Donald Trump Expands Claims of Fraud, Irregularity as Early Voting Begins

As early voting approaches, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s rhetoric has taken a more sinister turn. He has vowed to prosecute anyone who “rigged” the election, much in the same way he falsely claimed he won in 2020 and attacked those who supported an accurate vote count.

He also told a police officer gathering last Friday that they should “beware of voter fraud,” an apparent attempt to call for legally ambiguous enforcement.

Trump has claimed, without providing evidence, that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud by Democrats, election officials and others. On Saturday, Trump promised that if he wins this November, anyone found to have cheated will be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” He said he was referring to everyone from election officials to lawyers, political staffers and donors.

“Those who engage in immoral behavior will unfortunately be tracked down, arrested and prosecuted at a level never before seen in our country,” Trump wrote on his social media network Truth Social, and later posted the message to X (formerly known as Twitter).

The former president’s warning began with the words “cease and desist,” the latest in a growing wave of rhetoric used by authoritarian leaders.

Election experts and several state and local election officials were quick to condemn the former president’s comments, which they saw as an attempt to intimidate voters as they prepared to begin voting in their offices.

Barb Byrum, the Ingham County, Michigan, clerk, said she thought Trump’s post was an attack on democracy aimed at putting election officials out of work.

“But we know we won’t be bullied,” said Byrum, a Democrat. “We are public servants who signed up to make sure every voter has a chance to vote, and we will do that.”

To be clear, Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, with Biden winning by 7 million votes. Trump’s attorney general has said there was no evidence of widespread fraud, Trump has lost dozens of lawsuits challenging the results, and an Associated Press investigation found no fraud on a level that could overturn the election. Moreover, multiple reviews, recounts, and audits in key states where Trump claimed defeat have confirmed Biden’s victory.

Trump, who has spoken warmly of authoritarians and recently mused that “sometimes you need someone strong,” has already pledged to prosecute political opponents if he takes office. His allies have laid out plans to help federal prosecutors better target the president’s opponents.

In one conservative overview of the Trump administration known as “Project 2025,” a former Justice Department official in the Trump administration wrote that Pennsylvania’s top elections official should have been prosecuted for a policy dispute over whether voters there would have a chance to correct signature errors on their mail-in ballots.

Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department official and Biden administration staffer who now teaches law at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, said his investigation is consistent with the case, even though Trump has denied there was a 2025 project.

“He’s increasingly showing us what kind of president he wants to be, and that includes using the Justice Department to punish people who disagree with him, whether they’ve committed a crime or not,” Levitt said.

Levitt said he was skeptical that the Trump administration could simply prosecute those who refute his election lies, but he and others said such a proposal was nonetheless dangerous.

“If ‘fraud’ simply means not liking the election results, then threatening people with punishment for fraud is deeply troubling,” Steve Simon, a Democrat who is Minnesota secretary of state and president of the National Secretaries of State Association, wrote on X.

Trump’s campaign said the former president spoke only about the importance of a clean election.

“President Trump believes that anyone who breaks the law, including criminals who committed election fraud, should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. We can’t have a country without free and fair elections,” campaign spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt said in a statement.

Trump has already made threats against people who did not engage in illegal activity in the 2020 election. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg donated more than $400 million to local election offices in 2020 to help them cope with the pandemic. Trump threatened Zuckerberg “with the rest of his life in prison” if he donated any more, according to a book published earlier this month.

Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in an interview Monday that Trump’s comments have prompted election officials who have faced years of threats from Trump’s false claims of corruption in 2020 to step up their alert levels and security plans.

“It’s a level of malice and intimidation that we’ve never seen before, and it’s absolutely shocking and troubling,” Benson said. “We worry that individuals will read the investigation and take it upon themselves to seek revenge on the candidate before the election — or immediately after, if the candidate doesn’t win.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that Trump’s investigation was dangerous. “This is not who we are as a country. This is a democracy.”

Steven Richer, the Republican recorder in Maricopa County, Arizona, who Trump and his supporters have repeatedly attacked for sticking to the accuracy of the county’s vote count in 2020, pointed to X as pointing to an elections official who was indicted that year for her actions, Tina Peters. A former clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, was convicted in August of helping activists gain access to voting machines in her county to prove Trump’s lies.

“She was on your side,” Reacher wrote in his post to Trump. Earlier this summer, Reacher lost the Republican primary for reelection.

President Trump on Friday urged police to monitor polling places in case of fraud in November, speaking to a gathering of his support group, the Police Fraternal Order.

“I want you to watch and I want you to be all messed up. Watch out for voter fraud, because we won. Without voter fraud, we win so easily,” he told the officers. “You can just watch and stay quiet. Believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge. They’re afraid of you.”

According to Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, his proposal would violate several federal and state laws prohibiting voter intimidation, some of which specifically prohibit uniformed police officers from entering polling places except to respond to an emergency or to drop off ballots in person.

Diaz said these laws come from a bitter history in the United States where law enforcement officials abused their power to prevent black people from voting.

“When we think about law enforcement presence at polling places, we have to remember that history,” he said. “Even the best-intentioned police officers who are there to keep people safe, with no ill intent, can have their presence perceived by voters in a way that is different from what they intended.”

Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy in Detroit and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.