Can Trump And The GOP Steal The 2024 Election?

Why it will be much more difficult for Trump and his Republican enablers to steal this year's election.

Former US President Donald Trump with the US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Photo by Justin Lane - Pool/Getty Images.

Activist documentarian Lauren Windsor, the woman who recently surreptitiously recorded conversations with the Alitos, released another pair of recordings on Tuesday, this time of Trump ally and pardoned felon, Roger Stone. Stone was instrumental in Trump’s Stop the Steal campaign, and he was fairly forthcoming about his plans to undo yet another democratic election.

Windsor and a colleague asked Stone, in two different instances, how Republicans would secure the election this time, and Stone replied, “We’re working on this.” He added that their side will be armed with “lawyers, judges, technology,” all in place to challenge the official results if needed.  

“At least this time when they do it, you have a lawyer and a judge—his home phone number standing by—so you can stop it,” Stone continued. “We made no preparations last time, none… There are technical, legal steps that we have to take to try and have a more honest election. We’re not there yet, but there’s things that can be done.”

All this leads to some important questions: Will the Trump Campaign try to pull off another overturning of the election results? If so, will they face new obstacles in such an attempt, and will the guardrails hold? Finally, is there a point of vulnerability we should know about?

In today’s piece, I’ll delve into why I think it’s clear they will attempt a repeat of 2020’s “Stop the Steal” effort to overturn Biden’s election win. I’ll also discuss why it will be a much harder climb for them this time around, not only because we are aware of the threat, but because of important political and legal developments since January 2021. Finally, I will highlight one risk that we should all keep our eyes on and prepare for well in advance by sounding and amplifying the alarm now.

As we get closer and closer to the 2024 Presidential election, we’ll be covering important questions and concerns like this. If you’re able to, upgrade to a paid subscription today to help continue to make work like this possible.

Stop the Steal, version 2024

Key allies of Donald Trump have made no secret of their plans to challenge the election. For example, Steve Bannon, who is scheduled to go to federal prison on July 1 for two counts of contempt of Congress, recently suggested another violent MAGA reaction should Trump lose at the ballot box. At an extremist Turning Point Action rally in Michigan this week, Bannon exhorted the crowd to action. “If they steal this election, and they fully intend to steal it, this republic ends. Are you prepared to fight? Are you prepared to give it all? Are you prepared to leave it all on the battlefield?” 

Most of Trump’s top possible VP picks have refused to state on the record that they will accept the November election results. Contenders like Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) instead hedge their answers, saying that they will only accept them if the Democrats did not cheat. This of course is highly disingenuous. It falsely suggests that the Democrats cheated in 2020, even though there isn’t a shred of evidence to support that claim. If they proceed in 2024 in a similar evidence-free way, mere allegations of election fraud could justify, at least in their minds, a refusal to accept the results.

Trump himself has often suggested that the Democrats will attempt to steal the election, justifying some kind of response from the GOP. Before the same crowd Bannon spoke to in Michigan, Trump declared, “We got more votes than anybody's ever had. We need to watch the vote. We need to guard the vote. We need to stop the steal.” (He then confusingly, and deploying typical Trumpian word vomit, added, “We don’t need the votes. We have to stop, focus, don’t worry about the votes. We got all the votes.”)

As dangerous as these threats are, Republicans are in a poorer condition to successfully contest the November 2024 election results than they were in 2020. And there are two main reasons for that: Democratic gains in the battleground states and the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act.

Let’s look at both of these in greater depth.

The battlegrounds are in far safer hands now

Democratic electoral victories in the battleground states in 2022 put democracy-supporting leaders in place. These officials will act as stronger guardians of the integrity of the electoral certification process than we had in 2020.

Recall that in 2020, Republicans controlled the legislatures in five critical swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. That allowed the Trump Campaign to pursue an illegal drive to convince state representatives to undo the will of the voters, throw out the popular vote, and call the election in their states for Trump, despite the lack of any evidence of actual electoral fraud. It paired this with an illegal fake elector scheme that has since landed multiple indictments across the swing states.

Because it’s been three and half years since these events, it’s helpful to review some examples of what the Trump Campaign attempted at the state level to pressure officials.

In Arizona, Rudy Giuliani and Trump placed calls to the Republican Speaker of the House at the time, Russell “Rusty” Bowers, to demand that he open up the question of voter fraud in the state. Bowers famously refused, saying that he’d seen no evidence of fraud. “You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath,” Bowers declared. (For his brave stance in the face of this pressure, Bowers has received numerous death threats from MAGA extremists.)

In Georgia, Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s lackey in the Department of Justice, drafted a letter to Georgia officials advising that they reconvene the legislature to overturn the results of the popular election based on a claimed “investigation” of fraud by the Department. The letter did not go out due to the objections of Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and others. Trump placed a call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking that he “find” 11,780 votes—an act that in part landed Trump with a state RICO charge for conspiring to overturn the election in that state. 

In Michigan, Trump and then RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel pressured GOP members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers to refuse to certify the election results. Trump also invited leaders of the Michigan state legislature—Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield—to the White House right after the 2020 election in another bid to subvert the will of the electorate there. Fortunately, these leaders also rejected Trump’s entreaties. They said in a statement after that meeting, “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan and as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election.”

MAGA extremists have since taken over the state parties in many of these states, so if the 2022 elections had been a “red wave,” we would be in serious trouble today. There is little doubt that Trump would seek to use the same tactics to invalidate the popular votes in key swing states by act of the legislatures there. Moreover, the Republicans would have passed even more voter suppression bills there, just as they have been able to do in Georgia where the GOP maintains a state-level trifecta in government.

But in November of 2022, something extraordinary happened. Voters in these battlegrounds rejected MAGA extremism and election denialists at the ballot box, and instead elected Democratic governors in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. They flipped the state legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and they elected Democratic secretaries of state and attorneys general in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.

That means that in 2024, the administration, safety, and certification of elections in four of the five 2020 battleground states will be completely in Democratic hands. It is hard to understate the importance of this when it comes to election integrity and protection of the right to vote. These Democratic officials very likely will not tolerate illegal voter intimidation or disruptions of the vote count, and they have learned a lot from their experiences in 2020.

Further, the string of indictments brought by Democratic state attorneys general against fake electors and their co-conspirators in Washington will act as a strong deterrent to the kinds of illegal conspiracies, forgeries, and strong-arming that we saw in 2020. The fact that Trump does not currently control the Department of Justice is another reason to believe law enforcement cannot be weaponized in 2024 to throw the election.

Even in Georgia, where Republicans control the state government, both Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demonstrated in 2020 that they would not bow down to Trump and refuse to certify a fair and free election in that state. While Georgia has engaged in shameful voter suppression since that election, if the voters again cast a majority of their ballots for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024, there is little reason to believe Kemp and Raffensperger won’t accept the results.

A quick note on Nevada: It is also a critical swing state, albeit with fewer Electoral College votes up for grabs. Republican Joe Lombardo narrowly won the governor’s race there in 2022 and did not believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. In any event, Democrats control both chambers of the state legislature in Nevada as well as the offices of Secretary of State and Attorney General. With these safeguards in place, there is little risk that Gov. Lombardo would refuse to certify a Biden victory in that state either.

The Electoral Count Reform Act provides new protections

There was little fanfare at the time around it, but the passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA), which was included in an omnibus spending package signed by Joe Biden in January of 2023, allowed many election watchers to breathe easier. 

To understand why, it’s instructive to see what problems it fixed.

Under the older Electoral Count Act, any single member of the House, with the support of any single senator, could raise an objection to the official electoral count from any state. That in turn would open a debate and cause a vote by both chambers to affirm the count. While there were symbolic protests over the 2004 and 2016 results, both chambers of Congress voted overwhelmingly in each case to approve the count as is.

Moreover, under the old Act, it was still theoretically possible for states to send “competing” slates of electors to Congress, especially in a “contested” election. And the old Act didn’t affirmatively reject the notion that the Vice President could simply refuse to count certain states’ votes. That absurd loophole was one that Trump and his lawyers John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro sought to exploit by asking Mike Pence to reject the counts from swing states that sent in “alternative” slates of electors. (Trump, Eastman, and Chesebro are under some form of indictment in various federal and state cases for this conspiracy.)

On January 6, 2025, the Vice President will still be Kamala Harris, and she won’t be subject to any of the pressures from her boss that Mike Pence was under.

Even after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which appears to have been aimed at delaying the official count by Congress long enough to send the matter “back” to the states where GOP legislatures could do their mischief, 147 Republican members of Congress—139 in the House and 8 in the Senate—voted to object to the results of the election from Arizona and Pennsylvania. It fell far short of the majority needed to overturn the count under the old Act, but it raised the alarm among election integrity watchers.

The reforms to the Act under the ECRA seek to prevent a repeat of 2020. According to Democracy Docket, the ECRA:

• Clarifies that the role of the vice president is purely ceremonial,

• Raises the threshold for members of Congress to initiate objections to electoral results to one-fifth of each chamber,

• Ensures there is one conclusive slate of electors from each state, and

• Outlines a process for expedited court review of election results.

The governor of each state is now charged with certifying a single slate of official, certified electors. And Congress must now treat that slate (modified by any court relief) as conclusive.

While it seems likely that baseless claims of election fraud would be enough to get past the 20 percent threshold in the House, given that many of those who voted to object to the 2020 election are still in that body, getting 20 percent of Senators would require more than doubling the number who objected in 2020.

The grounds for objecting will be quite limited this time around as well. The courts will have made their final rulings, based on the evidence, likely long before the count. The Electoral College will have met on December 17, 2024, and the Democratic governors in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona will undoubtedly certify any Biden win. (GOP governors in Nevada and Georgia likely will as well.) That will leave few avenues for GOP members of Congress to pursue come the Electoral Count itself on January 6, 2025.

But what if…?

It’s the job of legal scholars and election watchers to raise any vulnerabilities that the system may have, even with the numerous additional safeguards that now exist. One such vulnerability may lie in an unlikely place: the new House Speaker, Mike Johnson.

It is highly likely that Speaker Johnson will not retain his post past January 3, 2025, when the 119th Congress is set to convene. But in the spirit of “what ifs”, we might pose this question: What if, after the 2024 election, he claims widespread voter fraud has infected the election and illegally handed the majority to the Democrats?

As Mark Medish and Joel McCleary point out in their extensive exploration of this possibility of a “constitutional coup,” Speaker Johnson could in theory refuse to seat members of Congress in certain closely contested elections where he baselessly alleges voter fraud. 

Under the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 5, ultimate certification of all House seats is up to the House: “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members.” Refusal to seat enough Democrats who are still battling over their House elections could prevent a new Democratic majority from forming and Speaker-elect Hakeem Jeffries from holding the gavel, both on January 3, 2025, and importantly on January 6, 2025. The Supreme Court could refuse to intervene in a “political” question that the House is supposed to determine on its own.

From there, “Speaker” Johnson could refuse to adopt the customary House rules and even refuse to consider the new Electoral Count Reform Act as valid and binding on the House. Again, these are matters governed solely by House Rules, not by any other laws or even the courts. Speaker Johnson could then set off a constitutional crisis by leading his conference to reject the results of the presidential election in certain contested states, meaning no candidate would have reached the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes.

In such a circumstance, the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would kick in, by which the vote would be thrown to the House to decide based on a vote by each state delegation. Currently, the Republicans control more states than the Democrats, so they presumably would cast their votes for Trump, and he would be elected.

The idea of Speaker Johnson going rogue is not wild speculation. We know this because he was deeply involved in the effort to overturn the last election. As Medish and McCleary point out, 

In 2020, current Speaker Mike Johnson, in a purely partisan act, organized 138 Republican House members who were in the minority to refuse to certify the election of President Biden, despite state certifications of the outcome of the vote and the almost universal rulings from state and federal courts that it was an honest election. Indeed, in multiple cases where Republican state legislatures refused to accept a Biden win and conducted recounts in their respective states, the results confirmed the original tally. Still, Johnson cried foul. Imagine if Johnson had been speaker in 2020.

That man is now Speaker in 2024, and he understands that he has the ability to cause a great deal of chaos. He is also extremely loyal to Trump.

On the other hand, since becoming Speaker, Johnson has backed down from the most extreme positions on the budget and aid to Ukraine, bucking the Freedom Caucus and the Putin Caucus in Congress. Given this, it is inaccurate to say that Johnson will always do the most extreme thing in the end. Still, it lends little comfort that we need to rely upon Johnson’s good faith not to upend the 2024 election as he attempted to do in 2020.

But there is no reason to panic, even though we should be on our guard. If the House majority is a close call after the November election, there still likely would not be sufficient House backing within the Republican conference for Johnson to reject the pro forma adoption of the ECRA and then proceed to reject the election results. It would be such a naked power grab that many within the party, particularly less extreme Republicans in vulnerable swing districts, would refuse to go along. 

There were around 85 House Republicans who bucked Trump and Johnson in January of 2021 and voted to uphold the 2020 election results. It wouldn’t take many of them, voting with the Democrats, to deny Johnson any kind of end-run around the rules or the electoral count.

Then there is the Senate to consider, where it is doubtful that a majority of senators would ever vote to throw out the election results and allow the House to choose the president through a vote by the states. This would especially be the case if, over in the House, the only reason this is happening at all is due to parliamentary trickery and constitutional hardball. The Senate majority is likely to hang by a single vote either way, but there remain centrists such as Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) who is not voting for Trump and hasn’t ruled out leaving her party.

Furthermore, and long before January 3, 2025, it will be obvious to most Americans outside the MAGA cult that President Biden has been reelected and the Democrats have won the majority in the House (knocks on wood, twice). Any refusal by Johnson to hand over the reins to Speaker-elect Jeffries, all so that he can throw the election to Trump in the House, would provoke an outcry from the Democratic electorate that would dwarf what we saw from the deluded MAGA protestors on January 6, 2021. Speaker Johnson would be well aware of this, as well as wary of incurring his own set of indictments should he illegally seek to hang on to power.

This is why I don’t lose sleep over the idea of a Johnson-led coup in the House. From where I sit, Johnson would much rather do what is customary and affirm the House rules and seat the next Congress. This would draw no headlines or protests at all when he does it. Then he could simply wait another two years to try and regain the gavel in a midterm environment that will be more favorable. Better that than risk his own career and his own liberty on behalf of someone who has lost the election again.  

For all of the above reasons, I am much less concerned in 2024 about a “constitutional coup” or Trump stealing the election than I was in 2020. While risks still exist, and forces on the right may attempt to incite trouble or violence, our democracy is stronger for having withstood the first assault in 2020, and our elected leaders in the battleground states and electoral reforms in Congress provide welcome added assurances.