The MAGA plot to steal 2024 election is on a 'different level than 2020': experts

12 August 2024

When Bill Maher predicted, in 2020, that Donald Trump would not concede the presidential election if he lost, Trump's defenders accused the "Real Time" host of having "Trump derangement syndrome." But Trump, just as Maher predicted, refused to admit defeat after losing the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden.

Now, four years later, a variety of Trump critics — from Maher to Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias — are warning that Trump will do the same thing again if he loses the 2024 election.

But The Guardian's Sam Levine, in an article published on August 12, stresses that there is a crucial difference between 2020 and 2024: Trump and his MAGA allies "may be better prepared" to steal the election this time.

"(Cleta) Mitchell, a close Trump ally, has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections," Levine explains. "And the Republican National Committee's election litigation team is now being led by Christina Bobb, an election denier who is now facing criminal charges for her efforts to overturn the 2020 race."

The reporter continues, "The RNC claims it is recruiting an army of 100,000 poll observers who could provide significant disruption during voting and counting…. But more significantly, the idea that the 2020 election was stolen has moved from the fringes to being a pillar of the Republican Party. A January poll from PRRI found that 66 percent of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen."

Elias laments that election denialism has become the GOP's "standard position."

The attorney and Democracy Docket publisher told The Guardian, "I think we saw efforts by Republicans in 2020 that were pretty ham-handed. I worry that there will be both legal and extralegal efforts by Republicans to keep ballots from being counted."

Similarly, Ben Berwick, an attorney for Protect Democracy, told The Guardian, "It's all part of creating sort of a pretext to say, 'Oh, we need to throw out this set of ballots' or 'We can't really know who the real winner is.' I think much of it won't stick, but I think the point is to have enough of it stick to create enough uncertainty for that critical post-election period."

Richard Pildes, an election law expert at New York University, told The Guardian he is "definitely concerned" that there will be "a lot of efforts to disturb" vote counting.

Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, believes that MAGA election denialism is much more sophisticated in 2024 than it was four years ago.

Morales-Doyle told The Guardian, "This has started earlier in the cycle and is louder and is more consistent. That is all just at a different level than it was before 2020.”

Read The Guardian's full report at this link.

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