Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take lead in ruby red Iowa near Election Day
Donald Trump is re-using his 2020 playbook to baselessly claim the 2024 election is being stolen from him and is being joined by allies with big megaphones amplifying his falsehoods ahead of Election Day.
Trump has made repeated false claims that Democrats are cheating in the election, and he’s twisted isolated problems with voting leading up to Election Day, all in an effort to prime his supporters to falsely believe the election is not legitimate if he loses.
This includes saying voting by noncitizens is a widespread problem. He’s claimed there’s no verification for overseas or military ballots. He’s claimed election officials are using early voting to commit fraud. He’s claimed that massive swaths of mail-in ballots are illegitimate, even as he’s encouraged his supporters to use mail voting this time around.
Most importantly, Trump has claimed that the only way Vice President Kamala Harris can win the election is by cheating.
The claims are baseless.
“It’s unfortunate that he sees his path back to the White House as denigrating a basic American institution like elections,” said Ben Ginsberg, a CNN contributor and Republican campaign attorney who has served as general counsel for several previous GOP nominees. “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.”
In 2020, Trump lost a close election, and then spent two months trying to overturn the result. In 2024, with polls signaling a razor-thin election in seven battleground states, election officials are bracing for another firehose of misinformation about the result – especially if the election hinges on the results of hundreds of ballots in one or two states.
Election experts say that despite the viral and hyperbolic claims, the vast majority of voters will almost assuredly experience a swift and uneventful experience whenever they vote, whether it’s through early voting, vote-by-mail or on Election Day.
As early voting has gotten underway, many local and state officials are showing they intend to proactively knock down falsehoods about the election that spread like wildfire on social media.
Voter fraud is rare, but when it does happen, it is usually caught thanks to the layers of safeguards built into voting processes, according to nonpartisan election experts.
“It’s really useful to remind people in this time of heightened anxiety, all the way around, that they’re still in charge (to decide the election outcome),” said Justin Levitt, a CNN contributor and election law expert at Loyola Law School who served as a voting rights adviser in the Biden White House.
“There’s a ton of noise out there right now. If this election is more than a 537-vote margin in any of the swing states, none of the noise will matter,” Levitt added, referencing the margin in Florida during the disputed 2000 presidential election.
Still, that hasn’t always stopped conspiracy theories from spreading on social media – including from Elon Musk, the CEO of X, who has poured tens of millions of dollars into boosting Trump’s campaign. Election officials warn they’re outmatched and struggling to combat the wave of falsehoods coming from Musk and his platform.