The MAGA movement is obsessed with "voter fraud" and "election fraud," and President Donald Trump continues to claim, without proof, that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. Many MAGA Republicans believe that undocumented immigrants are voting in U.S. elections in big numbers, offering no proof to back up that claim.

One of the many MAGA influencers who is making claims of widespread voter fraud is far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, who, in 2016, promoted the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory (which falsely claimed that a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. was being used for child trafficking).

Voter fraud, Posobiec claims, is rampant.

But Slate reporters Jacqueline Sweet and Marisa Kabas, in an article published on October 3, allege that Posobiec's own voter registration raises some questions.

"The Republican National Committee, last fall, enlisted him to speak to poll watchers about election security," Sweet and Kabas note. "Posobiec is particularly focused on Pennsylvania, repeatedly accusing the state's Democratic officials of fraud, even spreading conspiracy theories that were followed by an RNC lawsuit."

Sweet and Kabas, however, allege, "The focus on voter fraud in Pennsylvania is particularly ironic because it sure looks like, and a trail of documentation suggests, that Posobiec is living in Maryland but voting in Pennsylvania. If so, that would be a violation of voting laws, experts say."

Sweet and Kabas allege that Posobiec "voted in Pennsylvania elections from 2004 to 2024, both in person and by mail, according to a copy of his voting record viewed by Slate and the Handbasket."

"There's nothing untoward about any of that, provided Posobiec actually lives in Pennsylvania," Sweet and Kabas note. But they allege that "Posobiec listed a Maryland address — the same one he and his wife show in social media posts — more than a dozen times in his 2024 political contributions, according to Federal Election Commission filings."

Attorney Adam Bonin, an expert on Pennsylvania election law, told Slate, "Your legal residence is where your life is rooted, the place you come back to. Usually, where your spouse lives is where you are presumed to live, but we look at the totality of the circumstances…. You only have one residence for voting, and you can't choose where you vote based on convenience or politics."

Read Jacqueline Sweet and Marisa Kabas' full article in Slate at this link.

In October 2021, shortly before Election Day, Mahabubul Tayub was reviewing the voter rolls for the tiny Philadelphia suburb of Millbourne, where he was on the ballot as a candidate for mayor. Something didn’t seem right.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Dozens of new voters had been registered in recent weeks, he noticed, including some people he knew — people who didn’t live in Millbourne.

Tayub won the mayoral election that November, but it would take years for authorities to fully unravel what was behind the odd registrations he discovered: a brazen attempt at election fraud.

Just last month, his opponent in the 2021 race, Md Nurul Hasan, pleaded guilty in federal court to 33 felony charges in a failed scheme to steal the election by illegally registering dozens of nonresidents as Millbourne voters, then casting mail ballots on their behalf. Two associates also pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including fraudulent voter registration.

The case serves as a reality check amid a raging national debate over election security and the threat of voter fraud, especially in swing states like Pennsylvania. It’s proof, on one hand, that despite the many safeguards in place, voter fraud can happen at the local level, with lasting consequences for the community. On the other hand, it also helps illustrate how difficult it would be to orchestrate such fraud on a larger scale without detection.

“It seems to be in the local races this pops up the most, where there is a smaller turnout and there is possibly a direct connection between the person committing the bad act and the person who is going to benefit from the bad act,” said Jim Allen, the Delaware County elections director.

It’s in these small jurisdictions, he said, that “the temptation is highest and the risk-reward is highest.”

Two immigrants became friends, then competitors

Millbourne is a tiny borough at the eastern edge of Delaware County, bordering Philadelphia. It covers less than 50 acres — not even a tenth of a square mile — and has roughly 1,200 residents.

The land was originally the homestead of the Sellers family, immigrants from Derbyshire, England. In the mid 1700s, John Sellers opened Millbourne Mills, a flour mill that drew its name from nearby Mill Creek, now Cobb’s Creek — the dividing line between Delaware County and Philadelphia.

As small as it is, the borough has seen huge demographic changes in recent decades. In 1980, it was more than 90% white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but by 2020, it was majority Asian. That was driven by immigration from South Asia, including India and Bangladesh.

Now, Market Street, the main thoroughfare through Millbourne, is dotted with South Asian grocery stores and boutiques selling Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani clothing. In 2023, Sellers Avenue — a short, mostly residential street named after the founding family — was given a second name: Bangladesh Avenue, a change that the local Bangladeshi community celebrated as a testament to their growing economic and political power.

Tayub, 47, grew up in Chittagong, a port city in southeast Bangladesh. He graduated from university there with a degree in economics, and moved to Philadelphia, then Millbourne in the early 2000s. Hasan, 48, is also from Chittagong, and Tayub said the two had become friendly when he and Hasan lived in the same Philadelphia building.

“All the friends [who were] the same age, all the people from Bangladesh” socialized together, Tayub recalled.

Tayub also got to know former Millbourne Mayor Tom Kramer, a Democrat who later encouraged him to run for the five-member borough council. Tayub and Hasan both launched bids as Democrats and won in the 2015 municipal election, Tayub said. (Both Tayub and Hasan are U.S. citizens.)

In the spring of 2021, Kramer decided against running for another term as mayor. Tayub entered the race, with Kramer’s support. Hasan jumped in, too.

The town’s voters skewed heavily Democratic, which meant whoever won the party primary was likely to coast to victory in the fall. And whether it was Hasan or Tayub, the winner was poised to become the first Bangladesh-born mayor of a U.S. town, a prospect that received media attention in Bangladesh.

Tayub said he wasn’t worried about the competition. “I have faith people know me,” he said.

Tayub won the primary by 18 votes out of 258 cast. But Hasan launched a write-in campaign for the November general election with the support of two other council members: Md Munsur Ali and Md Rafikul Islam, who lost his primary bid for reelection to the council. (Md is an abbreviation for Muhammad, and a common prefix for Bangladeshi names.)

How the plot unfolded

According to the federal indictment that laid out the men’s attempt to steal the election, the three conspired to obtain personal information from non-Millbourne residents — mainly friends of Hasan’s and Ali’s. Hasan then registered them to vote in Millbourne using the Department of State’s website, the indictment said — in some cases updating existing registrations by changing them to Millbourne addresses — and requested mail-in ballots on their behalf.

The indictment said Hasan and Ali told the residents of nearby communities, including Upper Darby and Philadelphia, that they would not get in trouble, so long as they “did not vote in another election in November 2021.”

The indictment described an effort to “cover up the fact that defendant HASAN was requesting mail-in ballots for dozens of different people,” in which Hasan alternated email addresses when registering the voters, as well as the addresses, and requested that the mail ballots be sent to various locations.

According to the indictment, after receiving the ballots, Hasan and the others wrote in Hasan’s name for mayor and cast the ballots. In all, the indictment says, Hasan and his co-conspirators fraudulently registered nearly three dozen people.

The indictment doesn’t identify the voters who were registered improperly, but one of the people whom Hasan registered confirmed his involvement and agreed to speak with Votebeat and Spotlight PA on condition of anonymity, out of concern that their involvement in the scheme could jeopardize their current employment.

The voter confirmed giving Hasan their driver’s license and allowing Hasan to proceed with the Millbourne registration and request a mail ballot for them.

“I trusted him and thought if I only give one vote, it’s not a problem,” said the person. “He made us fools.”

Suspicion ahead of Election Day: ‘I know these people.’

The votes hadn’t even been counted when Millbourne residents began to catch on to the scheme. According to the indictment, the borough added 29 voters between the primary and the November election. Given that Millbourne had fewer than 600 voters, it was a noticeable jump.

After Tayub grew suspicious of the new voter registrations, he brought his concerns to Kramer, the departing mayor, though neither man remembers exactly when.

“I know these people, they never live [in] Millbourne,” Tayub recalled thinking when he saw some newly registered names. “They live [in] Upper Darby.” Tayub’s attorney filed a complaint with the county elections office on Oct. 28, 2021. Tayub and Kramer said they also reported the matter to law enforcement around the time of the election. The district attorney’s office did not respond to a question about when and how they became aware of the matter.

Allen, the county elections director, said in an email that Hasan himself had questioned some voter registrations months earlier, in April, and his office had referred that matter to the district attorney. Allen wrote that in the months and years after Tayub’s complaints, “we received and responded to periodic inquiries from investigators.”

But Tayub and others in Millbourne said they grew frustrated because although the county was taking steps to look into the situation, for nearly a year afterward, they didn’t observe much progress.

“I couldn’t take it,” Tayub said during a recent interview with Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

Tayub, Kramer, and the borough’s secretary, Nancy Baulis, all met with an assistant district attorney before the May 2022 primary to discuss the status of the case, and Baulis and Kramer followed up with emails to county officials, including the district attorney, a few months later expressing frustration about the apparent lack of movement.

Kramer shared those emails with Votebeat and Spotlight PA. In his, he wrote that the assistant district attorney at the meeting had said that “this particular situation was very problematic politically,” and would generate media interest.

In an interview, Kramer said after sending that email, he reached out to the FBI. He said the investigation seemed to pick up after that.

The federal indictment came in February 2025.

The county separately charged Hasan with unlawful voting and related charges in March, and the case is pending. Because of that, District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said he could not discuss the matter, but said in an email that it is “inaccurate” to say that the county did not move quickly on the case before the FBI’s involvement.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the assistant district attorney Kramer mentioned in his email responded to a request for comment on what Kramer said he was told at the May 2022 meeting.

The Pennsylvania Department of State said it “first became aware of the fraud allegations when it was contacted by federal law enforcement.”

“I don’t have any comment beyond stating the obvious, that there has been a prosecution,” Allen, the county election director, said. “It was a very difficult matter to investigate because you can’t make assumptions [based on] ‘Well, this house looks empty.’ Well, was it empty last fall? How do you know it’s empty? Did someone move out?”

Asked after an April borough council meeting if he had any explanation or comment, Hasan declined. “I don’t want to say anything now,” Hasan said.

Hasan’s attorney, Michael Dugan, said his client had no comment in response to a list of questions about the scheme. Islam, Ali, and their respective attorneys did not respond to emails with detailed questions for this story.

The reality of election fraud vs. false claims

Cases like Millbourne’s muddy the intensifying national debate over election fraud: how widespread it is, what to do about it, and, more fundamentally, whether our election system can be trusted.

In recent years, an ecosystem of conspiracy theories about election manipulation has flourished online. Justin Grimmer, a political scientist at Stanford University, has researched the kind of broad claims of systematic election fraud that President Donald Trump and his allies made after the 2020 election to explain his loss, and said he has found no evidence of any such conspiracy.

But Grimmer’s research has turned up real instances of fraud, and they typically look like what happened in Millbourne — a local race, involving a relatively small number of votes.

“I think it gives some insight into why it would be very hard to do this in a broad national way,” he said. “This sort of fraud will leave lots of markers that people will end up discovering.”

The kind of “marker” Grimmer is referencing is the evidence Tayub was able to cite: actual names and addresses for the people who were drawn into the scheme.

Scaling a scheme like the one in Millbourne to one that involves enough votes to swing a statewide or national election would be hard, Grimmer said, because it would involve so many people.

The perpetrators here had access to driver’s license numbers, which according to the indictment they got directly from the voters. Allen, the county election director, said he was unaware of any other fraud case where voters gave out their personal information like this.

Stephanie Singer, a former Philadelphia city commissioner who was in office in 2016 when a ballot box stuffing scheme orchestrated by a former congressman was happening, has developed an algorithm that looks for anomalies in election results in the hopes of catching attempted fraud. Georgia is currently using the program to monitor its elections.

“Part of the job, not just of the board of elections, but of us as a democratic populace, is to guard against that,” she said. “The people who win the elections have access to money and power, and that means it’s really tempting to cheat.”

These attempts to cheat, even if they are initially successful at changing the results, are frequently caught, and election officials uphold those cases as examples of the safeguards working. Even so, the very fact that they occur can help destroy trust in elections.

Incidents like those in Millbourne and in a 2018 North Carolina congressional race that required a new election can serve as a “proof of concept” for those already suspicious that election fraud is happening, Grimmer said.

He recalled a county elections meeting in Oregon where he was trying to counter points made by a speaker who believed there was a broad conspiracy to steal elections, and cited a local incident from California as an example.

“In that setting, I can explain that it’s very different than the kind of conspiracy he’s alleging,” he said. “But if someone’s suspicious, all of a sudden it does reveal that it is possible to do this at least on a small scale.”

“If I’m not sufficiently persuasive in that meeting that it’s hard to scale this up,” he added, “you could see how this can further undermine trust” in election administration.

In Millbourne, the story isn’t over

Nearly four years after the election fraud, and a month after the guilty pleas, a tense mood still hung over Millbourne’s five-member borough council.

Two members resigned recently for reasons unrelated to the fraud case, which until recently left only three members, including Hasan and Ali. Despite their convictions, the men refused to immediately resign, and weren’t legally required to do so. Sentencing is scheduled for June.

By staying in office, Hasan and Ali allowed the borough to keep conducting council business. Without them, the council wouldn’t have had enough members.

But recent council meetings were marked by fraught exchanges over the matter.

The borough council building is a tight space. A sliding partition and support pillar split the room between attendees and the U-shaped arrangement of folding tables where council members sit.

At an April 15 meeting, Kramer, the former mayor, stepped in front of the pillar when it was his turn to offer public comment.

“I’d like to address our felonious council people,” Kramer said, facing Hasan and Ali. “I wanted to ask if either one of you had any intention of resigning.”

The eyes of the other borough officials shifted to Hasan to see how he would respond.

Hasan, wearing a purple button-down shirt and gray jacket, looked uncomfortable as he answered, shifting his feet and looking around the room or down at his papers.

“Actually the court has a restriction,” he said. “I don’t want to say anything.”

But on May 13, borough officials confirmed that Hasan had formally submitted his resignation, though the council has yet to accept it.

As of Tuesday, Ali had not resigned.

Getting a public official out of elected office — outside of defeating them at the ballot box — is not simple, even if the official has pleaded guilty to a felony.

“It’s not just automatic,” James Gallagher, the borough’s solicitor, explained at an April meeting. He said Hasan and Ali’s resignations would be “in the best interest of the borough.”

The state Legislature can impeach local elected officials, but rarely uses that power. The other option is a quo warranto action, a legal action challenging a public official’s right to hold office, typically brought by the district attorney or state attorney general.

Chris Cosfol, a resident of Millbourne, said he wants the district attorney’s office to bring such an action. The ordeal has been “embarrassing” for the borough, he said, and he thinks the members should have automatically been removed from office once they entered a guilty plea.

Neither the district attorney’s office nor the attorney general has yet taken such action.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Republican Party operations all across the country are opting to embrace a voting policy so despised by President Donald Trump that he has pushed for it to be banned, and it all comes down to fears about midterm turnout.

Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, claiming without evidence that it is ripe with fraud and making it one of the recurring factors in his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him. As recently as this week, Trump called on Republican lawmakers in the Senate to abolish the filibuster so that a nationwide ban on the practice might be passed. By and large, the rest of the Republican Party has gone along with this over the years, but now, according to Politico, this is starting to change.

In Wisconsin, the state GOP "is preparing a full-court press of mailers, emails, phone banks, door knocks and digital ads" to convince its voters to get behind mail-in voting. State party Chair Brian Schimming told Politico that the GOP is ceding ground to Democrats by not pushing mail-in voting as a viable option, and it increasingly has little ground to spare as the 2026 midterms approach.

“Democrats have built a pretty massive structural advantage in early voting for a long, long time," Schimming explained. "And we just can’t keep going into election night 100,000 votes down and expect to make it up in 12 hours. Treating early voting as optional, or something Democrats do, is a losing gamble.”

The Pennsylvania Republican Party previously spent $16 million in 2024 to encourage members to use mail-in voting, and the party chair told Politico that a similar push is “a priority” for next year. Elsewhere, in Michigan's Monroe County, the local GOP conducted a social media campaign encouraging permanent absentee ballots for the 2025 off-year elections and plans a bigger push for 2026.

“We have to encourage people to embrace mail-in voting and early voting,” Pennsylvania GOP Chair Greg Rothman told Politico. “That has to be a priority for us in 2026.”

The need to encourage low-propensity voters will be even more needed in elections to come, Pennsylvania-based conservative activist Cliff Maloney told the outlet, as Trump will no longer be on the

“Without Trump on the ballot, the low-propensity problem is an epidemic... Republicans have to adapt or die,” Maloney explained. “The blessing here is that there’s a solution — and the solution is to actually put dollars, cents, time and energy into the same tactics that the left uses to target low-propensity voters.”

At the national level, the Republican National Committee, according to an anonymous source who spoke with Politico, "intends to build on the aggressive early mail and in-person voting campaign it ran successfully in 2024." The committee previously discouraged the method in 2020, despite the fact that mail-in voting would lower COVID-19 exposure risks, and Trump went on to lose his reelection bid that year.

It was an early sign of Democrats’ off-year electoral strength when James Malone, the former mayor of East Petersburg, defeated Lancaster County Commissioner Josh Parsons in a March special election. He became the first Democrat to represent Lancaster County in the chamber since 1889.

His victory was only by a mere 529 votes, but it was a shock to many political observers who thought a Democrat would never stand a chance in the race. The win gained national attention.

On Monday evening, Malone (D-Lancaster) officially launched his reelection campaign at Lancaster Distilleries in Columbia Borough.

“In that special election, voters from this community came together to say they were ready for something different,” Malone said. “This campaign isn’t about the noise or the chaos. It’s about neighbors. It’s about making our communities thrive. It’s about making sure Lancaster continues to grow in a way that reflects our values and our future.”

For both Malone, and Pennsylvania Democrats more broadly, the campaign launch was something like planting a flag. Despite the unique circumstances that led to his victory, the state party says it’s ready to help him win again, and are even aiming for the longshot goal of flipping the entire Senate, which is currently controlled by a 27-23 Republican majority.

“We are prepared to marshal every resource necessary,” Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Campaign Committee (SDCC) Chair Vincent Hughes told the Capital-Star. “And anyone who doubts that need only look at the results of the special election in Senator Malone’s seat earlier this year. We won it before. We can win it again. The Trump Agenda carried out by Republicans in Pennsylvania is wildly unpopular and they will answer for that in 2026.”

The 36th District race is likely to be one of the most closely watched in Pennsylvania. While the district voted strongly for Trump, it also went for Gov. Josh Shapiro by a less than 1% margin in 2022, according to data shared by the SDCC.

The path to a Senate majority is narrow, and would likely rely on Democratic Lt. Gov. Austin Davis presiding as a tie-breaker. But Democrats say they believe there are enough vulnerable Republicans up for election, and a favorable enough political environment, to eke out that victory.

Brittany Crampsie, a spokesperson with the SDCC, said along with holding onto Malone’s seat, Democrats are working to flip four other districts. They’d need to win all of them, without losing a single seat, to get a majority.

Specifically, they’re targeting the 6th District, which includes parts of Bucks County and is represented by Sen. Frank Farry (R-Bucks); the 16th District, which contains Lehigh County and is represented by Jarrett Coleman (R-Lehigh) ; the 24th District, which includes parts of Berks and Montgomery Counties and is represented by Tracy Pennycuick (R-Montgomery); and the 40th District which includes Monroe County, and is represented by Rosemary Brown (R-Monroe).

Democrats have reason to be optimistic. A number of Pennsylvania races in November’s municipal elections went their way. And a special election in a strongly Republican congressional district in Tennessee on Tuesday night has shown that momentum for the party remains strong.

While Republican Matt Van Epps won by a comfortable margin, Democrat Aftyn Benn had a surprisingly strong showing.

The district swung from one that voted for Trump by a 22 point margin in 2024, to electing a Republican by only 9 points on Tuesday.

That’s a 13 point shift. All of the Senate Districts Democrats are targeting in 2026 voted for Trump by a smaller margin in 2024, according to data shared by Crampsie.

Republicans, however, see a chance in the 36th District to retake a seat and cement their majority.

“The biggest difference from the 2025 special to the 2026 election is voters will actually know who James Malone is now,” said Michael Straw, the communications director with the Pennsylvania Senate Republican Campaign Committee (SRCC). “They’ll be well-informed about his voting record that has harmed small businesses and doesn’t represent the voters of the 36th Senate district.”

Straw added that Democrats’ recent victories have all come in off-year elections, where turnout is typically low. Only 29% of eligible voters participated in the March special election, relative to the near-80% who voted in the 2024 presidential election, an environment which Republicans believed favored Trump.

But, Republicans aren’t relying on turnout alone.

James Markley, the communications director for the Pennsylvania GOP, began his job on the day of Malone’s special election victory in March.

“It was a whirlwind,” he said and laughed.

Asked how Republicans plan to combat Democrats’ electoral gains since the 2024 election, he said they plan to pull a page from Democrats’ playbook, nodding to their recent victory in the statewide Supreme Court retention elections, which saw voters elected to retain a liberal majority on the bench.

“We saw what happened this November on election day, and we’re gonna be working extremely hard to do what we can to cut into the margins, to do a much better job facilitating and using mail-in ballots,” Markley said.

But, embracing mail-in ballots may mean Pennsylvania Republicans will be fighting against the leader of their national party, President Donald Trump.

“I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, the social media site that he owns, in August. Trump has long opposed mail-in voting and claimed, without evidence, that the practice is rife with fraud.

Still, Markley is optimistic, especially looking at voter registration trends across the commonwealth. While Democrats have maintained higher numbers of registered voters in Pennsylvania for decades, Republicans are starting to catch up.

“The biggest Republican victory in my lifetime in Pennsylvania was 2024,” Markley said. “There’s gonna be some pushback and there’s gonna be some victories for the other side in the next few years. We’re definitely seeing that, but I think Republicans are doing a great job pushing back everywhere they can. If you look at the registration numbers, they’re trending Republicans’ way.”

Another source of confidence for Malone’s team is the sustained popularity of Gov. Josh Shapiro, who will be on the ballot in 2026. Shapiro won his gubernatorial election by a roughly 15 point spread in 2022 against pro-MAGA candidate Doug Mastriano. And his approval rating remains relatively high.

Despite Shapiro eking out a victory in the district, in 2024, voters overwhelmingly chose Trump to be the next president.

Sexton hopes to use Shapiro’s popularity to Malone’s advantage, saying they plan to run “along with the governor.”

“We have good relationships there to do so,” she added. “Plus, we now have the benefit of incumbency.”

A spokesperson for Shapiro’s own reelection campaign did not respond to questions from the Capital-Star about what that might entail, or how Shapiro plans to get involved. In 2024, however, Shapiro was a visible surrogate for both the Biden and Harris presidential campaigns. His PAC also backed all Democratic row office candidates, save one who opposed Shapiro’s vice presidential ambitions.

However, Shapiro faced a far-right and conspiracy-prone candidate, Doug Mastriano, in 2022, who lost by a 15% margin. Now, the leader in the Republican primary race to unseat him is Stacy Garrity, who won reelection as treasurer in 2024 by a larger margin than any statewide candidate.

“A unique individual”

Stella Sexton, Malone’s campaign manager and vice chair of the Lancaster County Democratic Committee, called Malone “a unique individual, who is really the perfect person to have won and to hold this seat.”

She cited his eight years as mayor in East Peterson, a position he wasn’t paid for, and his upbringing in Wyoming.

“He’s not a typical politician,” she said. “He’s from Wyoming and grew up hunting and fishing for subsistence. He knows how to farm. He knows the building trades and put himself through school as a roofer. This is a guy who knows the value of hard work and can relate to people. And people sense that and feel that.”

Sexton said their campaign will focus on issues close to home: affordability, rising housing costs, school funding and supporting first responders.

“People are very concerned about the cost of living,” she said. “People want to be able to live and work in areas where they feel like they have a good home, and they have a good school district to send their kids to. We hear that a lot.”

Malone, who has a background in software development, has also been working in Harrisburg on issues related to artificial intelligence safety. He authored an amendment to a bill regulating sexually explicit deepfake images of children, known as CSAM. He was motivated by an issue in a Lancaster County school where sexually explicit images of students were created with AI and shared without consent. The bill would require teachers and other authority figures to notify investigators when made aware of such images. It passed the Senate unanimously last month.

Malone’s victory in March was something like a proof of concept for the upcoming elections. With Trump’s popularity dwindling since entering office, Democrats believe they can win in unlikely places. Holding the seat, however, in an election year that is likely to have much higher turnout, may be the real test.

Though Sexton sees November’s municipal elections as proof that they can hold on. Manheim Township’s board of commissioners, for instance, is now controlled by Democrats.

“I think we did such a good job of talking about how that was a Trump 15+ District, which it was in 2024, that some folks think, ‘Oh my gosh. How are we gonna win that?’” Sexton said.

But she pointed to Democrats’ victory in the district, with voters supporting the retention of Democratic judges on the Supreme Court.

“We’re seeing some increasing purpling here,” Sexton said. “One of the reasons for that, I think, is that the people in the district — both our candidates and our voters — were energized by [Malone’s] win, and saw a path for themselves, and really worked hard.”

Voting rights advocates are raising fears that the Trump administration may attempt to “hijack” the 2026 election after a new report revealed that a top election integrity official suggested invoking a “national emergency” to justify a federal takeover of state-run election processes.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that during a call in March with right-wing activists, the woman who has since been appointed to President Donald Trump’s newly created “election integrity” position within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had suggested that the president could declare a “national emergency” to give his government new authority to dictate election rules typically decided by state and local governments.

Heather Honey, formerly a Pennsylvania-based private investigator who came to prominence as a leading proponent of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden, said this authority would come from “an actual investigation” of the loss, which she has baselessly argued was marred by widespread fraud.

In the US, elections are administered by states, with the president having no legal authority over how they are carried out. But Honey suggested that the Trump administration has “some additional powers that don’t exist right now,” and that by using the investigation as a pretext, “we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.”

Seeming to recognize the extreme step she was proposing, Honey added: “I don’t know if that’s really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory.”

The 2020 election was subject to numerous state-level recounts and audits and over 60 failed court challenges in state and federal jurisdictions—many of which were dismissed by Republican and Trump-appointed judges for lack of merit and credible evidence.

An investigation by the Associated Press last year found that across the six battleground states Trump claimed were beset by widespread fraud, only 475 individual ballots out of millions of votes cast were flagged by election officials as “potentially” affected by fraud. Even if every single one of the ballots had been proven fraudulent, it would not have been nearly enough to swing the election result in Trump’s favor.

Meanwhile, several aides and officials who served Trump during the waning days of his first administration testified before the January 6 commission that the president was well aware he’d lost the election, but continued to push false claims of fraud in an effort to cling to power.

Matt Crane, a former Republican election official who served until earlier this year as a consultant for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—which Trump recently purged of election experts—told the Times that officials who have roposed relitigating the 2020 election “are not coming with an objective frame of mind to say, ‘Let’s look at the facts and see where that takes us.’”

“They have their destination in mind and cherry-pick facts to help stand up their crazy theories, so there’s nothing objective about it,” he said.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration had begun this effort to reboot the election fraud narrative, with Trump tapping former campaign lawyer and “Stop the Steal” proponent Kurt Olsen as a “special government employee” tasked with reinvestigating 2020. Olsen has reportedly already begun asking intelligence agencies for information about the 2020 election and has also suggested he wants to purge government employees who are disloyal to Trump.

Trump has also sought to implement many of the proposals from the “US Citizens Elections Bill of Rights,” proposed by the Election Integrity Network (EIN), a group of pro-Trump election deniers, of which Honey is a member. The group has become deeply influential during Trump’s second term, receiving a briefing from the DHS in June on how a database run by the department can be used to verify the citizenship status of registered voters, according to a report from Democracy Docket.

The group has called for new restrictions on mail-in ballots, early voting, and to make it easier for voter rolls to be scrubbed and for election results to be challenged. Many of these proposals have made it in some form or another into Trump’s executive order on elections and the SAVE Act, which Republicans passed through the House earlier this year, that would require all voters to show passports or birth certificates in order to register to vote, which voting rights groups have denounced as a “modern-day poll tax.”

As Max Flugrath, the communications director for the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, noted, “Judges have blocked Trump’s March executive order on elections—a move courts called an overreach that belongs to the states, not the White House.”

“Despite the rulings, Trump allies are pressing ahead,” Flugrath said. “The DOJ is collecting massive voter roll data, DHS is pressuring states to upload files, and Honey is spreading false claims and framing the directives as ‘best practices.’ It’s election disinformation rebranded as policy.” Those actions, he said, are being urged on by the EIN, which has promoted Trump “pushing the limits of executive power.”

Honey is just one of many EIN members with a direct line of communication to Trump.

Trump has also elevated a leading EIN operative, Marcy McCarthy—who also pushed debunked theories of widespread illegal voting in Georgia—to be CISA’s director of public affairs.

EIN’s founder, Cleta Mitchell, was notably one of the lawyers present on Trump’s phone call in January 2021 in which he attempted to pressure Georgia election officials to “find” him enough votes to be declared the winner of the state, which resulted in him being indicted three years later.

On a podcast with a Christian nationalist influencer last month, Mitchell likewise pushed the idea that Trump could use emergency powers to assert control over the election.

“The president’s authority is limited in his role with regard to elections except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States—as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have,” she said.

She seemed to suggest Trump was on board with the idea, saying, “I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.”

Flugrath said these statements, and those reported by the Times, “should be a five-alarm fire,” as they suggest Trump will use past false claims of voter fraud as “a cover to hijack elections” in the future.

He noted that in April, Trump himself seemed to echo EIN’s theories of sweeping authority, saying during a speech that “we’re gonna get good elections pretty soon” because “the states are just an agent of the federal government.”

“Trump is embedding EIN operatives into the government to push his election takeover agenda, all built on lies about his 2020 loss,” Flugrath said. “EIN seems to be using a playbook to decimate the independence and fairness of elections: Sow doubt in elections, install loyalists in government, use doubt sowed to push an ‘emergency,’ and change election rules.”

“It’s a federal strategy to control elections and rig our democracy,” he continued. “Independent elections are the foundation of freedom. If Trump can control our elections, he can dismantle other checks on power. Protecting free, state-run elections is the firewall between democracy and authoritarianism.”

In August, President Donald Trump vowed on social media to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.”

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

In Pennsylvania, though, Republicans are sending voters a different message as they work to unseat three state Supreme Court justices this November, a historically difficult feat that will require turning out as many voters as they can.

“In 2024, we voted by mail and flipped Pennsylvania red,” a video ad from the Republican State Leadership Committee said, before urging voters to go to a website to request their mail ballots for the judicial retention election.

Republican voters in the commonwealth have been getting these kinds of clashing messages for years, said veteran GOP consultant Christopher Nicholas, noting that Trump’s conflicting statements mail voting in particular has meant “it has taken our base longer to integrate new voting options.”

But as state-level Republicans increasingly embrace mail voting, it appears voters are starting to as well.

For this November’s election, about 12,000 more Republican voters have requested mail ballots than did for the last municipal election in 2023, and there are still more than three weeks left to request a ballot.

As more of these voters use mail voting, Nicholas said, it has become less “scary” to them.

How the rhetoric on mail ballots shifted

It took the party a while to get to this point.

After the 2020 election, many Republicans cast doubt on the integrity of mail voting, and some legislators even tried to repeal the 2019 law that made it easier to vote by mail in Pennsylvania.

Republican voters shied away from it, too. For the six primary and fall elections from 2021 through 2023, Republicans made up only about 22% of all requests for mail ballots.

But the Republican rhetoric on mail ballots started to shift in Pennsylvania a few years ago.

After losing his 2022 bid for governor by roughly 15 percentage points, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Trump ally, said Republicans “have to embrace no-excuse mail-in voting,” and blamed his loss on their reluctance to do so.

Last April, in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, was featured in an ad encouraging Republicans in the state to vote by mail.

“If you’re working a double shift, or family responsibilities prevent you from voting on Election Day, Joe Biden wins,” he says in the ad. “Pennsylvania, I need you to join the mail-in voting list today.”

Trump himself also encouraged mail voting at times last year.

And it seemed to have worked. In the 2024 presidential election, Republicans made up 32% of voters requesting mail ballots, a greater portion than ever before.

Still, Trump has persisted with his rhetoric against mail voting.

“ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS,” he wrote in an Aug. 18 social media post. “I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS.”

Jim Billman, chair of the Berks County GOP, said he agrees with the president’s recent statements and would like to see non-absentee mail voting eliminated, as he considers it too susceptible to fraud. But despite how he feels, he said Republicans still need to take advantage of the option in order to be competitive with Democrats.

“Even though we want to see this end someday, right now, it is the law of the land,” he said, so his advice to voters is “If you can’t get out to cast your ballot in person, cast a mail-in ballot.”

Infrequent voters are the target

When considering turnout, political parties and activists often think of voters in terms of how often they vote within a four-year election cycle. A “four year,” or “4y,” voter is one who votes every election, and can generally be counted on to cast a ballot.

But voters who rarely or never cast ballots, or only vote in the even-numbered years associated with bigger federal elections, are the ones parties hope might use mail ballots.

These are the “iffy votes” that Billman said he’s targeting for mail-in ballots. “You really have no excuse if your mail-in ballot comes to your house.”

The state Republican Party takes a similar line. James Markley, communications director for the Pennsylvania GOP, told Votebeat and Spotlight PA that while mail voting has its flaws, the party encourages voters to use any “legal means necessary” to cast their vote.

“If mail-in balloting is part of the process, and voters can’t make it to the polls on Election Day, then they should request a mail-in ballot and make sure their voices are heard,” he said.

The state GOP’s website gives three ways to cast a ballot, with the first two being versions of mail voting, and in-person voting listed third.

Scott Presler, a conservative activist who primarily focuses on turning out swing state voters for Trump, has also been pushing mail voting heavily on his social media pages, calling it an “emergency backup ballot” voters can use if they are unable to make it to the polls on Election Day.

Nicholas, the Republican consultant, said that for party officials, how GOP voters turn in their ballot is much less important than making sure they vote.

“Winning a campaign,” he said, “is preeminent.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Donald Trump uses a well-worn technique of saying several distinctly different things in one exchange, or in a series of exchanges, allowing people—including media, but also voters—to choose what they want to hear.

A case in point in the past few days is his answer regarding running for a third term, something that the 22nd amendment explicitly prohibits for any president elected to two previous terms.

A reporter asked Trump about Steve Bannon’s recent interview with The Economist, in which Bannon referred to a “plan” that would get around the 22nd amendment to make Trump president. “Trump is going to be president in 2028. And people just ought to get accommodated with that,” Bannon claimed.

Trump answered the question by saying this: “I haven’t really thought about it… but I have the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.” (That was a joke, as Trump’s numbers are in the toilet—but he doesn’t pass up any opportunity to spread disinformation.) And then he said, we “have great people,” floating Marco Rubio and JD Vance as strong candidates for president, suggesting he would not be running for president.

But then Trump added, “I would love to do it,” followed by this ambiguous line: “Am I not ruling it out? I mean, you’ll have to tell me.”

When asked about a scheme racing around right-wing circles in which he would run for vice president in 2028—which is legally dubious, but less clear cut—and then become president after his running mate resigns once in the Oval Office, Trump appeared to throw cold water on it while also saying he’s “allowed” to do it:

Yeah, I’d be allowed to do that…You’d be allowed to do that, but I wouldn’t do that. I think it’s too cute. Yeah, I would rule that out, because it’s too cute. I think the people wouldn’t like that. It’s too cute. It’s not—it wouldn’t be right.

So, in this entire exchange, Trump both promoted the idea of running and refused to rule it out—which tracks with statements and actions this year, including trolling online with Trump 2028 hats—and suggested he wouldn’t run by promoting other candidates for president while dismissing what appears to be the only semi-debatable way he could legally become president again.

People can take from it what they want. Most of the media reported on both responses—Trump dismissing running for VP as “too” cute but not ruling out a third term—but there was little in-depth coverage of how Trump would seek a third term. I believe that’s because it would mean speculating that he’s lying about not using the VP loophole or that he will engage in a coup. And our corporate media is deathly afraid of going to either place.

It’s possible Trump is promoting the idea of a third term, as some suggest, merely to elevate his power and put fear into people while he doesn’t have actual intentions of seeking it. A lame duck president is seen as weak, and Trump may be trying to scare Republicans in Congress, so they don’t begin pushing against him.

At the same time, we cannot rule anything out with Trump. And media should be deeply delving into anything he says, laying out the scenarios.

There’s nothing in the major news outlets, however, about the possibility of Trump staging a coup—even though he attempted to do so in 2020 and sent his MAGA mob to attack the Capitol. Conservative former appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig, writing in the Atlantic, explained this week just how much easier it would be for Trump to be successful the next time:

Today, Trump has vastly greater powers than he did in 2020. He has a willing vice president to preside over the joint session of Congress that will certify (or not) the next election, a second in command who refuses to admit that his boss lost the 2020 election. (Vance has said that he would not have certified the results without asking states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia to submit new slates of electors, a solution he invented to a problem that does not exist—there is no evidence of widespread fraud in those states or any state in 2020.)
Trump’s party controls both houses of Congress, and he will surely do everything he can to maintain those majorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has paved the way for a third Trump term, as it did for his current term, by essentially granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.

This kind of discussion is exactly what corporate media should be raising. They may claim it’s too conspiratorial and speculative, but the truth is that they’re just plain afraid. After all, it’s nothing out of the realm of possibility for Trump, because he’s attempted it all before.

They fall back on Trump giving mixed messages, and much of the public that wants to deny what Trump says follows suit. But how many times in the past nine months have we heard from Trump supporters, from Joe Rogan and the bro podcasters to average Trump voters, who’ve soured on Trump and now say they only thought he’d be going after hardened criminals—”the worst of the worst”—in his mass deportations?

How many times have we seen them express astonishment at the tariffs to which they are now strongly opposed? How many times have we watched as they expressed shock about mass firings in the government or attacks on foreign leaders and lands?

Trump said he was going to do all of this. He explicitly discussed deporting tens of millions of people during the 2024 campaign, for example, and even raised the reality of deporting mothers whose children are American citizens.

But people pre-disposed to like Trump’s rage and who were easily conned by his economic promises only heard what they wanted to hear. And much of the media has enabled this by not digging deeply into what Trump says, particularly when he purposely puts out mixed messages like a smorgasbord for people to choose from.

Right-wing UFC star Bryce Mitchell, an evangelical Christian who said during the campaign that he’d “take a bullet” for Trump, is now calling Trump the “Antichrist.” The fighter wrote on Instagram this week:

I do not like the guy at all…
Putting America last, and now he’s blaming the beef farmers for the price of beef. Hey, I’m not biased, man. He talked a good game, he tricked me. It fooled me. I admit it.

I’m glad he admits he was tricked and fooled. But again, it’s not like Trump didn’t say what he was going to do during the campaign. People who choose what they want to hear need to be hit over the head again and again with facts and analyses of potential outcomes. And unfortunately, our media didn’t do that and still isn’t doing it.

Like what you're reading?

Ahead of Tuesday, Donald Trump is using five strategies to overturn the election, according to CNN.

The former president's campaign team has placed "an intense focus on Pennsylvania" — a critical battleground state — the news outlet reports.

Per the report, "Trump has already claimed without evidence that his opponents are cheating in the state, both on his social media and at campaign rallies. At a Tuesday rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump claimed that the discovery of hundreds of suspected fraudulent voter registration applications in Lancaster County was evidence of cheating."

The second way the GOP nominee is setting the stage for election interference, is through billionaire "Elon Musk’s misinformation machine."

READ MORE: 'It’s not even close!' Trump melts down over new report on conservative state collapse

CNN reports, "In Michigan this past week, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson tried to push back on a claim Musk shared about registered voters in Michigan, accusing him of 'spreading dangerous disinformation.' Musk responded that Benson was 'blatantly lying to the public.'"

Furthermore, the report notes, "Musk was latching onto claims alleging there were more ballots cast in Michigan’s early voters than there were identified voters, which the secretary of state’s office said was due to a data 'formatting error' that was corrected."

Third, Trump and Republican allies are "manipulating early voting numbers."

The former president, CNN reports, "claimed he had won because he was ahead, ignoring the fact that the in-person votes, which tended to be more Republican-leaning, had been counted ahead of mail-in ballots, which leaned more Democratic."

READ MORE: Conservative pastor makes the case for Harris

However, since Republicans have "embraced mail voting this year and there’s no pandemic pushing millions to vote that way, a similar phenomenon could still happen this election."

The fourth way Trump wants to thwart the election results, are through "baseless claims of rampant non-citizen voting."

The news outlet notes that "experts say illegal voting by non-citizens is extremely rare, and when it does happen, it is usually caught quickly. A recent Georgia audit of the 8.2 million people on its rolls found just 20 registered noncitizens – only nine of whom had voted."

Lastly, Trump is stoking "fears of another attempt to challenge the result."

Although Congress has taken steps "to blunt any attempt to of a 2020 repeat," by updating "the Electoral Count Act, the law that governs the January 6 congressional certification of the presidential election, in an attempt to make it harder to block certification," the ex-president "and his allies have been laying the groundwork to try to dispute the election should he lose."

READ MORE: GOP officials in small swing state town slam Trump’s 'Third World hell hole' claim: report

A group of right-wing activists, according to CNN, have already invoked the "Stop the Steal" movement by "telling their supporters that the only way Trump can lose in 2024 is through fraud."

CNN contributor and Republican campaign attorney Ben Ginsberg said, "It’s unfortunate that he sees his path back to the White House as denigrating a basic American institution like elections. If you’re just starting to pay attention to this, the claims that you’re hearing in 2024 about the election system not being reliable is extraordinarily similar to what he and his supporters were saying in 2020."

CNN's full report is available here.

President Donald Trump has long criticized the integrity of mail ballots. But leading up to the 2024 election, Republicans spent millions of dollars encouraging supporters to vote early, including by mail, hoping to bank votes ahead of Election Day. Even Trump encouraged his supporters to use them.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

“ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS,” Trump, then the Republican nominee, posted on social media in April 2024.

That embrace didn’t last. In a new social media post this week that was full of false claims about elections — and signaled solidarity on the topic with Russian President Vladimir Putin — Trump promised to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” among other things, and wrote that an executive order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections” is coming.

Trump is only the latest to swing between support and skepticism of mail voting, a method that has divided the parties for decades.

Mail voting has been in use in American elections since the Civil War, though even then, as now, there were differences in how states administered it. Today, all states allow some form of it, and 28 states allow voters to cast ballots by mail for any reason. Eight states, including Republican-dominated Utah, as well as Washington D.C. allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail.

A bipartisan 2005 report from a commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Republican, concluded that absentee ballots were the greatest potential source of fraud, a finding often cited by critics of the method.

Voter fraud happens, but experts agree that it’s exceedingly rare and leaves a long paper trail. Election officials have multiple safeguards designed to catch any attempt.

Since 2008, an MIT Election Lab project called the Survey of the Performance of American Elections conducted after every federal election has asked voters whether they support running all elections by mail. Republican support was typically flat, while growing numbers of Democrats and independents supported the idea. Then, in 2020, when the pandemic supercharged mail ballot use, Democratic support spiked, while Republican support declined.

The partisan gap shrank considerably in 2024, the survey found, even as mail ballot use dropped from pandemic-fueled heights. But it’s still a bigger gap than it was before the pandemic. The survey also found Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe that voter fraud, including absentee ballot fraud, happens frequently.

Public opinion, of course, shifts. As Votebeat has reported, Republicans in 1991 made Arizona one of the first states in the country to allow voting by mail with no excuse, and the option has been wildly popular. But by 2022, against the backdrop of Trump’s claims about mail-in ballots, Republicans in the state were trying (so far unsuccessfully) to eliminate the option.

Even Carter and the Carter Center urged states to expand mail voting in 2020 during the pandemic, stressing the commission’s earlier conclusion that fraud was rare when safeguards were in place.

It isn’t clear what steps Trump will take to attempt to limit use of mail ballots. Under the Constitution, states have authority over the “time, place and manner of elections.” Congress also has some authority. Any attempt by Trump to eliminate mail voting by fiat would be quickly challenged in the courts, and legal experts stress it would be unlikely to succeed. Federal judges have already blocked key provisions of an executive order on elections Trump issued in March, citing his lack of authority over elections.

Comments from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt this week signaled a legislative effort could be in the works.

“The White House continues to work on this, and when Congress comes back to Washington I’m sure there will be many discussions with our friends on Capitol Hill, and also our friends in state legislatures across the country, to ensure that we’re protecting the integrity of the vote for the American people,” she said.

Ultimately, the fight isn’t just in the courts — it’s in public perception. And there, the verdict is far from settled.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

As Donald Trump and Kamala Harris campaign in Pennsylvania on the last day before the presidential election, false claims of voter fraud are spreading. “The truth is, none of these lies have been about election integrity. It’s always been about power,” says Neil Makhija, chair of the board of elections in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania — the battleground state that “could decide the election” — in a video essay featured by The New York Times. Makhija joins Democracy Now! to discuss his work expanding access to the vote and debunking the myth of mass voter fraud.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: “You’re Being Lied To About Voter Fraud. Here’s the Truth.” That’s the headline of a New York Times guest essay by Neil Makhija, the chair of the board of elections in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, who will help oversee elections in Montgomery County in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are campaigning today. As Trump continues to stir up false claims of voter fraud and similar rumors are flooding social media ahead of Election Day, we begin the show with a video Makhija published with his essay called “Our Elections Are Secure. The Right to Vote Is Not.” The video is illustrated by Molly Crabapple and produced with Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt.

NEIL MAKHIJA: Picture this: an America where your voice matters equally, as much as anyone else’s, where your voice carries the same weight, no matter who you are, where you’re from or what you have. That’s the promise of democracy: one person, one vote. Sounds simple, right? But it’s revolutionary. And right now that promise is in danger.

It started in earnest in 2020, when falsehoods spread about our elections became part of a calculated effort to undermine our collective voice. Since then, election deniers have been telling Americans that millions of votes are being cast illegally, by dead people, by people coming in from outside the border, by people stuffing drop boxes with illegal ballots. Election deniers brought these claims to court and lost in over 60 cases before judges of both parties. Yet the lies persist and have exploded into violence.

We saw this play out in the events of January 6th, when people who believed in the lies tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. It also hit closer to home. Just a few weeks after that, someone claiming the election was stolen fired gunshots into a campaign headquarters right here in Montgomery County, across the street from my office.

My name is Neil Makhija. Here in the battleground of Pennsylvania, I’ve been part of a new generation of election officials who are trying to combat the attacks on our democracy. I was born the son of immigrants and grew up in a small coal and steel town. I saw firsthand that while my family was different, we held shared values of hard work and opportunity in common with all of our neighbors. I also saw how easily our communities could be divided over differences.

By 2020, I was teaching election law in Philadelphia. I had to explain to my students why some folks were trying to throw out millions of legally cast votes in Pennsylvania. I knew I couldn’t just teach about this stuff anymore. I had to do something. So I ran for office, and in 2023, I won. Now, as a Montgomery County commissioner, I oversee the elections for 865,000 people. I became the first Asian American to hold this position in all of Pennsylvania’s history. My fellow commissioner, Jamila Winder, is the first Black woman. We are living proof of what democracy can look like.

When I took office as chair of the board of elections, I found that the lies about our elections have become worse than ever. Every public meeting is now full of conspiracy theories. But here’s what I’ve learned: Our elections are secure. You are more likely to get struck by lightning than to find voter fraud. Here’s why.

We have layers of protection to ensure that no one can vote more than once. And starting when a person registers to vote, we make sure that they’re eligible citizens over 18 by Election Day. Whether you vote in person or by mail, there are full paper trails every step of the way. Mail-in ballot envelopes are stamped with unique bar codes. They can be safely returned through secure drop boxes, which are monitored 24/7. Our county voter services and sheriffs manage highly secure daily pickups of the ballots. And every single ballot is scanned and kept safe and secure. After each election, we conduct multiple public audits to detect any irregularities. If we do detect an issue, or if it’s just a very close election, the law requires a full recount.

Pulling off widespread voter fraud with 10,000 different locally run elections across the country would be like trying to rob every bank in America at the same time. It’s just not happening. In my county alone, on Election Day, we have 2,700 poll workers across 430 precincts. These are your friends and neighbors, of all parties, working together to help everyone vote. Witnessing the incredible care that goes into ensuring everyone has a chance to vote, most county officials will appropriately certify an election.

If our elections are this secure, the truth is, none of these lies have been about election integrity. It’s always been about power. American democracy started with just 6% of people being eligible to vote. It took generations upon generations of activists subjecting themselves to violent opposition to expand voting rights to women, to people of color and young people, to a majority of our country. These rights were hard won.

There are some who are afraid of democracy in an ever-evolving, inclusive America. They’re part of a shrinking minority that wants to entrench itself in power and enact policies that set us back to a time when we had no rights. Instead of celebrating record voter participation in recent years, anti-democracy politicians have run for office specifically to introduce laws making it harder for us to vote. They continue to lie about the security of our process, and even go as far as to deny the certification of free and fair elections. Inevitably, this leads to violence. This isn’t just an attack on voting. It’s part of an attack on the American ideal that we all deserve a voice.

To protect democracy, we can’t just play defense. We need to go on offense to expand voting rights and access. We can make early voting easier, provide language assistance, support community voting centers. We can even bring mobile polling places to senior centers or college campuses where voters don’t drive. We need a movement in every corner of the country to celebrate our hard-won right to vote.

It’s time to step up and support those who will hold sacred our democratic process, who will reject violence and accept the outcome of elections, no matter the result. The vast majority of us agree on this, because, in the end, this is bigger than a policy debate. America is on the cusp of something unprecedented, a truly multiracial, inclusive democracy where we respect our differences and our rights, where our highest courts and halls of power truly seek to represent the best interests of everyone. That’s never existed before, not here, not anywhere. That America is within our grasp at this moment, but it could slip away. This is the dream we’ve been chasing since 1776. It’s now up to us to make it real.

AMY GOODMAN: Neil Makhija, chair of the election board in Montgomery, Pennsylvania, reading his guest essay, “Our Elections Are Secure. The Right to Vote Is Not,” the video picked up by The New York Times. It was illustrated by Molly Crabapple and produced with Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt. When we come back, we’ll speak with Commissioner Makhija, as well as former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission, Larry Noble. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “The Witching Hour” by Quincy Jones. The musical icon has died at the age of 91. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are both headed to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, today on the final day of campaigning before Tuesday’s election. Harris is scheduled to hold three other events in Pennsylvania: in Scranton, in Allentown and Philadelphia. Trump is also heading to Raleigh, North Carolina; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Grand Rapids, Michigan, tonight.

More than 78 million voters have already cast their ballots in the 2024 election. For months, pollsters have predicted the presidential race will come down to seven states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. But over the weekend, the most prominent pollster in Iowa, Ann Selzer, released the Des Moines Register poll which showed Harris has taken a shocking three-point lead in Iowa, which Trump easily won in 2016 and 2020. The poll showed women voters have shifted heavily toward Harris in Iowa, where a six-week abortion ban took effect in July.

For more, we go to the battleground state of Pennsylvania. We’re joined by Neil Makhija, who serves as Montgomery County commissioner and chair of the board of elections in the county, the most populous suburb of Philadelphia. Also with us in Potomac, Maryland, is Larry Noble, the former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission, now adjunct professor at American University Washington College of Law.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Neil Makhija, that was a fascinating video essay you did of your life and the elections in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. It seems, especially as this Des Moines Register poll has come out, which predicted Trump’s victory in Iowa in 2016 and 2020, but now, clearly, it has so shocked even the Trump campaign, he has doubled down on allegations of fraud around the country, and particularly focusing on Pennsylvania, where he and Kamala Harris will be today. Talk more about why you think the elections are safer than they’ve ever been, yet the allegations of fraud are greater than ever.

NEIL MAKHIJA: So, thank you so much for having me on for this topic.

And, you know, when I took office earlier this year, I had thought that we would have seen some of the disinformation die down after 2020, given that the former president took these claims to court in 60 cases, as the video describes, and lost, because there was never any evidence of widespread fraud. But unfortunately, as we’ve seen with other misinformation online, the more they repeat it, the more people believe it. And so, he’s got friends like Elon Musk that are perpetuating the idea that there are millions of votes being cast illegally, whether it’s from noncitizens or from individuals they don’t even describe, they can’t prove, they can’t show. They’re perpetuating this idea that our system is not secure.

And what I’ve done and tried to do throughout my tenure this year is make sure that in our communities, and more broadly, we’re giving people the facts, step by step, on all the safeguards that exist here in Pennsylvania and across the country. And as you say, they are more secure than ever, because our system has been challenged and questioned to such a degree that we’ve reviewed every step of the process and done everything we can to make sure that the process has integrity. And when you have it being run by 2,800 poll workers, as we do here in Montgomery County, you have people from all political parties, friends and neighbors, simply helping each other vote and exercise their fundamental rights. So, when Trump casts doubt on that, he’s really casting doubt on ordinary people.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain why Pennsylvania is so crucial to the election of president of the United States, Neil.

NEIL MAKHIJA: Well, all eyes are on Pennsylvania. And the candidates are here today, the day before the election, because we have 19 electoral votes, and this is a state that, from all indications, is the closest race in the country. It could decide — it could decide the election.

It’s a big, diverse state. I grew up in a coal and steel town in a rural part of the state where a lot has changed and, unfortunately, has been more receptive to the message of Donald Trump. But there’s both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, as well as, most importantly, the suburbs, including where I am in Montgomery County, that have shifted in the other direction, that are likely places where Kamala Harris is going to make gains. And yet the state remains divided quite evenly. I think the Selzer poll is interesting. I think some of the polling could be off, because they could be hurting and afraid to show that someone is breaking into an advantage.

But what we’re seeing right now in Montgomery County is that people are voting at historic rates. And what we don’t know is: Are there crossover votes happening? We know more Republicans are voting by mail than in 2020, and fewer Democrats. A lot of that is by nature of us getting past the pandemic and people feeling OK walking into their polling place. But we’ve had about 160,000 people vote already, and we expect several — three to four times that in person. So, we’re looking for historic turnout here in the suburbs.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how the motor election vans work?

NEIL MAKHIJA: Yes. So, look, when I took office, we wanted to do everything possible to make it easier for people to vote. And one of those things was expanding satellite locations, where you can request a mail-in ballot and submit it on the spot. And we decided to create a mobile satellite office, basically, a voter van. It’s kind of like an ice cream truck where you can submit your ballot. You can register to vote, request it and submit it all on the spot.

And the idea there was to change the story. Right now people are fearful. They are concerned about the integrity of the election. But in the process of getting out there and educating people, I’m trying to let them know that exercising our right to vote is something to be celebrated. And so, we show up in Montgomery County with our voter van. It’s the first of its kind in Pennsylvania. We go to senior centers and college campuses, and we simply make it easy for people to vote on the spot.

And, of course, the Republicans and their lawyers sued me immediately when we set this up. But thankfully, it continues to roll. We stopped on college campus at Bryn Mawr College here in Montgomery County. I remember being asked by someone on the right, “Why did you stop at a women’s college?” I said, “Well, because women have the right to vote.” So, we have to remind some folks on the right that, in fact, helping people vote is simply helping us live up to the promise of our democratic ideals.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Elon Musk, who promised to give away $1 million a day to voters who sign up with his America PAC. He’s been sued by the Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner for calling it an illegal — he calls it an illegal lottery scheme. Can you talk about the effect of this?

NEIL MAKHIJA: So, I think one of the ironies about those who are perpetuating the lie that there is widespread fraud are often the people who are committing the fraud, and first and foremost Donald Trump in his attempt, as we all know, in Georgia to find 11,000-some votes and to pressure election officials to do so. But now Elon Musk, who’s being told by the Department of Justice that his scheme may violate the law and that they’re investigating him, and he’s also been sued by the district attorney of Philadelphia for operating an illegal lottery.

And fundamentally, it’s very clear that they will say and do anything. And it’s concerning, because if they lose, it’s going to really be a question of what their supporters do after the fact. And that’s the biggest concern for me right now, is if we know on election night, if, say, the Selzer poll is accurate and Kamala Harris does very well, are any of their supporters going to believe the results, going to trust the results, despite the integrity of the process?