How Donald Trump Threatens The Legitimacy of U.S. Elections

Under heavy pressure, swing-state Republicans are changing the rules of the game

Donald Trump speaking on July 26, 2024. (Credit: Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons 2.0)

Donald Trump has threatened to jail his opponents if he wins the presidency. In a September 7 Truth Social post, he wrote, "WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.” (Cheating in elections is incredibly rare and did not affect the outcome of the 2020 election.)

While Trump's increasingly lurid rhetoric -- such as claiming that immigrants are eating people's pets -- is grabbing headlines, these other (for him) more familiar threats matter too. State and local officials are making potentially consequential decisions about the rules of the election, which is less than 45 days away. Trump's threats of potential jail time are undeniably adding to the pressure local and state officials are under to bend to his will.

In Nebraska, Republicans in the state legislature are considering changing the state's allocation of its five electoral votes from by congressional district to winner-take-all. Trump and allies like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have personally lobbied for the change. Vice President Kamala Harris is slightly favored to win the state's congressional district encompassing Omaha and its suburbs. Were this rule change to pass, Harris winning the "blue wall" states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would no longer be enough to win: it would change a 270-268 victory into a 269-269 tie, sending the election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where Trump would likely win. However, influential Omaha Republican state senator, Mike McDonnell, and two other Republican state senators, remain opposed to this change. The pressure they are under must be extraordinary. Until the day before the election, Nebraska's unicameral legislature could vote to change the rule, which is supported by the state's Republican governor. (Democrats in Maine, the only other state that allocates its electoral votes by congressional district, have likely run out of time to counter Nebraska's potential shift as its laws only take effect after 90 days. An effort this past spring to change Nebraska’s rules failed to gain traction as Maine could have made its change moot.) 

In the swing state of Georgia, Republicans have already changed the rules. On September 20, three members of the state's board of elections -- who were praised by Trump at an August Atlanta rally -- voted to approve a rule that requires poll workers to count the number of ballots by hand after voting is completed. One Democratic and one nonpartisan member of the State Election Board voted against the measure, which has come under criticism from the state's Republican attorney general, Chris Carr, and secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. Carr's office said that the rule isn't "tethered" to any state law, and Raffensperger said the "misguided" law would likely delay the reporting of results and introduces risks to the chain of custody. Carr and Raffensperger, who Trump personally threatened in 2020, have actual expertise on conducting free and fair elections -- but it is unlikely that the election board would ever listen to them in the face of Trump's pressure. (The board has made other dubious changes, which are currently in litigation, as this measure seems likely headed for.)

Georgia's latest change seems designed to sow doubt about the legitimacy of elections and will likely become fodder for disinformation campaigns. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump and his allies spread lies about how the ballots were counted in states that he narrowly lost. These lies inspired the U.S. Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, which, for several hours, violently interrupted the counting of electoral votes. In a Trump second term, J.D. Vance would certify future election results as vice president; Vance has repeatedly said that he wouldn't have certified the results of the free and fair 2020 election.

Many Republicans believe Trump's allegations of cheating, since they view him as the most reliable source for election-related information.