Republican presidential candidate former US President Donald Trump is putting together a detailed set of excuses to challenge the results of the 2024 presidential election if he loses.
This is reported by Axios.
In recent weeks, Trump has expanded the spectrum of his baseless attacks on voting procedures in the United States. In particular, Trump falsely claimed on Monday that Democrats are using the Foreign Voting Program for immigrants and military personnel to bypass "any kind of citizenship or identity verification."
And at a rally in Pennsylvania last week, Trump denounced what he called the "stupid" concept of voting 45 days before the election.
Also, Trump, a long-time critic of mail-in voting, recently attacked the US Postal Service as incompetent and untrustworthy — even as Republicans, on the contrary, pushed their voters to adopt the practice.
Also, the former US president is trying to develop a conspiracy theory about election fraud around the millions of undocumented migrants who crossed the borders of the States during the Biden administration.
Earlier this month, Trump urged House Republicans to use the threat of a government shutdown to pass a measure that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
The effort failed, but gave Trump and Republicans a new reason to claim election fraud — even though non-citizen voting in US elections is illegal and extremely rare.
Even without evidence of voting irregularities, Trump is preparing to deploy broader rhetorical arguments for why the election was fundamentally unfair.
The former president accused the Democrats of "fraud" because they changed their candidate in the election — from US President Joe Biden, who had little chance in the race due to his age and health problems, to 59-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris. In addition, Trump accused the Democrats of a legal war against him — saying that all criminal trials against him are nothing more than political persecution.
Since 2020, the apparatus of the Republican Party has been reorganized to confirm Trumpʼs false claims about falsifying the US election.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee say they have created a network of about 175 000 volunteer poll watchers and poll workers to "relentlessly ensure the integrity of the election."
In Georgia, the far-right election commission has passed new rules that Democrats say they could use to undermine confidence in the election results if Trump loses the critical state.
On November 1, 2020, Axios reported that Trump had privately told confidants that he planned to declare his victory early on election night if all indications were that he was "ahead" of his opponent. Thatʼs exactly what he did.