Trump’s 2020 scheme began with his right-wing media supporters portraying Trump as the favorite over Joe Biden, even as polls suggested otherwise. That helped prepare Trump’s supporters for his plan, as Steve Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser, privately detailed shortly before Election Day: “He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”

Indeed, Trump declared in the early hours following Election Day that he had triumphed, and he set about attempting to remain in power by disenfranchising the electorate. 

He and his allies concocted and promoted myriad conspiracy theories about rampant election fraud, which were heavily touted by his right-wing media supporters even as they failed miserably in the courts. 

In the end, he tried to lean on GOP officials at the local, state, and federal levels to use their authority to make him president. 

Trump’s plot ultimately failed. Biden’s victory was too large, Trump’s supporters too disorganized, and too many Republican officials like Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, refused to put his desires over the constitutional order. 

But not before Trump spent weeks causing chaos with lies delegitimizing the democratic process, then incited his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol as the House and Senate met to count the electoral votes. The violent mob assaulted scores of law enforcement officers and sacked the building, sending Congress into hiding and delaying the peaceful transition of power.

Special counsel Jack Smith is currently prosecuting Trump in federal court over his post-election activities; the former president is charged with four crimes including conspiracy to obstruct the right to vote. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results,” Smith wrote in a recent filing. “The through line of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.”

Thanks in part to the support of his right-wing media allies, the felonious chief executive who sicced a mob on the legislative branch in 2021 is on the verge of returning to power. Trump is unchastened, stating to this day that he won the 2020 election and floating pardons for the “hostages” who invaded the Capitol. And he and his team have worked diligently over the last four years to demolish the guardrails that prevented him from stealing the election.

Trump’s Republican Party turned election denial into a core precept. With the help of his media allies, the former president purged the GOP of critics of his coup attempt and others willing to say that Biden won. He made his election-denying daughter-in-law the party’s co-chair and replaced Pence on the ticket with Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who says that he does not believe the former president lost in 2020 and would have worked to overturn results if he had been in Pence’s position. 

A similar purge took place within the right-wing media, as outlets like Fox either fired commentators who had stressed that Biden won legitimately or saw them leave for other outlets. The remaining propagandists have fed their audiences a steady diet of election fraud lies and conspiracy theories all year long.

Social media outlets that tried to stave off the flow of election disinformation in 2020 have buckled to pressure from Trump and his allies and are largely refusing to police such lies this cycle.

A vast Trump-allied election denial infrastructure has been created on the right in preparation for Election Day and what comes after it, ready to concoct and promote new lies.

As in 2020, the plot begins with the right-wing ecosystem priming audiences to expect a Trump victory on Tuesday — and to treat defeat as an inherently corrupt result of Democratic fraud. Its leading lights are divided in the campaign’s final days over only whether Trump’s campaign must amass more votes to put the election “beyond their ability to steal it,” as Bannon argued, or if “the vibe is so strong right now” that Democrats already can’t credibly do so, as former Fox host Tucker Carlson claims.

Trump MSG rally, Tucker drawing a line in the sand right now: nobody is going to believe that Kamala got 85 million votes pic.twitter.com/9oJ7O5XNFW

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) October 27, 2024

If election results show Trump losing, this apparatus will swing into action. Its participants will start from the conclusion that the election was rigged and Trump actually won, and work backward to find the supposed fraud that will serve as a pretext to overturn the result. 

A movement of conspiracy theorists deputized as fraud hunters will build their narrative with decontextualized video clips and inaccurate readings of election mechanics. Right-wing influencers will ensure their bogus claims go viral on social media. Trumpist media outlets will tout the purported evidence to convince their audiences that the results are illegitimate. When the claims are inevitably swatted down by election officials, journalists, or the courts, they will cry foul, move on to the next lie, or both. 

Here’s how they might do it.

Noncitizen voting is illegal in federal elections and vanishingly rare, and there is no evidence of large numbers of undocumented immigrants registering to cast ballots. But in 2020, Trump and his allies claimed that noncitizens casting illegal votes played a crucial role in his defeat in Arizona. 

They were lying. Trump and his alleged co-conspirators “repeatedly changed the numbers in their baseless fraud allegations,” as special counsel Jack Smith pointed out in a recent filing. The figure they cited ranged from 32,000 to 250,000 noncitizen votes in Arizona, which Smith alleged demonstrates that their “lies were proved by the fact that they made up figures from whole cloth.” 

Four years later, Trump is previewing a potential post-election lie by warning that there are “illegal immigrants coming” and “they’re trying to get them to vote.” And the cable news outlets that support him are blanketing the airwaves with similar fearmongering about the dire potential for noncitizens to swing the election result. On Fox, pundits have falsely claimed that the “illegal voting issue” is “a national crisis,” arguing that because “Democrats can’t win lawfully,” they have “resettled” undocumented immigrants to “interfere in the electoral process of the United States.”

The Trumpists’ hysteria rests on disturbingly thin evidence. Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, for example, repeatedly told her viewers about a “Democrat operation” to register “massive lines of illegals” to vote at Texas government offices, a story she originally attributed to the wife of a friend of a friend and made no apparent effort to verify. A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety subsequently noted that assuming that nonwhite Texans are undocumented is “kind of racist” and called her story “simply false.”

Meanwhile, bogus stories of noncitizens voting are going viral on social media.

If Trump loses, expect baseless claims that noncitizen voters are responsible to explode, coupled with demands to toss out legitimately-cast votes from precincts that favor Harris.

There is no evidence that early and mail-in voting methods encourage widespread fraud that affects election results. But in the months leading up to his 2020 coup attempt, Trump and his right-wing media allies frequently attacked those procedures, arguing that they would result in a “totally rigged” result. Those false election fraud claims continued after Election Day, fueling Trump’s effort to subvert the election.

Many of Trump’s right-wing media allies continued stoking their audiences’ mistrust in the process this year. On Fox, commentators warned that Democrats “abuse” mail-in voting “to win,” describing drop boxes as not secure and “ripe for fraud.” 

Trump downplayed those concerns earlier this year as the GOP built its own mail-in voting campaign. But in the closing days of his campaign, the former president has returned to baseless claims that fraudulent mail-in votes will swing the results.

Trump has focused his ire on the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, which he claimed “is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.” On Truth Social, he declared that “Law Enforcement must do their job, immediately,” to respond to batches of allegedly fraudulent voter registration and mail-in ballot applications received in Pennsylvania, describing them as “Really bad ‘stuff,’” claims amplified by his media allies. But the election officials that received and scrutinized those forms in York and Lancaster counties said that such situations were routine and showed that “systems worked” and the election is secure.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists likewise amplified a viral video of a “man spotted dropping off an Obscene amount of Ballots at Northampton, PA.” The man was a postal worker bringing ballots into the election office who is now reportedly facing harassment.

More of these bogus stories will bubble up from social media in the lead-up to and following Election Day, as Trumpists build their narrative.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to vote by mail. This creates what election experts describe as a “red mirage,” in which states that begin counting mail-in votes on Election Day initially report a tally weighted toward Republicans, only for the tally to undergo a “blue shift” as the state counts Democrat-heavy mail-in votes. 

Similarly, it often takes cities more time to count Election Day votes than rural areas because the urban areas have more votes to count. Since cities tend to be heavily Democratic and rural areas heavily Republican, Republican candidates can jump out to sizable leads in the ballot count before the cities report their tallies and the Democratic candidate makes up ground.

In 2020, Trump relied on his supporters’ ignorance of these well-known phenomena, claiming that the withering of his early leads in key states as election officials tabulated mail-in and urban votes for Biden were evidence of massive election fraud. Many of his propagandists backed him up, though other right-wing media figures like Fox politics editor Chris Stirewalt worked to dissuade viewers from believing such lies. 

Four years later Stirewalt’s refusal to lie has cost him his job, but the circumstances for a “red mirage” followed by a “blue shift” remain. In swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,  Republican-controlled state legislatures refused to pass legislation allowing election officials to begin processing mail-in votes before Election Day. Those officials warn that as a result, they could take days to finish counting absentee ballots and determine the winner of a close election. And the tallies will undoubtedly shift over the course of election night as urban votes are counted.

That means we should expect Trump to call for officials to “STOP THE COUNT” while the tallies show he is ahead, for his right-wing media allies to encourage their audiences to treat further votes as inherently illegitimate, and for his supporters to try to carry out his demands by force.

U.S. elections are administered at the local level, resulting in a dizzying array of different voting methods and rules across the country. Election officials and poll workers in thousands of independent jurisdictions across the country are tasked with counting the votes that determine the president. During the 2020 campaign, Trump’s lies made those workers and the companies that made the machines used to tabulate votes targets for his supporters. 

Trump’s campaign and his propagandists, for instance, promoted a video from a Georgia absentee ballot counting site, which Trump supporters alleged showed election workers removing observers from the room, bringing out fraudulent ballots concealed in suitcases, and then counting them in order to change the result. While election officials swiftly debunked that narrative, the workers, Ruby Freeman and Shea Moss, were identified by right-wing media and subjected to a campaign of harassment and intimidation. 

Trump’s media allies at Fox and elsewhere also promoted a series of absurdities about voting machines being induced to change the results of the election. Dominion Voting Systems was a key target of their lies, with Trump himself parroting a false conspiracy theory that the election technology company had deleted the votes of millions of Trump supporters. 

These lies proved costly for some of their perpetrators. Freeman and Moss won a $148 million defamation judgment against former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, while Fox paid Dominion $787.5 million to settle a suit. 

But “law enforcement officials are confronting a rising wave of threats to election workers” this year and seeking to secure them from Election Day violence, while false claims about voting machines switching votes are already going viral. And Trump and his allies will do everything they can to stoke fears of a rigged election if that is what it takes to gain power.