How the Trump Team Is Preparing to Claim Fraud

Happy Friday! If the theft of 24 tons of artisanal cheddar cheese worth almost $400,000 last month had happened in the United States, we could have generously explained it away as the result of election stress scrambling the mind of the fraudster. But England, what’s your excuse? 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• On Thursday, former President Donald Trump held a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico—a state Vice President Kamala Harris currently leads by 7 points—in a late-campaign effort to court Hispanic voters. The Trump campaign has been in damage control mode amid the fallout from a joke delivered at his New York rally last week that referred to Puerto Rico as “garbage.” “I’m here for one very simple reason,” Trump said at the Albuquerque rally. “I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community.” The former president will also campaign in Virginia on Saturday. The Trump campaign has said it believes Trump could be competitive in the state, though it’s not considered a battleground by most election analysts.  
• Elon Musk’s lawyers filed a motion on Wednesday to move to federal court the Philadelphia district attorney’s civil lawsuit against the billionaire’s $1 million giveaways to registered voters set up through his PAC. Musk’s legal team argued that the case involves legal claims that belong in the “exclusive province” of federal court. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner filed a lawsuit Monday alleging Musk’s giveaway violated state law by operating as a lottery in Pennsylvania, where lotteries are required to be administered by the state. 
• A New York state appellate court on Thursday suspended the New York law license of Kenneth Chesebro—a onetime attorney for former President Donald Trump who helped carry out the plot to submit fake slates of state electors in the 2020 election. The court’s decision followed Chesebro’s October 2023 guilty plea in the Georgia criminal election interference case in which Trump was charged as a co-defendant. Chesebro was also charged in a separate criminal case in Wisconsin over the summer regarding his involvement in that state’s fake electors scheme. He joins a growing list of Trump lawyers who’ve been disbarred for their roles in trying to overturn the 2020 election results, including John Eastman, Rudy Guiliani, and Jenna Ellis.
• Hamas on Thursday rejected a temporary ceasefire-for-hostage release proposal, reiterating its opposition to anything but “a permanent end to the war.” The latest proposal—brokered by Egyptian, Qatari, and American officials—reportedly involved the return of some of the estimated 60 living hostages in Gazan captivity in exchange for a 30-day ceasefire and the release of dozens of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. U.S. officials reportedly hoped the arrangement would give way to a longer-term cessation of hostilities.  
• North Korea on Thursday test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the first launch of its kind this year. The missile traveled further and higher than any previous tests, according to Japanese defense officials, demonstrating an apparent advancement in Pyongyang’s ICBM development since its last test in December 2023. Past tests have already showcased a missile range capable of reaching any point in the mainland United States.  
• Israeli officials said rocket attacks by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, killed seven people in northern Israel on Thursday. One barrage killed five agricultural workers—four Thai nationals and one Israeli—in Metula, the northernmost town in Israel. Another killed two Israelis in a suburb of Haifa after striking the grove where they were gathering olives. The strikes represented the deadliest day for civilians in Israel since the military began its offensive in Lebanon to push Hezbollah fighters away from the border. 
• German officials on Thursday announced plans to shut down the three Iranian consulates in Germany following the execution of a German-Iranian citizen, Jamshid Sharmahd, on Monday. “We have repeatedly made it unmistakably clear to Tehran that the execution of a German national will have serious consequences,” said Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister. Sharmahd was accused of helping orchestrate a deadly terrorist bombing in Tehran in 2008, though he and his family denied the charges. The consulates in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich will close, but the Iranian embassy in Berlin will remain open. 
• Politico reported Wednesday that the September release of David Lin—a U.S. citizen who had been wrongfully held in China since 2006—was the result of the Biden administration exchanging a Chinese citizen held in the U.S. The State Department has not confirmed any of the details regarding Lin’s release and has declined to comment on the new reporting. “I am not going to say anything else about this process, other than what I’ve already said, which is that we welcome his release,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in September. “Sometimes in diplomacy, the less said, the better. This is one of those occasions.” 

Fraud Claims Cometh

Almost every pollster in America will tell you that the results of the presidential election on Tuesday are a toss-up. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, is unwilling to forecast much more than cautious optimism.

But former president Donald Trump is convinced—at least publicly—that he will win, bigly.

As the race enters its very last stages, Trump and his allies have begun, as in previous elections, casting suspicion on the legitimacy of the vote in advance. From baselessly claiming large leads and projecting unwarranted confidence to accusations of cheating, there is a movement at all levels of the GOP to prepare to contest the results of the election, as happened in 2020. 

The mentality starts at the top. Trump has consistently refused to countenance the possibility of losing this election—at least in the absence of widespread cheating. “They cheat. That’s all they want to do is cheat. And when you see this, it’s the only way they’re gonna win,” the former president said at a rally in Wisconsin early last month. 

Sometimes the claims about the certainty of his victory are wildly implausible: In an August interview with Dr. Phil—yes, Dr. Phil, who also made an appearance at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday—Trump claimed that he would win California “if Jesus Christ was the vote counter.” 

The former president didn’t simply mean to say that winning the Golden State would take divine intervention. “In other words, if we had an honest vote counter, a really honest vote counter—I do great with Hispanics, great, I mean at a level no Republican has ever done. But if we had an honest vote counter, I would win California,” he told the good doctor.

But his claims don’t stop at the supernatural: He’s also interested in cold, hard numbers—at least so far as they suit him. In a rally in Atlanta on Monday, Trump exhorted his voters to make the polls “too big to rig.” 

“We’re leading now in all the polls,” he proclaimed, incorrectly. 

That incorrect claim is part of his M.O. Trump has never admitted that he lost the popular vote in either the 2016 or 2020 elections—excepting the occasional slip—despite clear evidence to the contrary. It is extremely unlikely that he will do so this time around. 

There’s also another side to the coin of Trump’s ebullient predictions. He has begun preemptively predicting cheating in many states, especially those that will likely prove crucial to the election’s outcome. Pennsylvania, the most likely state to be the “tipping point”—perhaps even the keystone, if you will—in the election has been a particular target. 

In a Thursday post on his Truth Social account, Trump wrote, “We caught them CHEATING BIG in Pennsylvania. Must announce and PROSECUTE, NOW! This is a CRIMINAL VIOLATION OF THE LAW. STOP VOTER FRAUD! CHECK OUT KAMALA’S NEW SLEAZEBAG LAWYER. WE ARE ON THEM ALL THIS TIME! Who would have ever thought that our Country is so CORRUPT?”

While the immediate context for the post is not clear, it is possible—although he could truly have no particular incident in mind—that Trump was referring to videos of people transporting ballots, which circulated in viral social media posts claiming election fraud. Alex fact-checked these videos and found that they simply showed U.S. Post Office workers delivering mail-in ballots. He could also be referring to an incident in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where authorities discovered several hundred fraudulent voter registration applications—though they were not ballots. 

Trump has also claimed that a law, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), which allows Americans currently living overseas or serving in the military to vote by absentee ballot, will be used to cheat. “They are going to use UOCAVA to get ballots, a program that emails ballots overseas without any citizenship check or verification of identity whatsoever,” he wrote on Truth Social. 

But Trump’s strange mix of braggadocious confidence in his chances and deep suspicion of the vote is not confined to his own pronouncements. Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio and a longtime Trump ally, told Bloomberg this week that Trump’s victory was nearly assured. “The polls show he’s winning in the national polls, he’s winning in the swing states, and all the early voting—every data point is positive for the president,” he said. Asked if he trusted in the integrity of the upcoming election, Jordan deflected, saying “I’m confident the president is going to win.” 

It hasn’t all been unremitting skepticism, though: Vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio has said that the upcoming election will be “the safest and most secure election,” and Dispatch Politics reported earlier this month on the confidence of GOP election lawyers that many security concerns have been resolved—perhaps in an effort to avoid depressing turnout with defeatism.

But other Trump allies have been less circumspect—and more pessimistic. Tesla and SpaceX tycoon Elon Musk—a relatively late-in-the-game convert to Trumpism, though no less zealous for it—tweeted Monday that early votes in Pennsylvania were “trending toward a crushing victory.” This, however, wildly misstates the consensus of election forecasters, which is that Pennsylvania will be the most tightly contested race this cycle. 

Musk has also been quite focused on claims of election fraud. His feed on X, which he owns, has been a vector of false claims about noncitizens voting, and in a solo town hall in Pennsylvania earlier this month, he made a number of claims casting doubt on the previous and upcoming elections. “So, there’s always a question of, like, say, the Dominion voting machines. It is weird that, I think, they’re used in Philadelphia and in Maricopa County, but not a lot of other places,” he said, referring to hotly contested areas in swing states. “Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?”

Dominion, a company that makes voting machines and previously won a $787 million defamation settlement against claims aired on Fox News that its machines were used for election fraud, pushed back. “Fact: Dominion does not serve Philadelphia County. Fact: Dominion’s voting systems are already based on voter verified paper ballots. Fact: Hand counts and audits of such paper ballots have repeatedly proven that Dominion machines produce accurate results. These are not matters of opinion. They are verifiable facts,” a company spokesman wrote in an emailed statement to NBC News.

Musk, however, has been undeterred. He is currently attempting to crowdsource election fraud claims, directing voters to an Election Integrity Community on X, a feed which is administered by America PAC, which is supporting the former president.

Congressional and state-level allies have piled on as well. “Seems like the steal is on in Pennsylvania,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, tweeted on Wednesday. In response to videos of long lines at early vote stations in Pennsylvania—largely due to the state’s odd in-person mail-in early vote system, in which voters can go to a polling station, apply for and receive a mail-in ballot, and then fill it out there—that resulted in officials shutting down the queue early, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Whatley said that the party would be going to court. A judge in Bucks County ruled on Wednesday that mail-in voting would be extended through November 1, granting the Trump and Senate candidate Dave McCormick campaigns’ requests. 

Both the RNC and the Democratic National Committee are lawyering up ahead of what is likely to be extensive litigation which has begun even ahead of Election Day. As Mark Caleb Smith explained in a piece on the site last month, the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA) of 2022 closed some of the loopholes that allowed Republicans in some states to try to pass off false slates of electors as legitimate based on spurious fraud claims. But things could still get messy if litigation and even potential recounts make it difficult for states to meet the deadlines set out in the ECRA—potentially opening state legislatures up to install their own slates of electors and sending us yet again into uncharted constitutional waters. 

But the many fraud claims are in some ways more important for their number than their veracity: Quantity, after all, has a quality all its own. It’s also true that no election is perfect, and there have already been—and will surely be more—instances of deliberate or inadvertent election fraud this cycle. A Chinese student at the University of Michigan, for example, is being prosecuted for voting illegally after seeming to realize he was ineligible as a noncitizen. These cases tend to make splashy headlines, but the amount of fraud that we’re likely to see—the applications in Lancaster County were rejected, after all—is extremely unlikely to affect election results. 

However, the fraud claims also represent the conviction on the part of many Republican voters that Trump’s victory is inevitable. A national poll by Florida Atlantic University and Public Opinion Research Lab, conducted in September, found that 93 percent of Trump voters believed that he would win.

It’s worth noting that a similar percentage of Harris voters believe the same things about their own candidate. Where the two groups differ is their confidence in the legitimacy of the result. In a national poll administered last week, just over half of Trump supporters said that they thought elections would be fairly administered, compared to 90 percent of Harris voters.

The upshot of all of this? Unless there’s one of the greatest electoral surprises in American history and either side wins a landslide, expect the election to be contested in some sense. Trump, his allies, and his supporters have persistent doubts about the legitimacy of the process and are likely to act accordingly. Voters, and the courts, should buckle their seatbelts.

Worth Your Time

• Our old friend Harvest Prude reported on how Christian election workers are dealing with distrust and threats from within their own communities as they work to protect the voting process. “Partisan attacks on election administration methods, election results, and election officials are not new, but they have become a defining feature of today’s political landscape, with the ‘stop the steal’ rhetoric and claims of election fraud that emerged after Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in 2020,” she wrote for Christianity Today. “It seems harder than ever for election workers trying to keep the process fair and trustworthy. … Christians called to serve in these roles have found some comfort in their convictions—but they’ve also felt the sting of neighbors and churchgoers demonizing their work. Kentucky secretary of state Michael Adams recalls his wife and daughter peeling his campaign sticker off their cars after dealing with public confrontations in the parking lots of grocery stores, pharmacies, and even their church.”
• For Persuasion, Eboo Patel recalled his journey out of criticizing everything. “Critical theory is like a sharp kitchen knife: very useful for some things, like cutting meat, but if you eat your cereal with it, you’ll hurt yourself,” he wrote. “And if you point it at someone else, then it’s a weapon. In some circles, on some campuses, every other utensil has been removed from the intellectual cutlery drawer, replaced with sharp kitchen knives. There’s a better way. Pluralism means that you cooperate with people of diverse identities, that you learn from the divergent ideologies, that you expand the number of explanatory frameworks you have to make sense of the world. You should not exit college narrower than you entered. And you should not graduate believing that you are less capable than when you began.”

Presented Without Comment  

New York Times: Campaign Ad for Nebraska Senator Uses Images From the Northeast

The new campaign ad for Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska, a Republican, opens with drone imagery of a serene small-town setting where an America flag is hoisted high in the center of a lush boulevard, and a car drives along a tree-lined street.

“Nebraska is a great place to raise families,” Ms. Fischer says in a voice-over,  “and I’ve worked hard to keep it that way.”

The images on the screen, however, are identical to stock images filmed in Vermont and elsewhere in the Northeast. One is labeled, “Patriotic American Flag flies over town square in Anytown USA.”

Also Presented Without Comment

NBC News: L.A. Hit By Looting And Chaos Amid Dodgers World Series Celebrations

In the Zeitgeist 

At the risk of double dipping with the Tom Hanks content, the actor’s latest film, Here, hits theaters today. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, the movie reunites Hanks and Robin Wright 30 years after the pair appeared together in the Oscar-winning project Forrest Gump. Unfortunately, we have no idea what this movie is about, other than being an impressive exercise in making the 68-year-old Hanks look 30 with the help of CGI.

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew reported on former GOP Sen. Jeff Flake’s campaigning for Harris in Arizona, Will shared 24 insights that help explain our current political, technological, and cultural moment, and Nick explored (🔒) the policy “magic beans” behind support for a second Trump term. 
• On the podcasts: Sarah is joined by Steve, Jonah, and special guest Steve Kornacki—NBC’s polling guru and national political correspondent—to discuss polling and the countdown to Election Day on The Dispatch Podcast roundtable. 
• On the site: Cole Murphy explains how the jobs report—and revisions to it—works, and Kevin argues that the presidency has grown too powerful if one election could be the end of the country.

Let Us Know

Do you think the former president will contest the results of the election if he loses?