Trump allies spending millions to dissuade voters in key states from polls

Key rightwing legal groups with ties to Donald Trump and his allies have banked millions of dollars from conservative foundations and filed multiple lawsuits challenging voting rules in swing states that are already sowing distrust of election processes and pushing dangerous conspiracy theories, election watchdogs warn.

They also warn that the groups appear to be laying the groundwork for a concerted challenge to the result of November’s presidential election if Trump is defeated by Kamala Harris.

America First Legal and the Public Interest Legal Foundation together reaped more than $30m dollars from the Wisconsin based Bradley Impact Fund and its parent, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, from 2017 through 2022, according to a financial analysis from the Center for Media and Democracy.

Lawsuits filed by the groups, which overlap with some Republican party litigation, focus in part on conspiratorial charges of non-citizen voting, which is exceedingly rare, and bloated voter rolls, and pre-sage more lawsuits by Trump if his presidential run fails, in an echo of his 2020 election-denialist claims, say watchdogs.

“It seems clear that the lawsuits these rightwing groups are bringing attacking the integrity of the voting rolls, methods of voting and how the ballots are counted are an attempt to make it harder for people to vote, disenfranchise and intimidate legitimate voters, and create confusion,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission.

Noble added: “At the same time, they also appear to be laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the election after November 5, if Trump loses.”

In another troubling sign, Noble cited the dearth of data to support non-citizen voting claims to reject the “rationale for the non-citizen voting lawsuits”.

A study from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, in the wake of false claims by Trump of widespread non-citizen voting in the 2016 presidential election, revealed only 30 incidents among 23.5m ballots cast.

Other voting watchdogs voice strong warnings about the Maga-allied legal blitzes.

“We’re seeing much more litigation from Trump allies this election cycle, targeted at swing states, which appears to lack evidence,” warned David Becker, who runs the nonpartisan non-profit Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Becker noted, critically, that the lawsuit plaintiffs often knew about the challenged policies, including issues relating to voting lists, non-citizen voting, mail voting and military voting, years or even decades earlier, and seem to have intentionally waited until the last minute to file their lawsuits. “While they’re very unlikely to get the relief they’re seeking, this could later fuel claims that the election was stolen,” he said.

Early voting at a polling station in Black Mountain, North Carolina, on 18 October 2024. Photograph: Allison Joyce/AFP/Getty Images

Becker’s points are underscored by the litigation blitzes from Maga allies in swing states.

The surge in litigation is exemplified in Michigan, where the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) filed a lawsuit alleging voter rolls are bloated with the names of deceased people and seeking to clean them up – moves that mirror others this year by rightwing groups and the Republican party.

PILF’s Michigan lawsuit was rejected on 1 March by a federal judge who ruled the state is “consistently among the most active states in the United States in canceling the registrations of deceased individuals” and that “deceased voters are removed from Michigan’s voter rolls on a regular and ongoing basis”.

PILF, which has filed similar lawsuits in several other states, received about $3m from the two Bradley foundations in the years 2017-2022. It is chaired by ex-Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a board member of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Mitchell was on Trump’s infamous call on 2 January 2021 with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, where he beseeched him to “find” 11,780 votes to help reverse his defeat there.

Later in 2021, Mitchell organized a major Maga-allied project dubbed the “election-integrity network”, which promoted voting conspiracies and election-denialist claims about 2020, and has remained a key figure in the right’s legal efforts this year.

Soon after Pilf’s lawsuit was dismissed, the Republican National Committee filed a similar suit in Michigan that Jocelyn Benson, the secretary of state there, denounced as a “PR campaign masquerading as a meritless lawsuit”.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, America First Legal, which is run by Trump’s hard-right ex-immigration adviser Stephen Miller, has sued to compel counties to probe some 44,000 voters who were registered without providing proof of citizenship.

The legal battle was sparked in part by Arizona’s two-level voter-registration system that mandates voters must show proof of citizenship in state elections, but doesn’t require that in federal contests.

Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Arizona Republican consultant, who became an independent in 2017, said that “the lawsuit is driven by falsehoods about non-citizen voting and is part and parcel of the Trump narrative to depress voter turnout through negative campaigning and suppress younger voter participation in the cycle”.

The Miller-led group’s legal blitzes have been fueled by hefty checks from rightwing donors, including a whopping $27m dollars it received in 2022 from the Bradley Impact Fund.

Voting experts don’t see much merit to the group’s lawsuits and many others filed by Trump-allied groups.

“Many of these suits seem like vehicles to spread conspiracy theories and misinformation,” said Leah Tulin, a senior litigation counsel with the Brennan Center. “In other words, they read more as press releases than serious legal claims.”

By way of example, Tulin cited several lawsuits filed by America First Policy Institute (AFPI), which boasts billionaire Linda McMahon, a former Trump cabinet official and a co-chair of his current transition team, as a board member

AFPI has filed lawsuits in Georgia and Arizona, including one intended to allow local election officials to block certifying results when they suspect fraud. In Georgia, a Fulton county judge this month rejected AFPI’s Georgia lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of a county election official who has been allied with Mitchell’s election-integrity network.

AFPI also filed a lawsuit this year in Texas that alleged that a Biden initiative in 2021 that greenlighted government agencies to promote voter registration was just a partisan move that would likely help Democrats.

Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state who chairs AFPI’s Center for Election Integrity, charged on X in August that the Biden administration was mounting an “attempt to weaponize federal agencies into a leftwing election operation that opens the doors to non-citizen voting”.

On another Maga-allied election front, Arizona-based Restoration of America donated $3.1m dollars and $5.9m dollars, respectively, in 2021 and 2022, to Tea Party Patriots Action and Susan B Anthony List. Both groups have been active with the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, according to Issue One, a bipartisan political reform group.

Restoration of America boasts Gina Swoboda, who chairs the state GOP, as a top official; Swoboda also has been an ally and a podcast guest of Cleta Mitchell, who has helped lead the Only Citizens Vote Coalition. The coalition this year helped push a bill through the House requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, even though non-citizen voting is almost nil and is illegal.

Election watchdogs say the aim of these pro-Trump groups with election-denialist track records, coupled with the surge in lawsuits by other Maga allies, is to cast doubts about election rules and security, and are harbingers for challenging the results in key states if Trump loses.

“Under the guise of election integrity, new policies and legal challenges are being advanced that could ultimately disenfranchise US citizens,” said Michael Beckel, the research director of Issue One.

“Secretive big-money donors are bankrolling a blitz of false information about the integrity of elections and laying the groundwork for Trump supporters to challenge the results of the presidential election if they don’t like the outcome,” Beckel added.

Similarly, Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, the former Republican representative, told the Guardian: “I believe Trump’s allies are planning to challenge the certification of votes in various battleground states if he loses. I think they’re trying to lay the groundwork post-election for litigation challenging certification.”

Ultimately, Noble emphasized that the wave of lawsuits poses long-run dangers to democracy and election security by “creating an atmosphere that presents a real and present threat to the safety of election workers who have a long record of running free and fair elections”.

“These are not just the efforts of some fringe groups and this is not truly about election integrity,” he said. “These are efforts being supported by Trump and the [Republican National Committee] … and the claims of election fraud have long been debunked. The end goal appears to be to put Trump back in power regardless of the cost to the country and our democracy.”