A friend recently sent me a message on Instagram with the note, “Enjoy this throwback to 2016” and shared the debate clip when Hillary Clinton reminded everyone that Donald Trump has a history of complaining about “rigging.” It’s worth revisiting Clinton’s comments in their entirety:
“Every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction he claims whatever it is is rigged against him. The FBI conducted a yearlong investigation into my emails. They concluded there was no case. He said the FBI was rigged. He lost the Iowa caucus. He lost the Wisconsin primary. He said the Republican primary was rigged against him. Then Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering. He claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged. This is a mindset. This is how Donald thinks. And it’s funny but it’s also really troubling. That is not the way our democracy works. We’ve been around for 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections. We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them. And that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.”
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In the eight years since she warned us, we have endured his Big Lie of 2020, the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, and we are bracing ourselves for what further disinformation will infect Election Day and beyond. If Trump ultimately falls behind or loses, we should absolutely expect the post-election period to be characterized by lies meant to disrupt the election process and democracy itself.
How could election be subverted? Deceive, disrupt and deny
Election experts at Protect Democracy, a cross-ideological nonprofit dedicated to defeating the authoritarian threat and building more resilient democratic institutions, compiled a comprehensive 2024 Election Subversion Strategy that outlines three tactics election deniers are using to lay the groundwork for claims that the 2024 election was rigged: Deceive, disrupt, deny.
First is to deceive the electorate by spreading disinformation through bad actors across media and social media in order to erode voter confidence. We are already seeing this in 2024 through challenges to voter status, disinformation about noncitizen voters (look no further than Wisconsin’s statewide referendum on noncitizen voting) and demands that ballots be counted by hand.
Second is to disrupt or otherwise cause chaos in the electoral process. This could be accomplished by making unlawful threats to election officials or targeting them with ads that suggest they don’t have to certify results. It also could take the form of recruiting confrontational poll observers or poll workers in swing states and training them to be “spies”. Or it could be filing “zombie lawsuits” – which are filed despite having no chance of succeeding but can be used to overrule voters afterward.
Finally, deny any certification of election results they do not like. This could look like Trump once again claiming victory before all of the votes have been counted considering we could very likely not have a clear winner on Election Night. It could also look like another campaign meant to pressure local officials whose job it is to certify results at the county level or interest with the Electoral College process.
Maybe Trump will win outright and all of this hand wringing about election denialism will be for naught. But if he doesn’t, what do we, the people who trust that our elections are safe and secures, do to counteract these strategies so that they don’t gain enough momentum? We come stocked with accurate information and the truth.
Pro-democracy groups have organized and prepared to push back
What sets 2024 apart from 2020 is how much more organized and prepared national pro-democracy organizations have been to strategize their counter offense to bad actors. In addition to Protect Democracy, the Brennan Center for Justice, Informing Democracy, and others have a myriad of research, whitepapers, FAQs and more readily available for people to read and share.
For statewide election information, go straight to the horse’s mouth: The Wisconsin Elections Commission. It has a section on its website where it debunks voting and election myths like “Were more than 1,000 absentee ballots sent to ineligible voters in the 2024 General Election?” The answer is no. WEC also outlines the handful of cases where voter fraud attempts were made and prevented.
For more local information, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has been feverishly publishing transparent voting information from what poll observers can and cannot do, to explaining why Milwaukee will report a final count after midnight, to filming an undisrupted demonstration of election day voting equipment.
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The League of Women Voters Wisconsin has also published a series of articles called BallotBulletin that explains everything from pre-election equipment testing to election rules regarding convicted felons.
Unfortunately, when it comes to some people, no amount of evidence will dissuade them from believing that there is no way Trump could lose other than massive fraud.
Those of us standing up for the truth need to be prepared to be louder than the election deniers, supported by accurate information and ready to condemn, correct and call out the lies.
Kristin Brey is the “My Take” columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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