'Mass challenges to voter eligibility': Far-right groups plan widespread election disruption

31 July 2024

Editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect that the cancellation of 400,000 Pennsylvania voter registrations was due to normal list maintenance, not challenges from outside groups.

A collection of GOP-aligned organizations are already hard at work planning to make it harder for predominantly Democratic constituencies to cast their ballots this November.

According to a Wednesday report in tech publication Wired, groups like True The Vote, the Election Integrity Network, Check My Vote and the Nevada-based Pig Pen Project are planning to blitz urban voting precincts in some of the more competitive battleground states this November like Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This initiative is likely to create headaches for voters who may show up to their polling place this fall only to find that their registration was removed due to challenges from one or more of these groups.

“These groups and the broader election denial movement have been building these structures, building these projects, over the course of many, many months and years, in preparation for this moment,” Brendan Fischer, who is the deputy executive director at Documented, told Wired. “And the pieces are finally falling into place, where they can begin to file these mass challenges for voter eligibility.”

"Staffing poll observers, both during early voting and on election day, in addition to mass voter challenges, in addition to conducting citizen research about election conspiracy theories, these are all priorities for them," he added.

Republican National Committee (RNC) co-chair Lara Trump — who is former President Donald Trump's daughter-in-law — has previously hinted at a well-funded infrastructure put in place to both challenge voter eligibility and to challenge election results themselves. During a Fox Business interview in May, Lara Trump told host Maria Bartiromo that the RNC is ready to engage in a campaign of mass disruption in the weeks following the November election.

"We plan on having attorneys in all of these major polling locations across the country," she said. "We can't wait to litigate something weeks after it has happened. We need to strike at a moment's notice. We want people there on the ready to hit things and hit the ground running when they happen so that we are never seeing 2020 happen ever again."

Pennsylvania Secretary of State press secretary Matt Heckel told Wired that election officials are already constantly working to keep voter lists accurate and up to date, saying that 400,000 registrations were removed in 2023 due to regular list maintenance. He warned that a wave of superfluous challenges from outside groups would only add to what is already a considerable workload.

"Challenges which seek to remove voters on the basis of unverified information or a timeline inconsistent with federal law will lead to disenfranchisement, unnecessary litigation, and a harassing diversion of already-stretched county resources," Heckel told Wired.

After losing the 2020 election, former President Trump filed more than 60 legal challenges to election results in various states. He lost all but one of those challenges, and the sole victory involved a negligible number of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that were rejected on a technicality. Those ballots did not have an impact on the final tally.

Click here to read Wired's report in full (subscription required).

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