Simon Lewis, Joseph Tanfani -
For months, President Donald Trump has tried to convince Americans that the November 3 election will be “rigged,” claiming without evidence that mail voting will open the door to mass cheating.
“The greatest Election Fraud in our history is about to happen,” Trump wrote on Twitter on August 23.
In making these claims, Trump has seized upon the idea that US elections are vulnerable to rampant fraud. That once-fringe theory has become a staple of Republican politics, due largely to the efforts of a small network of lawyers who have promoted it for two decades, funded by right-wing foundations.
This year, the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have cited concerns about voter fraud in a nationwide legal battle with Democrats and voting-rights advocates over election procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic. These lawyers have played an important role, arguing for restrictions on mail-in voting in the closely-watched states of Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina.
Four nonprofits run by or linked to this network of lawyers — the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the American Constitutional Rights Union, Judicial Watch and True the Vote — have been involved in at least 61 lawsuits over election rules since 2012. More than half have been initiated since Trump took office in 2017, including 11 cases concerning absentee or mail-in voting.
These groups have helped lead a larger movement in the Republican Party that has seen states pass restrictions on voting, including strict voter identification laws passed by nine states since 2005. They have sought purges of voter rolls that could disproportionately affect minority voters, who tend to vote for the Democratic Party, according to voting-rights advocates and election officials who have opposed these efforts.
Trump, saying he wanted an investigation into supposed voter fraud, appointed Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and Hans von Spakovsky, who runs the election integrity programme at the conservative Heritage Foundation; to an election integrity commission in May 2017. It disbanded after less than a year without finding evidence of fraud. — Reuters
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