The GOP's new scheme for this election

It entails recruiting voters to attack other voters

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

With forty-two days until the election, the polls have Harris and Trump neck and neck, with Harris slightly ahead. The question on everyone’s mind is who will persuade the most voters to register, go to the polls, and cast votes for them.

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But as I argued in a column for The Bulwark, the better question to ask right now is whether Trump and the Republican party machinery will succeed in their myriad efforts to cheat their way back into the Oval Office. We all remember the “Stop the Steal” campaign from the 2020 election. There were over 60 frivolous mass voter challenges initiated to support the spread of the Big Lie (that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump).

But this year, instead of filing lawsuits over ballot counting, Republican-backed groups are focusing their efforts on preemptively challenging perceived deficiencies in voter eligibility. The goal? To “clean up” voter rolls before the election.

What are “mass voter challenges?”

A “mass voter challenge” involves individual voters across the United States questioning the eligibility of hundreds or thousands of voters all at once. As I mentioned, we saw a lot of these after the 2020 election in an effort by Trump and his supporters to spread the fabricated story that Democrats stole the election from them—which has been proven to be false over and over again.

The idea behind the mass voter challenges is a string of false claims, including dead voters filling up the voter rolls, people registering to vote where they do not live, or that the rolls are full of people who are not American citizens.

The challenges use technological software that allows amateur sleuths intent on finding election fraud to log in, investigate, and evaluate voter eligibility using what they find on the Internet and social media. Then, if they identify what they deem to be a problem, they can use systems like True the Vote and EagleAI to file a challenge with their state official.