Donald Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as people try to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump wants to jail former and current members of Congress who investigated his incitement of the violent Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and he plans to pardon the rioters immediately upon taking office, he told NBC News Sunday.

On the network’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” Trump said leaders of the special congressional panel that probed the Capitol riot “lied” and “should go to jail.”

Trump singled out committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and a senior Black member of Congress, and former high-ranking House Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who co-chaired the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

“Cheney did something that’s inexcusable, along with Thompson and the people on the un-select committee of political thugs and, you know, creeps,” Trump told NBC host Welker. 

Jason Miller, an adviser to Trump, walked back the president-elect’s comments Monday. Miller told CNN that Trump’s remarks about jailing Jan. 6 committee members were taken out of context and that he just wants his administration to “apply the law equally” to everybody.

President Joe Biden is reportedly mulling preemptive pardons for Cheney and former Democratic Congressman and incoming Sen. Adam Schiff of California, who also sat on the panel, along with others who could be targeted by the new Trump administration, according to media reports citing anonymous White House sources.

Trump takes office Jan. 20.

Cheney: ‘Here is the truth’

In a statement Sunday, Cheney described Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 as “the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power,” Cheney said. “He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten, and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave.”

The Justice Department charged just over 1,560 people for taking part in the attack. Among those, 210 were found guilty at trial, and 979 pleaded guilty to charges that included assaulting police officers, trespassing and bringing deadly weapons to the Capitol, according to the most recent department data. That means it’s possible more than 1,000 individuals could be pardoned, depending on Trump’s decisions.

“As proven in Court, the weapons used and carried on Capitol grounds include firearms; OC spray; tasers; edged weapons, including a sword, axes, hatchets, and knives; and makeshift weapons, such as destroyed office furniture, fencing, bike racks, stolen riot shields, baseball bats, hockey sticks, flagpoles, PVC piping, and reinforced knuckle gloves,” according to the Justice Department.

Thompson said Monday the committee members “are simply not afraid of his most recent threats.”

“Our committee was fully authorized by the House, all rules were properly followed, and our work product stands on its own. In fact, in the two years since we have completed our work, no court or legal body has refuted it,” Thompson said in a statement provided Monday to States Newsroom.

“Donald Trump and his minions can make all the assertions they want – but no election, no conspiracy theory, no pardon, and no threat of vengeful prosecution can rewrite history or wipe away his responsibility for the deadly violence on that horrific day. We stood up to him before, and we will continue to do so,” said Thompson, who has served as the top Democrat on the House Committee on Homeland Security for the past two years.

Pardons on day one

Trump told Welker that he intends to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters on his first day in office. He said they violently attacked police officers because “they had no choice” and that their lives have been “destroyed” after facing charges for their actions.

During the wide-ranging interview Trump also blamed former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the attack and repeated debunked claims that “antifa” activists were part of a conspiracy to bait his supporters into attacking.

Video from Trump’s speech that day show him rallying his supporters to march to the Capitol and urge Congress to “do the right thing” by refusing to certify Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory.

Trump also falsely told Welker that the Jan. 6 committee destroyed its investigative material and evidence.

In fact, hundreds of witness interview transcripts, videos and online exhibits are publicly available. The committee’s work culminated in a nearly 900-page final report that remains available online, and can be easily found with a simple internet search.

Kinzinger: ‘We did nothing wrong’

Former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the only other Republican who sat on the Jan. 6 committee, said Sunday in a statement that Trump’s threat is “nothing more than the desperate howl of a man who knows history will regard him with shame.

“Let me be clear: we did nothing wrong. The January 6 Committee’s work was driven by facts, the Constitution, and the pursuit of accountability — principles that seem foreign to Trump,” Kinzinger, of Illinois, published on Substack.

Trump did not specifically name Kinzinger during his interview.

The White House did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment on Biden’s reported consideration of preemptive pardons.

Eric Hovde speaks in a video posted on X Tuesday, Nov. 12, in which he questions how ballots were counted in his election loss to Sen. Tammy Baldwin that was called early Nov. 6. Hovde did not concede then, only doing so on Monday, Nov. 18.. (Screenshot | Hovde campaign on X)

Poor Eric Hovde. His protestations that the election was rigged against him have fallen on deaf ears. Hovde’s grudging concession to Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who beat him by 29,000 votes to hang onto her seat in the U.S. Senate, came as Republicans across the country rejoiced at winning control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Like his Tom Selleck mustache, Hovde’s election denial is way out of style. 

Hovde’s baseless accusations during his very tardy concession speech about the questionable “legitimacy” of “absentee ballots that were dropped in Milwaukee at 4 a.m.” is so 2020. This year, Trump won all the swing states and, unlike last time, when he lost to Joe Biden, allegations of illegal voting, fraud, recounts, court challenges and death threats aimed at election officials have disappeared like morning dew in the Southern California sun.

Hovde heads home to Laguna Beach, California, a lonely, sore loser instead of storming the U.S. Capitol as a champion for MAGA grievance with his Trump-supporting friends. 

“I entered the race for the U.S. Senate because I love our country and I’m deeply concerned about its direction,” Hovde declared in his concession speech Monday. By then, the country’s direction had taken a sharp right turn. 

The top concerns that Hovde, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, said motivated him to run — government spending, border security and international relations — are now firmly in MAGA hands. 

“Lastly, as I’ve repeatedly expressed, I’m very worried about the political divisions and rhetoric that are tearing our country apart,” Hovde declared.

This last worry led him, Hovde said, to run a campaign that “focused on issues instead of personal attacks.” He followed this assertion by besmirching the integrity of Wisconsin election officials, denouncing his opponent as a liar and blaming Democrats for underhandedly stealing the election from him by allowing third-party candidates to run and by spreading rumors that he’s a California bank owner (a verifiable fact). For good measure, he added, “Equally concerning is the large segments of the press that don’t care to fact-check these lies and even helped propagate misinformation to help their preferred candidate.”

Anyone who watched the debate between Hovde and Baldwin might be surprised to hear Hovde congratulate himself for running a high-minded campaign rooted in the “values of integrity and morality.”

“The one thing you’ve perfected in Washington is your ability to lie,” Hovde sneered at Baldwin at the start of the debate. While Baldwin focused on her long record of detailed policy work, reaching across the aisle to pass bills that helped Wisconsinites, Hovde relied heavily on unsubstantiated accusations and repeatedly called out Baldwin’s girlfriend, a Wall Street investment adviser, demanding that she release financial information she is not required to disclose and unsubtly calling attention to the fact that Baldwin, an out lesbian, is in a same-sex relationship. 

This week, Baldwin is back in Washington doing what she does best — focusing on unsexy issues that matter to her constituents (see her Wednesday press release: “Baldwin Calls on USDA to Provide Emergency Aid for Gamebird Farmers Hit By Tornadoes”). Hovde, who admitted during the debate that he doesn’t know much about what’s in the Farm Bill and then griped afterward to rightwing talk radio host Vicky McKenna: “Like, I’m supposed to study [the bill] in depth?!” can’t imagine why Wisconsin chose Baldwin over him.

There was nothing nefarious about Baldwin’s win. She received a predictable boost from absentee voters in heavily Democratic Milwaukee, and as she has done in her previous statewide races, and she got a lot of votes in Republican-leaning areas of the state where she has spent a great deal of time listening to her constituents and championing their interests in bills that help Wisconsin agriculture and manufacturing. That’s the kind of work that made her the only Democrat to win the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.

Hovde distinguished himself, according to The New York Times, by becoming the first prominent Republican in the nation to suggest the election was rigged, parroting Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories. 

Fortunately, this year Hovde’s complaints are just one man’s sour grapes. But in his incivility, his poor grasp of policy, and, most of all, in refusing to concede for so long and, even when he did, questioning the integrity of the election, Hovde made a divisive political environment more toxic.

As Sam Liebert, Wisconsin state director of All Voting is Local told Erik Gunn, “The rhetoric of questioning our democracy is more than just words. … It  contributes to chaos and confusion, which undermines public trust in our elections and the officials who administer them.” 

As Hovde himself might put it, the kind of campaign he ran is tearing our country apart. Fortunately for Wisconsin, in this case, it’s over. 

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Michael Gableman in Dane County Circuit Court on Thursday, June 23 | Screenshot via Wisconsin Eye

The Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation (OLR) filed a disciplinary complaint against former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman on Tuesday. In 10 counts, the complaint alleges Gableman violated numerous provisions of the Wisconsin Rules of Professional Conduct for Attorneys during and after his much-maligned investigation of the 2020 election. 

Among the allegations, Gableman is accused of failing to “provide competent representation” and to “abstain from all offensive personality” and of violating attorney-client privilege. 

The OLR investigation into Gableman was initiated after a grievance was filed by voting rights focused firm Law Forward. In a statement, Law Forward president Jeff Mandell said the organization would continue to hold people accountable for undermining faith in the state’s election system. 

“Gableman misused taxpayer funds, promoted baseless conspiracy theories, and engaged in improper intimidation tactics; his efforts undermined the integrity of our electoral system,” Mandell said. “Law Forward is committed to ensuring accountability for those who undermine the public’s trust in our elections, and we will continue to pursue legal action to hold others who impugn elections responsible for their actions, ensuring that they face consequences for any misconduct that threatens the freedom to vote. Our work is far from finished, and we are dedicated to securing a future where elections remain fair, transparent, and free from interference.” 

The first two counts against Gableman involve statements and actions he took after filing subpoenas against the mayors and city clerks of the cities of Green Bay and Madison. The complaint alleges that Gableman mischaracterized discussions he had with the lawyers for both cities, communicated with Green Bay’s city attorney when the city had obtained outside counsel in the matter, lied to Green Bay city officials about the work of his investigation and mischaracterized those actions when he filed a petition with a Waukesha County Circuit Court attempting to have the mayors of both cities arrested for not complying with his subpoenas. 

The third count alleges that Gableman made false statements in his testimony to the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections when he accused officials at the Wisconsin Elections Commission, as well as the mayors of Green Bay and Madison, of “hiring high-priced lawyers” to conduct an “organized cover-up.”

Gableman – Complaint

“Gableman did not characterize his assertions as opinions,” the complaint states. “He presented them as objective, proven facts. His assertions were public accusations of improper, possibly unlawful activity by Mayors Rhodes-Conway and Genrich. Gableman had no tangible, verifiable, objective, persuasive evidence to support his assertions. Gableman’s accusations caused serious reputational damage to the public officials involved. He publicly sought to jail the mayors of Madison and Green Bay, despite all they and their attorneys had done to comply with Gableman’s subpoenas.” 

The fourth through seventh counts against Gableman involve actions and statements he made during open records litigation involving his investigation by the public interest organization American Oversight. 

Those counts allege that Gableman’s statements while on the witness stand, in open court during a recess and to the news media after a hearing about his investigation’s failure to provide records constituted demeaning statements about a judge and opposing counsel and displayed a “lack of competence” in following the state’s open records and records retention laws by destroying records and failing to comply with American Oversight’s records requests. 

Count eight alleges that Gableman used his contract with the Wisconsin Assembly and Speaker Robin Vos to pursue his own interests, including by stating multiple times he had to “pressure” Vos into continuing the investigation that dragged on for months after it was supposed to end. 

The complaint states that Gableman was paid a total of $117,395.95 during the investigation and the Assembly paid $2,344,808.94 for the investigation, including $1,816,932.26 for hiring outside counsel in multiple instances of  litigation initiated during the review. 

“Before signing the contract, Gableman did not tell Vos that he did not agree with the objectives Vos had outlined, the time frame for submitting the final report, or the compensation to be paid to him,” the complaint states. “Gableman also did not tell Vos that he intended to enlist public support to pressure Vos to change the objectives of the investigation, increase the budget, or expand the time frame.” 

The ninth count in the complaint alleges that by supporting a failed effort to recall Vos, and making various public statements at rallies and in the media about his discussions with Vos and Vos’ staff, Gableman violated his duty of confidentiality with his client, the Assembly. 

The final count alleges that Gableman lied in an affidavit to the OLR submitted during its investigation into his conduct. Gableman stated in the affidavit that at no time during his investigation was he “engaged in the practice of law.” However the complaint includes excerpts from a number of the agreements he signed with the Assembly that served as contracts for “legal services,” lists the instances during the investigation in which he gave legal advice to the Assembly and the times he made court filings as an attorney during the investigation. 

The complaint states that he made “multiple demonstrably false statements” in the affidavit in which he was attempting to show he had not violated the state code of conduct, itself a violation of the code. 

OLR complaints are heard by the state Supreme Court. The office said it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

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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.

The Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, speaks at a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

NEW YORK  — Former President Donald Trump promised “America’s new golden age” of closed borders and world peace as he rallied a capacity crowd at Madison Square Garden in his home city in the final stretch of the 2024 presidential contest against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump headlined the over six-hour rally that featured nearly 30 speakers, some of whom insulted Latinos and attacked Democratic nominee Harris over her race, and he vowed “to make America great again, and it’s going to happen fast.”

“It is called America first, and it is going to happen as no one has ever seen before,” Trump said, adding “We will not be overrun, we will not be conquered. We will be a free and proud nation once again. Everyone will prosper.”

But the event also generated intense criticism from Democrats for remarks made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who spoke during the afternoon hours ahead of Trump and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now.”

The joke could prove politically problematic for Republicans, who have been courting the Latino vote, and particularly in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans live.

The United States is home to 5.6 million Puerto Ricans, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data, and about 8% of them live in Pennsylvania.

Hinchcliffe, who hosts a podcast called “Kill Tony,” also said Latinos “love making babies” and made a lewd joke about them.

Florida Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, whose state is also home to hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans, on X wrote, “It’s not funny and it’s not true. Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!”

Democrats brought in U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is Puerto Rican, and the vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, to blast the joke. “When you have some a-hole calling Puerto Rico floating garbage … that’s what they think about anyone who makes less money than them,” she said.

Harris on Sunday in Philadelphia laid out a new policy proposal focused on Puerto Rico.

The former president’s 80-minute speech mostly featured his standard campaign promises and stories, though he added a proposal to his list of tax breaks — a benefit for those caring for sick or aging relatives in their homes. Harris also introduced a policy for at-home care for seniors earlier in October.

Trump repeated his popular pledges to “get transgender insanity the hell out of our schools,” “stop the invasion” at the border and restore peace to Ukraine and the Middle East, which he claims would have never become war-torn had he been in office.

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, told the crowd his time campaigning around the country for Trump has revealed “something very powerful out there happening among the base.”

“I’m telling you, there’s an energy out there that we have not seen before,” Johnson said.

NYC stop a detour

Trump held the rally nine days before polls close on Nov. 5. Nearly 42 million Americans have already voted early, in person or by mail, in more than two dozen states, according to the University of Florida Election Lab’s early voting tracker.

Trump’s New York stop detoured from the seven battleground states in this election’s spotlight — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. His campaign also announced on Sunday two upcoming stops in New Mexico and Virginia during the contest’s final week.

Still, both candidates once again hit Pennsylvania over the weekend, with Trump delivering remarks Saturday at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania, and Harris spending Sunday rallying a crowd in Philadelphia.

Harris spoke to the press in Philadelphia, a city she described as “a very important part of our path to victory.”

“I’m feeling very optimistic about the enthusiasm that is here and the commitment that folks of every background have to vote and to really invest in the future of our country,” Harris told reporters.

The vice president criticized Trump for using “dark and divisive language,” including his comments this week that America is the “garbage can of the world.”

“I think people are ready to turn the page,” she said.

Tucker Carlson goes after Harris

Numerous speakers attacked Harris’ record — a standard feature of political rallies — but some comments invoked her race. Trump’s childhood best friend, David Rem, clutched a crucifix and told the crowd Harris is the “antichrist.”

Conservative media personality Tucker Carlson described Harris as a “Samoan Malaysian low IQ former California prosecutor” as he was spinning a scenario in which the Democrats reflect on their candidate post-election.

“Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us,” Carlson said earlier in his speech.

Harris’ mother was Indian, and her father is Jamaican. Trump has previously questioned her race during his interview with the National Association of Black Journalists.

Carlson, who was fired by Fox News in April 2023, accused Democrats of telling “lies,” and said in a mocking voice, “Jan. 6 was an insurrection, they were unarmed, but it was very insurrection-y.”

The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 by thousands of Trump supporters came after months of the former president refusing to concede the 2020 presidential election, which President Joe Biden won.

Twenty-eight speakers preceded Trump, beginning at just after 2 p.m. and holding court until the former president took the stage at 7:13 p.m. Trump’s wife, Melania, in a rare campaign rally appearance, introduced him and spoke briefly.

The lineup included the founder of Death Row Records, TV personality Dr. Phil and pro wrestling’s Hulk Hogan and Dana White — some of whom spoke at July’s four-day Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, whose super PAC has flooded more than $75 million into the campaign, was among the cast of speakers.

Musk told the crowd to vote early and that he wants to see a “massive crushing victory.”

“Make the margin of victory so big that you know what can’t happen,” he said, referring to debunked claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Focus on NYC

The day was heavy on the mystique of New York and Trump’s ties to it. New York City is not only where Trump grew up and followed his father’s path into real estate, but now also where he was convicted in May in a Manhattan court on 34 state felony counts for a hush money scheme involving a porn star.

A vendor hawking campaign gear to supporters waiting to enter Madison Square Garden Sunday morning advertised a hat that read “I’m voting for the convicted felon.”

Several speakers credited Trump with changing the New York City skyline. The 58-story Trump Tower stands on 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan, among his other real estate holdings on the island.

“New York City made Donald Trump, but Donald Trump also made New York City,” said Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

Howard Lutnick, chair and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of the Trump campaign’s “transition team,” told the story of losing just over 650 of his employees in the World Trade Center attack on Sept. 11, 2001 masterminded by known terrorist Osama bin Laden.

“We must elect Donald J. Trump president because we must crush jihad,” Lutnick said.

Lutnick bantered with Musk on stage, estimating the pair could possibly cut $2 trillion in federal spending under a second Trump administration. Trump has chosen the duo to lead a commission on government efficiency if elected.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who took a leading role in spreading Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election, received a standing ovation from the full arena.

He accused Biden and Harris of spreading “socialism, fascism and communism.”

Giuliani, a major player in Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election, appeared at the rally just days after a federal judge in New York ordered him to surrender his apartment and valuables to election workers in Georgia whom he was found guilty of defaming.

Giuliani, along with a handful of other speakers, also implied that Democrats are responsible for the two assassination attempts on Trump.

“I’m not gonna do conspiracy,” Giuliani said, “but it’s funny that they tried to do everything else, and now they’re trying to kill him.”

The accusation was a theme throughout the daylong event. Speaker after speaker implied or outright blamed Democrats for the two attempts on Trump’s life, never mentioning the perpetrators. The gunman in the first attempt was killed by law enforcement, and the second, who never fired at Trump, has been charged in Florida; neither has been found to have ties to Democrats.

Trump focused some of his comments on New York City, referencing his childhood and adding that he felt sympathy for the city’s indicted Mayor Eric Adams.

The rally ended, not with Trump’s signature closer “YMCA” by the Village People, but with a live rendition of “New York, New York” by Christopher Macchio.

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Voters make selections at their voting booths inside an early voting site on Oct. 17, 2024 in Hendersonville, North Carolina. (Photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — As an exceedingly bitter, tight and dark campaign for the presidency moves into its last moments, apprehensive election officials and experts warn Election Day is only the first step.

The closing of the polls and end of mail-in voting kick off a nearly three-month process before the next president of the United States is sworn in on Inauguration Day in January. New guardrails were enacted by Congress in 2022 to more fully protect the presidential transition, following the Jan. 6, 2021 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters and a failed scheme to install fake electors.

But even before that shift to a new chief executive begins, a presidential victor is unlikely to be announced election night or even the following day.

It’s a result that will possibly take days to determine, given tight margins expected in seven swing states. Officials needed four days to count all the votes to determine President Joe Biden the victor of the 2020 presidential election.

In states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the law does not allow that process to begin for millions of mail-in ballots until Election Day. Other states allow pre-processing of ballots.

Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s former Republican secretary of state, said ballot authentication could be on different timelines across the country after voting ends on Election Day.

“We have 50 states, plus D.C., that pretty much all do it differently,” Grayson, who served as president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, told reporters Friday on a call of bipartisan former state election officials who are working to explain the process to the public.

It could mean “in a very close election that we don’t know on election night who the president is or who controls the House or the Senate, but we should feel confident over the next couple of days, as we work through that, that we’re going to get there,” he said.

Lawsuits and potential recounts 

Those delays, which former President Donald Trump seized on to spread the baseless lie that the election was stolen from him, are expected again in November, especially as all eyes will be on the battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Additionally, there already are hundreds of pre-election lawsuits, mainly filed by Republicans, ranging from election integrity challenges to accusations of noncitizens allowed to vote in federal elections — something that rarely happens and is already illegal. The legal challenges could further spark delays.

“We will not have a winner on election night most likely and so we need to be able to prepare the public for this,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and CEO of the democracy watchdog group Common Cause, during a Tuesday briefing.

She added that her organization will focus on combating misinformation and disinformation on election night and beyond.

“There is the potential that somebody could claim the win before … all of the votes have been counted,” she said.

In the early morning hours after Election Day in 2020, before results from key states were determined, Trump falsely claimed he won in an address at the White House.  

On top of that, experts say this year could see election denial erupting in countless courtrooms and meeting rooms in localities and the states, as well as across social media, if doubts are sown about the results.

Recounts could also delay an official election result, and the laws vary from state to state.

For example, in Pennsylvania, if a candidate demands a recount, three voters from each of the over 9,000 precincts have to petition for a recount.

“We’ve never seen that happen actually in Pennsylvania,” Kathy Boockvar, the commonwealth’s former Democratic secretary of state, said on Friday’s call with reporters.

An automatic statewide recount is triggered in Pennsylvania if there’s a difference of a half percent of all votes cast for the winner and loser. The final recount results, by law, are due to the secretary of state by Nov. 26, and results would be announced on Nov. 27, Boockvar said.

The margin in Pennsylvania’s 2020 results for the presidential election was between 1.1% and 1.2%, not enough to trigger the automatic recount, Boockvar said.

Taking out the shrubs

State election officials have been preparing for the past year to train poll workers to not only run the voting booths but for possible violence — a precaution put in place after the 2020 election — and have beefed up security around polling locations.

On Friday, Trump posted on X that the election “will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.”

A reporter asked Grayson about the possibility of aggression from poll watchers. The Republican National Committee announced in April a “historic move to safeguard the integrity of the electoral process,” establishing party-led trainings for poll watchers.

Poll watchers are not a new concept, and Grayson said clear “safeguards” are in place.

“If you’re intimidating, you’re gone. There’s clear laws in every state on that,” he said.

Celestine Jeffreys, the city clerk in Green Bay, Wisconsin, said during a Wednesday roundtable with election workers that the city has an Election Day protocol in place that includes everything from blocking off streets to City Hall to getting rid of shrubbery.

“We have actually removed bushes in front of City Hall” to ensure no one can be concealed behind them, she said. In the second assassination attempt on Trump earlier this year, a gunman hid in bushes outside Trump’s private golf course.

New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said during a Tuesday briefing she is focused on the physical safety of election officials.

During the event with the National Association of Secretaries of State, she said such safety is not only a priority during voting but when officials move to certify the state’s election results in December.

“We have all been spending a lot more time on physical security and making sure that our election officials at all levels are more physically secure this year,” Toulouse Oliver said. “And of course, you know when our electors meet in our states, you know, ensuring for the physical security of that process and those individuals as well.”

On Dec. 17, each state’s electors will meet to vote for the president and vice president. Congress will vote to certify the results on Jan. 6.

“We are thinking a lot more about this in 2024 than we did in 2020, but I think that each one of us… have a playbook in mind for how to handle any unanticipated eventualities in the certification process,” she said.

It’s a security precaution that the U.S. Secret Service is also taking.

For the first time, Congress’ certification of the Electoral College on Jan. 6 has been designated a National Special Security Event, something that is usually reserved for Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

The 2020 experience

In 2020, The Associated Press did not call the presidential election for Biden until 11:26 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 7 — roughly three-and-a-half days after polls closed. The AP, as well as other media organizations, project election winners after local officials make initial tabulations public.

Those tallies are then canvassed, audited and certified, according to each state’s legal timeline. Recounts may also extend the timeline before final certification.

The vote totals reported in Pennsylvania — a state that carried 20 Electoral College votes in 2020 — put Biden over the top for the 270 needed to win the presidency.

Trump refused to concede the race, and instead promised to take his fight to court.

For the next two months, Trump and his surrogates filed just over 60 lawsuits challenging the results in numerous states. Ultimately none of the judges found evidence of widespread voter fraud.

The next step was for Congress to count each state’s certified slate of electors, which by law, it must do on the Jan. 6 following a presidential election.

However, in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, Trump and his private lawyers worked to replace legitimate slates of electors with fake ones, according to hundreds of pages of records compiled by a special congressional investigation, and by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Trump pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to block ratification of the Electoral College’s vote at the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress, because the vice president’s role in the certification of electoral votes was not exactly clear in the Electoral Count Act of 1887.

Pence ultimately refused.

Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 following a “Stop the Steal” rally at The Ellipse park, south of the White House, where Trump told the crowd “We will never concede.”

The mob assaulted police officers, broke windows to climb inside and hurled violent threats aimed at elected officials, including the desire to “hang” Pence. More than 1,500 defendants have been charged by the Department of Justice.

Congress stopped its process of reviewing the state electors in the 2 p.m. Eastern hour as police ushered the lawmakers to safety. The joint session resumed at roughly 11:30 p.m., and Pence called the majority of electoral votes for Biden at nearly 4 a.m. on Jan. 7.

New law on presidential transition

To deter another Jan. 6 insurrection, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transitional Improvement Act of 2022 as part of a massive appropriations bill.

The Electoral Count Reform Act codifies into law that the vice president, who also serves as the president of the U.S. Senate, only ceremoniously reads aloud a roll call of the votes.

Most notably, the provision raises the threshold for lawmakers to make an objection to electors. Previously, only one U.S. House representative and one U.S. senator would need to make an objection to an elector or slate of electors.

But under the new law, it would take one-fifth of members to lodge an objection and under very specific standards — 87 House members and 20 senators.

The Electoral Count Reform Act also identifies that each state’s governor is the official responsible for submitting the state’s official document that identifies the state’s appointed electors, and says that Congress cannot accept that document from any official besides the governor, unless otherwise specified by the state’s law.

Trump and his allies tried to replace legitimate slates of electors in several states with fake electors who would cast ballots for Trump.

The Presidential Transitional Improvement Act provides candidates with funding and resources for transitional planning, even if a candidate has not conceded after the election.

There are already issues with the transition of power. The top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, sent a Wednesday letter to Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, urging them to sign documents to ensure a peaceful transition of power.

“With fewer than three weeks left until an election in which the American people will select a new President of the United States, I urge you to put the public’s interest in maintaining a properly functioning government above any personal financial or political interests you may perceive in boycotting the official transition law and process,” Raskin wrote.

Denial expected at all levels of government

Experts warn the effort to delay certification of the vote is largely being fought at the local and state levels, and that several groups are gearing up to sow doubt in the election outcome.

Devin Burghart, president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, said on a press call Wednesday that since 2020, “election denial has shifted away from the capital to county election commission meetings, courtrooms, cyber symposiums and countless conspiracies in preparation for a repeat this November.”

“This time, the baseless claim that undocumented immigrants are somehow swamping the polls has fueled the ‘big lie’ machine,” Burghart said.

Kim Wyman, the former Washington state secretary of state, said the noncitizen topic is not new.

In two high-profile cases, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Republican-led efforts in Alabama and Virginia to purge voter rolls after alleging thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote. Both states were ordered to stop the programs and reinstate voters – though Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin promised Friday to appeal and even escalate to the Supreme Court.

In Georgia, the state’s Supreme Court delayed new rules until after this election that would have required three poll workers at every precinct to count ballots by hand once the polls closed — essentially delaying unofficial election results.

More than 165 electoral process lawsuits across 37 states have been filed by both parties since 2023 leading up to the 2024 presidential election, according to a survey by Bloomberg of pre-election cases. The journalists found that more than half the cases have been filed in swing states, and challenge almost every facet of the voting process, from absentee voting, to voter roll management, voter eligibility and vote certification.

Republican and conservative groups have filed roughly 55% of the lawsuits, mostly aimed at narrowing who can vote, and overall most of the cases were filed in August and September, according to the analysis.

Courts threw out dozens of lawsuits claiming voter fraud in 2020.

Mai Ratakonda, senior counsel at States United Democracy Center, said anti-democracy groups have used litigation “to legitimize their efforts to sow doubt in our election system.”

“We’ve unfortunately continued to see this trend of filing lawsuits to bolster and legitimize narratives that our elections are insecure and laying the groundwork to contest results later,” Ratakonda told reporters on a press call Wednesday hosted by the organization, whose stated mission is to protect nonpartisan election administration.

Timeline of key presidential election dates

• Nov. 5, 2024—Election Day
  The voters in each state choose electors to serve in the Electoral College.
• By Dec. 11, 2024—Electors appointed
  The executive of each state signs the Certificate of Ascertainment to appoint the electors chosen in the general election.
• Dec. 17, 2024—Electors vote
  The electors in each state meet to select the president and vice president of the United States.
• Jan. 6, 2025—Congress counts the vote
  Congress meets in joint session to count the electoral votes.
• Jan. 20, 2025—Inauguration Day
  The president-elect is sworn in as president of the United States.

Source: The National Archives and Records Administration

Correction: This report has been updated to reflect that former Washington state Secretary of State Kim Wyman made the comment that noncitizen voting has been illegal at the federal level since 1996.

A crowd of Harris-Walz supporters applauds at a campaign rally in Ripon Thursday, Oct., 3, where former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican, spoke in support of Harris. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)

When Steve Michek voted for Donald Trump in 2016, the Republican sheriff from Iowa County was mainly focused on the fact that his party’s candidate for president that year came from the private sector.

“I learned enough through my experience as sheriff, you can’t run government like a business — it’s not the same,” said Michek, 64, who retired in 2023. “Nonetheless, I thought having some business-related experience certainly is not a bad idea.”

During Trump’s four years in office, however, Michek found the news from Washington increasingly disturbing. A revolving door of cabinet members hired and fired — “or he was belittling them in public,” Michek told the Wisconsin Examiner. “I was like, ‘What the hell? You don’t do that.’”

Then came Trump’s first impeachment in 2019 and early 2020, and his appointment of his daughter and son-in-law to “high-level jobs” in the White House. As sheriff, Michek said, “The people in the county wouldn’t permit me to do things like that.”

By 2020 “I’d had enough,” he said. Michek cast his ballot that November for former Vice President Joe Biden as the only other practical option. Then came the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who sought to prevent Biden from being certified as the winner of the election.

“I was appalled and even terrified,” Michek said. “I thought, what in God’s green earth are we doing?”

Michek had been a leader in the state sheriff’s association and visited Madison during the massive protests over Act 10, the legislation to end most union rights for state employees in 2011. He recalled those protests as primarily peaceful and “well-behaved.”

What he saw unfold on television from the U.S. Capitol was entirely different. “This was worse than anything I’d ever witnessed,” Michek said.

All of that explains why Michek was in Ripon Thursday to introduce former Republican U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney at a rally to showcase GOP support for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president.

“It is now clear to me that Donald Trump is a danger to our country. That is why I am voting for Vice President Kamala Harris,” Michek told the crowd at Ripon College. “As we gather in the very town where the Republican Party was founded, I am asking my fellow Republicans to join me as we turn the page on Trump’s campaign of division and chaos.”

‘Ronald Reagan conservative’ makes common cause with Democrats

The Harris campaign is emphasizing its outreach to Republicans in the 2024 election, including knocking on more than 200,000 doors in Wisconsin counties where Trump won four years ago. Trump carried Fond du Lac County, where Thursday’s rally was held, with 62% of the vote in 2020.

At the rally, a large sign declaring “Country Over Party” towered over one section of the audience, which greeted Cheney with cries of “Thank you, Liz!”

Cheney, who endorsed Harris in September, harkened to the Republican Party’s founding in 1854 by opponents of slavery.

Underscoring her Republican credentials — “I was a Republican even before Donald Trump started spray tanning,” she quipped as the crowd laughed and cheered — Cheney called herself “a Ronald Reagan conservative.” She defined that ideology as a belief in limited government, low taxes, a “strong national defense” and the premise that “the private sector is the engine of growth of our economy.”

Although she had never voted for a Democrat before, Cheney said she would “proudly” vote for Harris in November. 

“Vice President Harris is standing in the breach at a critical moment in our nation’s history. She’s working to unite reasonable people from all across the political spectrum,” said Cheney. Lauding Harris for a career in public service, she added, “I know that she will be a president for all Americans.”

She reiterated her call for Republicans to cross party lines in November. “We cannot turn away from this truth in this election — putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration,” Cheney said. “It is our duty.”

Taking the podium and calling Cheney “a true patriot,” Harris thanked her “for your support and your leadership and your courage.” She also thanked Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has said he will vote for Harris because of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“We both love our country and revere our democratic ideals, and our oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America is a sacred oath — an oath that must be honored and must never be violated,” Harris said. She framed the choice at the polls in November as an answer to the question, “Who will obey that oath?”

Harris reprised an appeal that she’s been making since the Democratic National Convention in August, when a series of Republican former office holders, including some former Trump aides, endorsed the Democratic ticket.

“No matter your political party, there is a place for you with us and in this campaign,” Harris said.

Republican Harris endorsement letter

Michek was one of 24 Republicans to sign an open letter backing Harris that the campaign released Thursday.

Over the last year, he said, when talk has turned to politics among friends and acquaintances he has been open about his opposition to reelecting Trump.

“I would say I’m not going to vote for a criminal — he’s a convicted felon,” Michek said.

When some people have pushed back, “I ask, ‘Would you vote me in for sheriff if I was a felon?’ They’ll say ‘Oh, hell no!’ So why would you for a president? I think it’s an easy argument this time around.”

He said he hasn’t volunteered for the campaign or for the Democratic Party. He only learned about the rally and the open letter two days before the Thursday event when he got a request to speak.

“I didn’t hesitate — I was glad to,” Michek said.

The request came through a sheriff colleague who’s a Democrat. “He knew there were things I didn’t like about the Trump administration,” Michek said. When the request came, “To me it was like, ‘Wow, he was paying attention to the things I was saying.’”

Another signer was Mark Becker. A former Brown County Republican Party chair, Becker said he opposed Trump from the day the developer and reality TV star declared his candidacy and “just starting talking about migrants as, you know, terrible people,” Becker told the Wisconsin Examiner during a Zoom call Sunday morning.

After unsuccessfully urging Republicans “to do the right thing back in 2016” and reject Trump, Becker became part of a nascent never-Trump movement that former Milwaukee talk radio host Charlie Sykes helped to spearhead.

Trump “spent his time in office dividing us and creating chaos,” Becker said. “And then, of course, he capped it all off with Jan. 6, where he tried to overthrow and overturn a free and fair election and encouraged his supporters to violently storm the Capitol, resulting in 140 police officers being injured. It is clear that Donald Trump is a danger to our country, and this time there will be no guardrails.”

Becker now hosts a weekly talk show on Civic Media radio stations in Wisconsin, where he aims for discussion that goes across partisan lines. His motto is, “I don’t advocate for left versus right, but we advocate for right versus wrong.”

Former Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh, who was also on the Sunday call, turned against Trump in 2018 after “I made a mistake in 2016” and campaigned for him.

“Trump has reshaped the GOP into something extreme and dangerous,” Walsh said — “a party driven by conspiracy theories, authoritarianism and personal enrichment.”

Calling Jan. 6 “a defining moment for our nation,” Walsh said that in addition to failing to uphold a peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election, “Donald Trump has pledged to do the same thing this year if he were to lose.”

Insurrection, insults and invective

The Capitol attack on Jan. 6 tops the list of anti-Trump Republicans’ reasons for opposing the former president.

“People lost their lives,” Michek said. “Not everyone’s been held accountable for that.”

He referred to former Gov. Scott Walker’s statement that people should “move on” from those events, although he didn’t mention Walker by name.

“I don’t think we should move on,” Michek said. “It’s similar to 9/11 — that’s something we should never forget.”

But criticisms of Trump don’t stop there.

Former state Sen. Barbara Lorman of Fort Atkinson was another GOP veteran to sign the letter supporting Harris. Like Becker, Lorman said she opposed Trump from the first time he ran in 2016 — turned off by his divisive rhetoric and what she saw as a lack of a moral compass.

“It’s about leadership,” Lorman told the Wisconsin Examiner in a telephone interview. “What kind of a leader do you want? Do you want a leader who admires despots? Who admires Putin? Who admires [Hungarian President] Viktor Orban? [That] should be a price to pay for any political party.”

Lorman, 92, served in the Wisconsin Senate from 1981 to 1995, an era when she served “with very nice Republicans” as well as with some legislators who “went to jail — both parties.”

She recalls her tenure there as a time when lawmakers were able to work across party lines.

“We need a strong two-party system,” Lorman said. “And we need people who can compromise — who can negotiate, who can work in a group, and who understand you can’t always have everything you want.”

Those are not qualities she sees in Donald Trump.

“To slam the other side, to say if they win, you’re going to die — I don’t want a leader who talks like that,” Lorman said.

She is baffled by Republican politicians who have thrown their support to Trump despite being targets for his scorn in the past — often because of their earlier criticism of Trump.

“His loose tongue has insulted so many people, and then when they get an opportunity they turn around and support him,” Lorman said.

But the Capitol attack was the worst offense in her eyes. “After Jan. 6, and after watching him on TV over and over, I just don’t understand why anyone would support him,” Lorman said.

Walsh told the Wisconsin Examiner that being a Republican for Biden in 2020 was “a much lonelier position than it is right now to be a Republican for Kamala Harris.”

The former Illinois congressman counts as many as 500 to 600 anti-Trump Republicans, including former members of Congress, former national security officials and veterans of past GOP administrations, all the way back to Reagan.

“This movement right now of Republicans for Harris is really something the country’s never seen,” Walsh said. In visits to all the battleground states in recent weeks, “I’m blown away by the local support of so many local Republicans in each of these states coming up to me when I’m in town with them, and saying, ‘Joe, I’m with her. I’m a Republican. I’m going to vote for her.’”

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The Republican vice presidential candidate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, participate in a debate at the CBS Broadcast Center on Oct. 1, 2024 in New York City. (Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images)

Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Republican Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance squared off Tuesday night in a vice presidential debate that marked the last scheduled in-person meeting for the campaigns as Americans decide the country’s next chapter.

Meeting for the first time, Walz and Vance engaged in a policy-heavy, nearly two-hour back-and-forth hosted by CBS News at its studios in New York City. The debate was moderated by Norah O’Donnell, host of the “CBS Evening News,” and Margaret Brennan, who anchors the network’s Sunday political show “Face the Nation.”

The vice presidential candidates emphasized their modest upbringings and laid out their visions to lower high living costs, address charged issues like reproductive rights, immigration and gun violence, and navigate a quickly worsening conflict in the Middle East.

And, with the presidential contest marking the first since the violent aftermath of the 2020 election, and Trump’s continued false claims that he won, the moderators pressed the men on whether voters would see a peaceful transfer of power, no matter the winner. Vance would not provide a direct answer whether he would have certified the 2020 vote.

Walz is a second-term governor who previously served six terms in the U.S. House. Prior to his election, Walz worked as a public school teacher and football coach while also enlisted in the Minnesota Army National Guard for 24 years.

Vance served in the U.S. Marines for four years before earning his Yale law degree and becoming a venture capitalist and bestselling memoirist. He was first elected to public office in late 2022 to serve as Ohio’s junior U.S. senator.

The mostly amicable debate, with some moments of tension, was a noticeable departure from the bitter polarization on display daily during the presidential campaign. Walz and Vance shook hands and lingered onstage afterward chatting and introducing each other to their wives.

The presidential nominees, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, met on the debate stage last month in a more acrimonious exchange during which the former president falsely claimed immigrants were eating pets in Ohio and Harris ripped into him for his remarks on race and abortion.

Trump has refused to debate again. Following the Vance-Walz exchange, the Harris campaign renewed its offer for another presidential meetup offered by CNN in Atlanta later this month.

Growing Middle East conflict

Answering the first question from the moderators Tuesday night, Walz and Vance sparred over which administration, if elected, would best quell signs of a widening war in the Middle East.

Tensions in the region escalated earlier Tuesday when Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, according to the Pentagon.

Walz accused Trump of being “fickle” on foreign policy and said the world is worse off since Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal. Walz argued for “steady leadership.”

“You saw it experienced today where, along with our Israeli partners and our coalition, [we were] able to stop the incoming attack,” Walz said.

“It’s clear, and the world saw it on that debate stage a few weeks ago, a nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump talking about crowd sizes is not what we need in this moment,” the governor continued.

Vance maintained that Trump headed off heated global conflict by invoking fear.

“We have to remember that as much as Governor Waltz just accused Donald Trump of being an agent of chaos, Donald Trump actually delivered stability in the world, and he did it by establishing effective deterrence,” Vance said. “People were afraid of stepping out of line.”

The barrage in the Middle East followed Israel’s ground incursion into Southern Lebanon and its recent assassination in Beirut of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Iranian proxy militant group Hezbollah.

While Israel intercepted the majority of the rockets Tuesday, U.S. Navy destroyers in the Middle East fired roughly a dozen interceptors at incoming Iranian missiles, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder said.

The Biden administration promised “severe consequences,” though it has not provided details. Harris said late Tuesday that Iran poses a “destabilizing, dangerous force in the Middle East” and her commitment to Israel is “unwavering.”

Despite a visit to Washington less than a week ago from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the CBS moderators did not ask about the ongoing war in Ukraine, and neither candidate brought up the costly and ongoing fight against Russia’s continued invasion.

2020 election

Vance and Walz sparred over how Trump handled his loss in the 2020 presidential election and his actions leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol following a rally that Trump hosted.

Walz said while he and Vance found some areas of common ground at other points during the debate, the two were “miles apart” on Trump’s actions following the 2020 election.

“This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen, and it manifested itself because of Donald Trump’s inability to say – he is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said.

Vance didn’t directly answer whether he would have certified the electoral count for President Joe Biden had he been a member of Congress at the time, to Walz’s dismay.

“I’m pretty shocked by this,” Walz said. “He lost the election. This is not a debate.”

Walz said he was concerned that Vance wouldn’t follow the example set by former Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to go along with a scheme to recognize fake slates of electors and deny Biden the presidency.

Fact check: States Newsroom assesses claims from the Vance-Walz vice presidential debate

Vance tried to pivot to Harris’ actions following the COVID-19 pandemic and whether she “censored Americans from speaking their mind” before saying that both he and Trump “think that there were problems in 2020.”

There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud during the last presidential election, during which Trump lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

Walz also criticized Trump and Vance for using the same narrative ahead of this November’s elections, saying they were “already laying the groundwork for people not accepting” the results should Trump lose.

Taxes and tariffs

Both Harris and Trump have released economic plans that would add trillions to the national deficit — though analysis after analysis shows Trump’s proposals outpacing Harris’ by at least a few trillion.

Harris and Walz are running on an “opportunity economy” theme that would permanently expand the Child Tax Credit, including giving $6,000 to new parents, and provide tax credits and deductions to first-time homebuyers and entrepreneurs.

Harris, following Biden’s earlier budget proposal, has said she would impose a minimum tax on high-wealth individuals, but vowed steeper levies on long-term capital gains.

Trump has promised to fund the Treasury’s coffers with money raised by taxing imported goods. Largely he wants to extend his signature 2017 tax law and permanently lower the corporate tax rate.

When asked by the moderators how the candidates could accomplish those goals without ballooning the national debt, both Vance and Walz sidestepped directly answering the question. Rather they touted Trump and Biden administration policies and then went on the attack.

“Donald Trump made a promise, and I’ll give you this: He kept it. He took folks to Mar-a-Lago [and] said, ‘You’re rich as hell. I’m gonna give you a tax cut,’” Walz said, adding that Trump’s tariff plan would be “destabilizing” for the economy.

Economists warn that Trump’s plan to slap tariffs on imports across the board —  as high as 60% on Chinese imports and 100% to 200% on cars and John Deere tractors manufactured in Mexico — could cause consumer prices to increase and invite retaliation.

But Vance said he wanted to “defend my running mate” on the issue.

“We’re going to be taking in a lot of money by penalizing companies for shipping jobs overseas and penalizing countries who employ slave laborers and then ship their products back into our country and undercut the wages of American workers. It’s the heart of the Donald Trump economic plan,” the senator said.

High costs and housing

Both candidates spent significant time addressing housing and child care costs.

Walz touted Harris’ “bold forward plan” that calls for construction of 3 million new homes and “down payment assistance on the front end to get you in a house.”

“A house is much more than just an asset to be traded somewhere. It’s foundational to where you’re at,” Walz said.

Vance said some of Walz’s ideas on housing were “halfway decent.”

One of the central pillars of Trump and Vance’s housing plans is to turn over federal lands to private hands for development.

“We have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything. They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used, and they could be places where we build a lot of housing,” Vance said.

On child care, Walz pledged a paid federal family and medical leave mandate as a priority for the Harris campaign, and advocated a parallel workforce development program for the care professions.

“We have to make it easier for folks to be able to get into that business, and then to make sure that folks are able to pay for that,” Walz said.

The dual goals, he said, “will enhance our workforce, enhance our families, and make it easier to have the children that you want.”

Vance said he sees an opportunity for a “bipartisan solution” to the high cost of child care, though he stopped short of agreeing with a federal paid leave law.

Instead he proposed expanding the potential recipients for federal child care grants.

“These programs only go to one kind of child care model. Let’s say you’d like your church maybe to help you out with child care. Maybe you live in a rural area or an urban area, and you’d like to get together with families in your neighborhood to provide child care and the way that makes the most sense. You don’t get access to any of these federal monies,” Vance said.

Immigration, again

Vance also repeatedly connected the housing shortage and high costs to immigration — the central issue for Trump’s campaign and a common answer from him for several of the nation’s woes.

The Ohio senator said housing is “totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”

“The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’ open border,” Vance said, referring to the town where he and Trump falsely claimed over and over that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets.

Debate moderator Brennan pressed Vance on his claim: “Senator on that point, I’d like for you to clarify. There are many contributing factors to high housing costs. What evidence do you have that migrants are part of this problem?”

Vance said he would share on social media following the debate a Federal Reserve study that supported his claim.

Reproductive rights 

Access to abortion and fertility treatments was one of the more contentious areas of disagreement, though neither candidate trod new ground for their party.

Vance maintained the Trump stance that abortion laws should be set by voters or state lawmakers, while Walz said women and their doctors are best suited to make those decisions.

Vance told a story about a woman he grew up with having an abortion, then telling him a few years ago that “she felt like if she hadn’t had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship.”

“And I think that what I take from that, as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable, is that my party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue, where they frankly, just don’t trust us,” Vance said. “And I think that’s one of the things that Donald Trump, and I are endeavoring to do.”

Walz rejected Vance’s position that state lawmakers should determine women’s access to the full slate of reproductive decisions, including fertility treatments.

Walz referenced some of the stories women have told in the last two years about being denied medical care for miscarriages or other dangerous pregnancy complications because of vaguely written state laws that banned or significantly restricted access to abortion.

“This is a very simple proposition: These are women’s decisions to make about their health care,” Walz said, later adding that people should “just mind their own business on this.”

Gun violence

The two vice presidential candidates had one of the more genuine exchanges of the debate after the moderators asked them about solutions for gun violence.

Vance conceded that he and Walz both want to reduce the number of people killed by guns every year, but said the solution should center around addressing illegal guns, including those used in drug trafficking, and through changing how schools are designed.

“Unfortunately, I think that we have to increase security in our schools. We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the door stronger. We’ve got to make the windows stronger,” Vance said. “And of course, we’ve got to increase school resource officers, because the idea that we can magically wave a wand and take guns out of the hands of bad guys, it just doesn’t fit with recent experience.”

Walz said school shootings are every parent’s “worst nightmare” before telling a story about how his son witnessed a shooting at a community center while playing volleyball.

“Those things don’t leave you,” Walz said, before talking about meeting with parents of the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, when he was a member of Congress.

“We understand that the Second Amendment is there, but our first responsibility is to our kids to figure this out,” Walz said. “In Minnesota, we’ve enacted enhanced red flag laws, enhanced background checks.”

Walz said he absolutely believes Vance hates it when children die from gun violence, but added that’s “not far enough when we know they’re things that work.”

“No one’s trying to scaremonger and say, ‘We’re taking your guns,” Walz said. “But I ask all of you out there, ‘Do you want your schools hardened to look like a fort?’ … when we know there’s countries around the world that their children aren’t practicing these types of drills.”

Vance expressed sympathy that Walz’s son had witnessed a shooting and thanked him for bringing up Finland as an example of a country with a high rate of gun ownership that doesn’t have school shootings.

“I do think it illustrates some of the, frankly, weird differences between our own country’s gun violence problem and Finland,” Vance said, before mentioning higher rates of substance abuse and mental health issues within the United States.

“I don’t think it’s the whole reason why we have such a bad gun violence problem, but I do think it’s a big piece of it,” Vance said.

Hurricane Helene response, climate change 

The two candidates expressed dismay about the destruction stemming from Hurricane Helene in states in the Southeast, but disagreed about how best to address climate change.

Vance said “a lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns,” before criticizing how Democrats have drafted climate change laws.

“This idea that carbon emissions drive all the climate change; well let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of arguments,” Vance said. “Well, if you believe that, what would you want to do? The answer is that you’d want to restore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you’d want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America, because we’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.”

Walz said that Biden and Harris have worked with Congress to enact legislation addressing climate change that also created jobs.

“We are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have. We’re also producing more clean energy,” Walz said. “Reducing our impact is absolutely critical, but this is not a false choice. You can do that at the same time you’re creating the jobs that we’re seeing all across the country.”

Walz also said that farmers in Minnesota know climate change is real because some years they experience significant drought and other years they’re inundated with too much rain for their crops to handle.

“They’ve seen 500-year droughts, 500-year floods back-to-back,” Walz said. “But what they’re doing is adapting, and this has allowed them to tell me, ‘Look, I harvest corn, I harvest soybeans, and I harvest wind.’”

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Voters in Grand Rapids, Mich., cast their ballots during the state’s August primary

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Some voters are already casting early ballots in the first presidential election since the global pandemic ended and former President Donald Trump refused to accept his defeat.

This year’s presidential election won’t be decided by a margin of millions of votes, but likely by thousands in the seven tightly contested states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

How legislatures, courts and election boards have reshaped ballot access in those states in the past four years could make a difference. Some of those states, especially Michigan, cemented the temporary pandemic-era measures that allowed for more mail-in and early voting. But other battleground states have passed laws that may keep some registered voters from casting ballots.

Trump and his allies have continued to spread lies about the 2020 results, claiming without evidence that widespread voter fraud stole the election from him. That has spurred many Republican lawmakers in states such as Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina to reel back access to early and mail-in voting and add new identification requirements to vote. And in Pennsylvania, statewide appellate courts are toggling between rulings.

“The last four years have been a long, strange trip,” said Hannah Fried, co-founder and executive director of All Voting is Local, a multistate voting rights organization.

“Rollbacks were almost to an instance tied to the ‘big lie,’” she added, referring to Trump’s election conspiracy theories. “And there have been many, many positive reforms for voters in the last few years that have gone beyond what we saw in the COVID era.”

The volume of election-related legislation and court cases that emerged over the past four years has been staggering.

Nationally, the Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan group that researches election law changes, tracked 6,450 bills across the country that were introduced since 2021 that sought to alter the voting process. Hundreds of those bills were enacted.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, cautioned that incremental tweaks to election law — especially last-minute changes made by the courts — not only confuse voters, but also put a strain on local election officials who must comply with changes to statute as they prepare for another highly scrutinized voting process.

“Any voter that is affected unnecessarily is too many in my book,” he said.

New restrictions

In many ways, the 2020 presidential election is still being litigated four years later.

Swing states have been the focus of legal challenges and new laws spun from a false narrative that questioned election integrity. The 2021 state legislative sessions, many begun in the days following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, brought myriad legislative changes that have made it more difficult to vote and altered how ballots are counted and rejected.

The highest profile measure over the past four years came out of Georgia.

Under a 2021 law, Georgia residents now have less time to ask for mail-in ballots and must put their driver’s license or state ID information on those requests. The number of drop boxes has been limited. And neither election officials nor nonprofits may send unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to voters.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said when signing the measure that it would ensure free and fair elections in the state, but voting rights groups lambasted the law as voter suppression.

That law also gave Georgia’s State Election Board more authority to interfere in the makeup of local election boards. The state board[AS1]  has made recent headlines for paving the way for counties to potentially refuse to certify the upcoming election. This comes on top of a wave of voter registration challenges from conservative activists.

In North Carolina, the Republican-led legislature last year overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto to enact measures that shortened the time to turn in mail-in ballots; required local election officials to reject ballots if voters who register to vote on Election Day do not later verify their home address; and required identification to vote by mail.

This will also be the first general election that North Carolinians will have to comply with a 2018 voter ID measure that was caught up in the court system until the state Supreme Court reinstated the law last year.

And in Arizona, the Republican-led legislature pushed through a measure[AS2]  that shortened the time voters have to correct missing or mismatched signatures on their absentee ballot envelopes. Then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed the measure.

“Look, sometimes the complexity is the point,” said Fried, of All Voting is Local. “If you are passing a law that makes it this complicated for somebody to vote or to register to vote, what’s your endgame here? What are you trying to do?”

Laws avoided major overhauls

But the restrictions could have gone much further.

That’s partly because Democratic governors, such as Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, who took office in 2023, have vetoed many of the Republican-backed bills. But it’s also because of how popular early voting methods have become.

Arizonans, for example, have been able to vote by mail for more than three decades. More than 75% of Arizonan voters requested mail-in ballots in 2022, and 90% of voters in 2020 cast their ballots by mail.

This year, a bill that would have scrapped no-excuse absentee voting passed the state House but failed to clear a Republican-controlled Senate committee.

Bridget Augustine, a high school English teacher in Glendale, Arizona, and a registered independent, has been a consistent early voter since 2020. She said the first time she voted in Arizona was by absentee ballot while she was a college student in New Jersey, and she has no concerns “whatsoever” about the safety of early voting in Arizona.

“I just feel like so much of this rhetoric was drummed up as a way to make it easier to lie about the election and undermine people’s confidence,” she said.

Vanessa Jiminez, the security manager for a Phoenix high school district, a registered independent and an early voter, said she is confident in the safety of her ballot.

“I track my ballot every step of the way,” she said.

Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer and Volker Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the think tank Hoover Institution, said that while these laws may add new hurdles, he doesn’t expect them to change vote totals.

“The bottom line is I don’t think that the final result in any election is going to be impacted by a law that’s been passed,” he said on a recent call with reporters organized by the Knight Foundation, a Miami-based nonprofit that provides grants to support democracy and journalism.

Major expansions

No state has seen a bigger expansion to ballot access over the past four years than Michigan.

Republicans tried to curtail access to absentee voting, introducing 39 bills in 2021, when the party still was in charge of both legislative chambers.

Two GOP bills passed, but Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed them.

The next year, Michigan voters approved ballot measures that added nine days of early voting. The measures also allowed voters to request mail-in ballots online; created a permanent vote-by-mail list; provided prepaid postage on absentee ballot applications and ballots; increased ballot drop boxes; and allowed voters to correct missing or mismatched signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes.

“When you take it to the people and actually ask them about it, it turns out most people want more voting access,” said Melinda Billingsley, communications manager for Voters Not Politicians, a Lansing, Michigan-based voting rights advocacy group.

“The ballot access expansions happened in spite of an anti-democratic, Republican-led push to restrict ballot access,” she said.

In 2021, then-Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, signed into law a measure that transitioned the state into a universal vote-by-mail system. Every registered voter would be sent a ballot in the mail before an election, unless they opt out. The bill made permanent a temporary expansion of mail-in voting that the state put in place during the pandemic.

Nevada voters have embraced the system, data shows.

In February’s presidential preference primary, 78% of ballots cast were ballots by mail or in a ballot drop box, according to the Nevada secretary of state’s office. In June’s nonpresidential primary, 65% of ballots were mail-in ballots. And in the 2022 general election, 51% of ballots cast were mail ballots.

Last-minute court decisions

Drop boxes weren’t controversial in Wisconsin until Trump became fixated on them as an avenue for alleged voter fraud, said Jeff Mandell, general counsel and co-founder of Law Forward, a Madison-based nonprofit legal organization.

For half of a century, Wisconsinites could return their absentee ballots in the same drop boxes that counties and municipalities used for water bills and property taxes, he said. But when the pandemic hit and local election officials expected higher volumes of absentee ballots, they installed larger boxes.

After Trump lost the state by fewer than 21,000 votes in 2020, drop boxes became a flashpoint. Republican leaders claimed drop boxes were not secure, and that nefarious people could tamper with the ballots. In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, then led by a conservative majority, banned drop boxes.

But that ruling would only last two years. In July, the new liberal majority in the state’s high court reversed the ruling and said localities could determine whether to use drop boxes. It was a victory for voters, Mandell said.

With U.S. Postal Service delays stemming from the agency’s restructuring, drop boxes provide a faster method of returning a ballot without having to worry about it showing up late, he said. Ballots must get in by 8 p.m. on Election Day. The boxes are especially convenient for rural voters, who may have a clerk’s office or post office with shorter hours, he added.

“Every way that you make it easy for people to vote safely and securely is good,” Mandell said.

‘A case of crying wolf again’: Election experts say Wisconsin is prepared to avoid conspiracies

After the high court’s ruling, local officials had to make a swift decision about whether to reinstall drop boxes.

Milwaukee city employees were quickly dispatched throughout the city to remove the leather bags that covered the drop boxes for two years, cleaned them all and repaired several, said Paulina Gutierrez, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission.

“There’s an all-hands-on-deck mentality here at the city,” she said, adding that there are cameras pointed at each drop box.

Although it used a drop box in 2020, Marinette, a community on the western shore of Green Bay, opted not to use them for the August primary and asked voters to hand the ballots to clerk staff. Lana Bero, the city clerk, said the city may revisit that decision before November.

New Berlin Clerk Rubina Medina said her community, a city of about 40,000 on the outskirts of Milwaukee, had some security concerns about potentially tampering or destruction of ballots within drop boxes, and therefore decided not to use the boxes this year.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, who serves the state capital of Madison and its surrounding area, has been encouraging local clerks in his county to have a camera on their drop boxes and save the videos in case residents have fraud concerns.

A risk of confusing voters

Many local election officials in Wisconsin say they worry that court decisions, made mere months before the November election, could create confusion for voters and more work for clerks.

“These decisions are last-second, over and over again,” McDonell said. “You’re killing us when you do that.”

Arizonans and Pennsylvanians now know that late-in-the-game scramble too.

In August, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated part of a 2022 Arizona law that requires documented proof of citizenship to register on state forms, potentially impacting tens of thousands of voters, disproportionately affecting young and Native voters.

Whether Pennsylvania election officials should count mail ballots returned with errors has been a subject of litigation in every election since 2020. State courts continue to grapple with the question, and neither voting rights groups nor national Republicans show signs of giving up.

Former Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, who is now president of Athena Strategies and working on voting rights and election security issues across the country, said voters simply need to ignore the noise of litigation and closely follow the instructions with their mail ballots.

“Litigation is confusing,” Boockvar said. “The legislature won’t fix it by legislation. Voter education is the key thing here, and the instructions on the envelopes need to be as clear and simple as possible.”

To avoid confusion, voters can make a plan for how and when they will vote by going to vote.gov, a federally run site where voters can check to make sure they are properly registered and to answer questions in more than a dozen languages about methods for casting a ballot.

Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers and Jim Small, Nevada Current’s April Corbin Girnus and Pennsylvania Capital-Star’s Peter Hall contributed reporting.

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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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