Voters sign in at a polling place in Takoma Park, Md., on Election Day. Voter enthusiasm was high across the country on Tuesday. (Barbara Barrett/Stateline)

America’s voting system was under siege for four years.

Former President Donald Trump’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election exposed the people who operate our elections to threats and harassment in the run-up to this one. They fortified their offices against potential violence, adjusted to last-minute, politically driven changes in election laws, and fought a relentless stream of lies and disinformation. Going into Election Day, officials and pro-democracy advocates braced for the worst.

What a difference a day — and a result — makes.

Aside from a few hiccups, the U.S. voting process went smoothly this year. The winner of the presidential election was declared early the next morning, few people claimed widespread voter fraud, and the losing candidate conceded defeat.

It was a triumph for democracy, said David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan organization that advises local election officials nationwide.

But he wondered what would have happened had Trump, now president-elect, lost again.

“It’s somewhat telling that we’ve seen fewer fraud claims in the aftermath of an election which former president and future President Trump won,” he said. “But if we can get to the point now where President Trump and his supporters believe in the integrity of our elections, believe in the reality of our integrity of the elections, I will take it.”

Those who study the election process say they have questions: With Trump heading back to the White House, will faith in American democracy rebound? Will Republican lawmakers continue to use the myth of widespread voter fraud to implement further restrictions on mail-in and early voting? And will the threats that have hounded state and local election officials continue?

There’s a lot of uncertainty ahead for U.S. elections, said Kathy Boockvar, the former Democratic secretary of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. But what is certain is that by fueling distrust in elections, Trump and his allies have done permanent damage in this country, she said.

“Will there be a bump, maybe, because some of these folks now saw their candidate that they wanted to win? Sure,” she told Stateline. “There may be a bump in trust, but it’s not going to erase years and years of intentional dividing American against American, and intentional fueling of distrust of institutions and media.”

What happened to the election fraud?

In his victory speech on Tuesday night, Trump said his win was “a massive victory for democracy.” He made no mention of widespread voter fraud and gave no indication that there were any attempts to steal the election.

He had struck a different tone just hours before.

Earlier in the day, Trump falsely asserted in a Truth Social post that there was a heavy law enforcement presence in Philadelphia and Detroit. Officials in both cities debunked that claim. He also claimed without evidence that there was “massive CHEATING” in Philadelphia, which local officials, including Republicans, denied.

Trump would go on to win the critical swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania in his landslide victory.

Election officials faced some falsehoods and disruptions Tuesday. Michigan officials called out what they said was an inauthentic video, allegedly showing boxes of ballots being carried into Detroit’s election office late Tuesday evening. The FBI warned of fabricated videos circulating online and of noncredible bomb threats at polling places in several states, including Michigan, originating out of Russia.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, told reporters at a news conference Wednesday morning those incidents of disinformation felt like things she saw in 2020, as Trump and his allies began to contest his loss.

“I worry and imagine that there was much more planned to drop, potentially, to create confusion and chaos in the hours following the election in an effort to potentially lay seeds to challenge results in the future,” she said. “Of course, we didn’t see that play out.”

U.S. national security officials praised how elections were conducted nationwide this year, as they had in 2020. Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said the election was peaceful and secure, and that malicious activity had no significant impact on the integrity of the process.

“Our election infrastructure has never been more secure and the election community never better prepared to deliver safe, secure, free, and fair elections for the American people,” she said in a press release Wednesday.

Election officials did a heroic job this year, said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that works with state and local election officials to keep voting systems secure. Officials’ work was built on years of beefing up election procedures, audits and security, and coordinating with nonprofit advisers. Elections are resilient, Smith said.

But she added: “What will it take to get belief in the trustworthiness of elections to a point where it’s true for all of us, all the time? And maybe that is a lofty goal, but it’s worth having.”

There are some challenges that need to be addressed, including long lines on college campuses, how to decrease the number of absentee ballots rejected over incorrect signatures, and how to address the continued threats from foreign bad actors such as Russia.

But the crisis of the past four years did force state and local election officials to be more prepared for all threats, said Boockvar, who is president of Athena Strategies and a member of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections. The committee’s bipartisan group of election and law enforcement officials developed pocket-size guides to election laws for police officers to carry.

“The good news is we have much more cross-sector support,” she said.

Future legislation

After Trump cast his ballot on Election Day in Florida, he went to his campaign headquarters in Palm Beach and laid out what he wished the voting process looked like.

“They should do paper ballots, same-day voting, voter ID and be done,” he said. “One day, same day.”

The makeup of Congress is still unknown as local election offices continue to count ballots. But Republicans have shown a willingness to tackle federal voting legislation, as they did with their failed attempt to insert into a larger funding bill a ban on voting by noncitizens (which already is illegal).

But some of Trump’s ideas, especially moving the country to a system in which voters can only cast a ballot on Election Day, is unlikely, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. But other suggestions are possible, he added.

There is broad, bipartisan support among voters for mail-in and early voting, along with other protections such as voter list maintenance and audits, Olson said. For example, Georgia is a Republican-run state with robust early and mail-in voting and high voter turnout, with paper ballots, post-election audits and voter ID requirements.

Connecticut voters just approved a constitutional amendment that allows for no-excuse absentee voting. Nevada voters approved a ballot measure that now requires an ID to vote by mail and in person. Voters in eight states, including North Carolina and Wisconsin, also approved ballot measures to make noncitizen voting illegal under state law.

Republican state lawmakers still seem keen to continue finding new ways to tighten procedures in the name of “election integrity.”

This election ran smoothly because of the legislation and proactive lawsuits from the conservative movement, argued Arizona state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, a Republican who was sanctioned by the State Bar of Arizona for his role in challenging the 2020 election.

“Look, there were a lot of vulnerabilities still, but it was a more secure election than the ones we’ve had in the past,” he said in an interview.

Kolodin introduced legislation this year to keep vote centers open longer and give voters more notice to fix signature or date errors on their absentee ballots, among other provisions. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signed it in February.

He expects Trump to keep election integrity in the public consciousness and continue to pressure conservatives to work on it. For his part, Kolodin will push to scrap Arizona’s larger vote centers and opt for precinct-level polling places for better efficiency.

Before the election, Michigan state Rep. Luke Meerman, a Republican, told Stateline that he would love to see measures that require some sort of ID to vote in person and by mail.

“Something to prove that whoever filled that ballot out was the person that was supposed to be filling it out probably would be at the top of my list,” he said.

Despite Trump’s win, the false narratives around the supposed insecurity of U.S. elections — in which noncitizens and dead people are voting in droves — will likely continue, said the Cato Institute’s Olson; it is baked into the movement that brought the former president back into power.

“Given that so much of this was about Trump’s desire for personal vindication, maybe it’s over, and maybe we won’t face the same kind of systematic attempt to delegitimize the honesty of elections,” Olson said. “But that’s the optimistic view.”

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Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

Voters at the Wilmar Neighborhood Center on Madison's East side cast their ballots. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Four years ago, in late September of 2020, the concerns that then-President Donald Trump would not accept the results of the election if he lost began to become more concrete. The COVID-19 pandemic had caused a massive boost in the use of absentee voting and Trump had warned his supporters not to use the voting method. 

Then, in the days after the election when the result remained in doubt, conspiracy theories began to spread around the country. In Wisconsin, Trump supporters complained of a “ballot dump” in Milwaukee that flipped the result for Joe Biden (actually the surge in absentee ballots had just made it slower for election workers at the city’s central count location to tally the votes). 

“There’s been a travesty at the ballot box,” one voter told the Wisconsin Examiner on Nov. 6, a day before Biden was declared the winner. “We’re seeing unbelievable numbers of ballot harvesting, voter fraud, election fraud and nothing’s being done to correct the situation in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta.”

That same weekend, a Wisconsin attorney and the Trump campaign began to shape a plan. That plan — created as Trump’s final legal avenues to overturn the election results ran out — would soon become the fake elector scheme, in which Republicans in Wisconsin and six other states where Biden had won cast false slates of electors for Trump. The plot underpinned the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, urged on by Trump, as Congress attempted to certify that Biden had in fact won the election. Trump’s supporters used the fake elector scheme to argue that the certification should be stopped so that the fraudulent electoral votes could be counted.

In the months after the election, multiple reviews, audits and investigations were launched, searching for the voter fraud that Trump and his supporters baselessly claimed had stolen the election from him. By June, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos had tasked state Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) and former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman with running their own investigations into the election. Gableman and Brandtjen ultimately joined calls for the election results to be decertified and drew massive amounts of criticism. 

Gableman’s review ran for more than a year, racking up legal fees and keeping public records hidden, without finding any evidence of fraud. Brandtjen, who was at the time the chair of the Assembly’s elections committee, repeatedly invited conspiracy theorists to testify, giving a platform to  debunked claims of wrongdoing. 

After Gableman’s review ended, state Rep. Tim Ramthun ran a Republican primary campaign for governor entirely on a platform of election conspiracy theorism. Election deniers in Wisconsin state government  along with local activists Peter Bernegger of New London (previously convicted of fraud) and Harry Wait, of Union Grove (charged with felonies after illegally requesting absentee ballots), as well as  former Menomonee Falls Village President Jefferson Davis became the core of the state Republican Party’s election denying wing — with allies in the Legislature and a sizable number of voters on their side. 

But despite the hold that election conspiracy theories have on a subset of Wisconsin Republicans, elections experts say the state is prepared for 2024 and unlikely to see a repeat of the 2020 effort to overturn results. 

“It’ll be a case of crying wolf again,” Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, says. “All of this was done in 2020 to no effect, with no evidence.”

Laws and rules have been changed or clarified; election officials and others have spent countless hours repeatedly sharing factual information about how the voting system works; the two attorneys central to planning the false elector scheme have been charged by the state Department of Justice with felonies, Wisconsin’s fake electors have agreed as part of a settlement deal that they tried to falsify the results of the election and that they will not serve as Trump electors in the future, and Trump no longer has the element of surprise. 

Mandell says he thinks the small fringe of election deniers in Wisconsin will make baseless accusations while Heck says he’s looking out for efforts to discourage people from voting and staying vigilant against disruptive observers at polling places and central count locations where absentee ballots are tallied. But generally, the two say they’re confident clerks, election officials and legal observers are prepared. 

“There’s no doubt that there continue to be things thrown at the wall, but I think we’re in a much better place than we were four years ago or even before that,” Jeff Mandell, general counsel at the voting rights-focused nonprofit firm Law Forward, says. “When I think about threats to this election, there are, of course, things, both in Wisconsin and around the country, that we continue to hear. And we are thinking through and preparing for those things, but I regard those as really low likelihood problems. And so while we’re doing everything we can to be ready, in case one of them does rear its head in Wisconsin, I’m pretty skeptical that one will.” 

Leading up to the election, Republican politicians continue to make false claims about the system. Last week, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and a number of county sheriffs held a press conference to attack the use of absentee ballot drop boxes and warn of attempts by non-citizens to vote. Republicans in Congress have tied the passage of a federal spending bill to the SAVE Act, which outlaws voting by noncitizens in federal elections, something that is already a felony carrying  penalties of imprisonment and deportation and which data shows happens incredibly rarely. 

“This just doesn’t happen,” Mandell says. “It is already illegal under state law. It is already illegal under federal law. The consequences are tremendous. And so I would actually say that I think some of this carping about this fictitious idea of non-citizen voting is just evidence of how much election denialism has been marginalized because there’s almost nothing left for them to talk about.”

Earlier this year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a previous decision, once again allowing the use of drop boxes for returning absentee ballots. A number of election clerks in Republican parts of the state have decided not to use the method because of unsubstantiated warnings that they are vulnerable to fraud and “ballot harvesting,” the alleged practice of political groups rounding up and returning hundreds of absentee ballots at once. 

The national Republican party has promised to send more than 100,000 volunteers to serve as election observers.  During the last election, a number of Wisconsin’s most prominent election deniers had the police called on them for disrupting voting during the Democratic primary in an August special election for state Senate. They promised to be back in November. 

In the small town of Thornapple in Rusk County, the U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against local officials for repeatedly refusing to use electronic voting machines and instead hand counting ballots. The lawsuit argues the town must use machines that allow voters with disabilities to vote. Election conspiracy theorists have regularly called for the hand counting of ballots over concerns that electronic machines — which aren’t connected to the internet — are susceptible to hacking. Election officials say that hand counting adds the threat of human error and voting machines are much more accurate. 

In other states, voting rights advocates have warned that Republican members of election boards and other agencies central to the certification of election results may step in and refuse to certify the election if Trump loses. Mandell says that Wisconsin’s decentralized voting system helps defend against that threat. 

Each municipality has a board of canvass responsible for certifying the local election results, which then get sent to the county boards of canvass and then on to the state. Mandell says that the role played by local officials  Wisconsin means someone denying the certification would be tossing out the votes of their friends and neighbors. That’s an important safeguard, he says. 

“You’re talking about folks not saying ‘I am skeptical of elections,’ or ‘I don’t like election machines,’ or some other nonsense,” he says. “You’re talking about people saying ‘I want to throw out my friends’ and neighbors’ votes. I don’t want my spouse’s vote to count or my family’s votes to count.’ And I think people are understandably and correctly reticent to say such a thing.”

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