his allies have learned since is that they have to sow these ideas early.”
In 2020, Trump declared himself the winner in the early morning hours after Election Day, three days before the first television networks made a call. He ultimately lost to his then Democratic opponent Joe Biden. He has never accepted the result and continues to falsely assert that it was stolen from him through widespread fraud.
Flood of lawsuits
The Trump campaign and the GOP are also set to file an avalanche of lawsuits challenging the election results.
After Trump lost the 2020 election, he and his allies attempted to overturn the result through dozens of lawsuits that ultimately failed to alter or delay the vote count.
Republicans have already preemptively filed more than 100 lawsuits in the battleground states that will decide the election to seed the ground for post-election challenges, including claiming, without evidence, that non-citizens will be voting in large numbers.
“The underlying claims in the suits are based on totally unreliable data, shoddy methodology, and basically the claims are garbage,” Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the watchdog group Protect Democracy, told The Guardian. “They are also, in this case, brought by election deniers, in an attempt to spread a false narrative to mislead the public and undermine confidence in elections.”
Creating chaos
The Electoral College, the United States’ unique method of choosing a president, rooted in the Constitution enacted in 1789, gives Trump an opportunity to seek to undermine election results at the local, state and national level.
As they did in 2020, Trump’s allies in key states, local election officials, state lawmakers and perhaps judges, could seek to delay certification, the confirmation of a state’s official tally, through claims of fraud.
Trump also famously pressured officials in Georgia to find more votes for him.
All states must submit their certified totals before the Electoral College meets in December and electors cast their votes. That vote is then delivered to Congress for final certification in January.
Trump-inspired court challenges and certification delays could cause a state to miss the filing deadline. That could provide grist for Republican objections in Congress.
Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in a failed effort to stop his vice president, Mike Pence, from certifying Biden’s victory.
Some fear a repeat of that incident.
Paul Beck, Academy Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, told Reuters, “If Trump is defeated, he will not accept the result and will do everything he can try to prevent that count on, I think it’s January 5. This year where they are certifying the presidential electoral votes.”
Some election law experts caution that it is difficult to predict how novel legal disputes over certification might be resolved, especially if they are handled by judges sympathetic to Trump’s claims.
What do experts say?
That Trump and his allies are far more prepared this time.
“The effort to try to subvert the outcome is more thought-out, more strategic, more organised, more coordinated in 2020,” Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Guardian.
However, there are key differences now as compared to 2020.
For one, Trump is no longer the sitting president – and thus no longer has control over the levers of power.
“The difference between 2020 and 2024 is that he is not the president. He doesn’t have the kind of levers of power that he was fully able to exercise to try to prevent a Biden victory in the electoral college. He will do that again but not from the kind of position of power that he had in 2020 and early 2020,” Beck said.
And new state and federal laws have been put in place to make it more difficult to influence election results.
It is also important to know that Trump’s efforts at overturning the election failed last time.
Election law experts say the laws in those key states are clear that local officials lack the power to throw out ballots or derail the process.
Congress has also taken steps to avoid a repeat of 2020.
It passed a reform law known as the Electoral Count Reform Act which makes it more difficult for candidate to mount the kind of challenge Trump attempted.
It makes clear that the vice president, who in this case would be Harris, has no authority to delay national certification or throw out a state’s results, as Trump urged Pence to do in 2020.
The measure also requires that an objection to a state’s electoral count cannot be brought unless one-fifth of the members of each house of Congress agrees. After that, it takes a majority vote in each house for an objection to be found valid.
In the unlikely result that enough electoral votes are tossed so that neither candidate reaches the necessary majority, the newly elected US House of Representatives would choose the next president.
Any effort by Trump to suggest the election was rigged could potentially lead to civil unrest, as it did on January 6, 2021.
Experts who monitor militant right-wing groups, such as Peter Montgomery of the People For the American Way, a liberal think tank, say they are less concerned about a violent response from these groups than they are about threats against election workers counting votes. There also could be violent demonstrations in the capitals of battleground states, Montgomery said.
Hundreds of people who were involved in the January 6 attack on the Capitol have been convicted and jailed for their actions, a powerful deterrent to others who may be considering taking similar actions.
Democrats say they are prepared
Democrats are readying a rapid-fire response to flood social media and the airwaves with calls for calm and patience with vote-counting should Donald Trump try to prematurely claim election victory, as he did in 2020, Harris campaign and party officials have said.
“We are sadly ready if he does and, if we know that he is actually manipulating the press and attempting to manipulate the consensus of the American people … we are prepared to respond,” Harris said in an interview with ABC on Wednesday.
She gave no details of those preparations, but six Democratic Party and Harris campaign officials said the initial fight against any early Trump victory claim would take place in the court of public opinion. They plan to flood social media and television airwaves with demands that all votes be counted before victories are declared.
“As soon as he (Trump) falsely declares victory, we’re ready to get up on TV and provide the truth and tap a broad network of people who can use their influence to push back,” a top official with the Democratic National Committee said in an interview.
A senior Harris campaign official said in a conference call with reporters on Friday they “fully expect” that Trump will falsely claim victory on Tuesday night, before all the votes are fully counted.
“He did this before it failed. If he does it again, it will fail,” the official said.
With inputs from agencies
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