Republicans are waging lawfare to win the White House

Democracy be damned.

It’s no secret that Donald Trump plans to contest the result of the 2024 election if he loses, just as he did in 2020. But this time, it’s not just Trump and a team of hucksters, sycophants and incompetents spreading lies about non-existent election fraud and attempting to manipulate electors and the legal system to put a loser in office. Right-wing lawyers around the country via the pro-Maga non-profit organisation America First Legal foundation and the Trump-controlled Republican National Committee (RNC) are sowing doubt among the electorate and courts which could destroy the heart of the US democratic system if their guy loses.

It’s undemocratic, and a deeply sinister laying of the groundwork to overturn the upcoming election.

Neither Trump nor his running mate JD Vance will say that Trump lost in 2020, nor has either promised to respect the results of the 2024 election – unless Trump is the winner, of course. In 2020, Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence followed the law and certified Joe Biden’s victory; Pence is no longer Trump’s running mate (when told that Pence’s life was under threat by angry pro-Trump rioters on 6 January 2021, Trump reportedly responded, “so what?”).

Vance has shown that he will bow to the will of his boss. Dangerous election denialism appears to have the full backing of the RNC, which is co-chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. It’s also an organisation that is involved in more than 100 election-related lawsuits across more than half of US states, concentrated in some of the most hotly contested districts of swing states. The RNC’s election integrity division is headed by Christina Bobb, who was indicted in Arizona for election interference along with the ex-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, and more than a dozen other Republicans.

These RNC lawsuits repeat the debunked claims that there was widespread voter fraud in 2020: that ballots were illegally cast, a large number of non-citizens voted, and machines were corrupted. These have all been shown to be lies, including by multiple Republican election officials. But the point isn’t to find the truth; it’s to create a legal pretext that the election results were invalid.

These lies have come at a steep cost for many. Some Trump loyalists who have allegedly interfered with the 2020 results have faced criminal charges and some have even gone to jail; several of the lawyers who challenged the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf have been disbarred, sanctioned or criminally charged. Pro-Trump election deniers have faced criminal charges in Nevada, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin for various election-stealing schemes. Fox News paid a $787.5m (£600m) settlement to avoid a trial after being sued by one voting machine manufacturer for defamation after the network repeated the conspiracy theory that the machines switched Trump votes to Biden ones.

This narrative has also come at a price to those who are safeguarding US democracy. Many election workers – including Republicans and Trump supporters – have been subject to intimidation and physical violence for not accepting Trump’s election lies. Some elected Republicans are reportedly so scared of their own party’s supporters that they’ve declined to publicly refute election claims they know aren’t true. Democrats are shoring up their own legal teams to make sure that whoever wins in 2024 actually takes office. And it’s impossible to forget the absolute nadir of 2020 election denial: the deadly riot at the Capitol, which saw many rioters sent to prison, and put the former president under investigation for election interference.

None of this is stopping the would-be election stealers of 2024. This time around, those who want to install Trump in office aren’t waiting for November to attempt interfering in the election. In Georgia, several Trump-supporting election officials refused to certify the results of the primary election. The Republican-controlled election board has also tried to give these election deniers the power to refuse to certify the results in November. That same board passed a last-minute rule requiring hand-counting of ballots in some counties, an error-prone and chaos-inducing process that would almost certainly delay the election results, foster distrust, and give conspiracy theories more time to percolate (Democrats have sued to block the new hand-counting rule). In Nebraska, the GOP has tried to change the rules to give all of the state’s electoral college votes to the winner, rather than the long-standing rule allowing those votes to be split between candidates. In Nevada and Mississippi, the RNC has sought (and so far, failed) to overturn a rule allowing mail-in ballots to be counted so long as they were sent before the polls closed on election day.

The RNC is interested in putting Trump in power – not election integrity – and they are willing to burn down democracy to get what they want. This threatens the foundations of the American democratic system, and that which glues the country together. It’s one thing to be disappointed at the result of an election; it’s another for swathes of the public to believe that elections are stolen. Once that kind of doubt enters the national psyche, it’s awfully hard to go back to being a country where people may dislike an outcome but understand that it’s fair, and believe that the task is to do better next time around. What we get if too many Americans tip over into the land of reality-denialism isn’t a vigorous, if contested democracy; it’s a failing state.