5 ways Trump is planning to thwart election results: report

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."

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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."

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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."

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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.