Donald Trump and his GOP supporters say they are just having fun stoking the fears of Democrats about a “secret” election plan the former president dangled during his rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on Sunday.
“We can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret, we’re going to take the House, right?” Trump told rallygoers of his plan with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). “Our little secret is having a big impact. … We’ll tell you what it is when the race is over,” he said with a conspiratorial grin.
In an interview with The New York Times on Monday, Johnson played coy and said he didn’t intend to share the secret just yet.
Trump’s comment immediately worried many Democrats, who harbor nightmares about Trump and Johnson conspiring to try to overturn the upcoming election if Trump loses, the Times noted, given that Johnson previously worked with Trump to undermine the 2020 election results.
While the vice president certifies elections, the speaker could cause trouble by helping to organize Republican lawsuits or rejecting electors from certain states.
“There’s a lot of ability for a bad actor to mess with the Electoral College if he’s the speaker of the House,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-New York) told the Times.
But later on Monday, at a small rally in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Johnson insisted the secret is not a “diabolical” plan to toss out Electoral College results but a “get-out-the-vote” effort to boost congressional candidates as well as the top of the ticket, reported The Hill.
“It’s nothing scandalous, but we’re having a ball with this. The media, their heads are exploding. ‘What is the secret?’” Johnson told the crowd with a chuckle.
Trump’s spokesman, Steven Cheung, backed up this explanation, saying, “President Trump has done countless tele-rallies reaching millions of Americans across the country in key regions that also help bolster Republicans in Congressional races,” in a statement responding to reporters’ questions about the “little secret.”
Yet by Monday night, Trump was rolling out what appeared to many political observers as a cynical effort to falsely claim widespread fraud in the 2024 election.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that thousands of fraudulent voter ballots had been cast in York and Lancaster counties, a claim he repeated at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday.
“They’ve already started cheating in Lancaster,” Trump told his supporters, alleging, without evidence, that “every vote was written by the same person.”
Trump was alluding to a county investigation into suspicious voter registration forms, not ballots, reported Mediaite. Election workers in two Pennsylvania counties identified large batches of questionable voter registrations that are now under investigation by local law enforcement.
In Lancaster County, 2,500 voter registrations that were flagged have been examined and verified by election workers, according to Lancaster County Commissioner Alice Yoder, who said, “The system worked. We caught this.”
Trump also claimed on Tuesday that voters seeking mail-in ballots in Bucks County, north of Philadelphia, were being turned away from election sites, and announced he was suing the county.
Trump’s political director, James Blair, posted on X that voters across the state waited in long lines “only for election officials to come out and push people out of line and tell them to come back. Voter suppression!”
Bucks County officials responded on X, “Contrary to what is being depicted on social media, if you are in line by 5 p.m. for an on-demand mail-in ballot application, you will have the opportunity to submit your application for a mail-in ballot.”
The county acknowledged that due to a miscommunication, some people in line on the last day to turn in mail ballots “were briefly told they could not be accommodated. In fact, these voters were given the opportunity to submit mail-in ballot applications” by the end of the day.
However, none of the pushback from local election officials stopped Trump from posting on Wednesday morning that “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.”
This prompted Joe Walsh, a former Republican Illinois congressman and 2020 presidential candidate, to excoriate Trump on X for distorting the truth about the election fraud allegations:
“No one voting for Trump can defend this,” Walsh’s Oct. 30 post said. “He’s lying about our elections. Again. He’s attacking the very foundation of our democracy. Again. He’s inciting violence. Again. He is a traitor to this country.”
Legal challenges to election processes remain a key tool in the Republican playbook. Republican National Committee (RNC) officials say they’ve filed over a hundred lawsuits regarding the presidential election across 26 states in recent months, reported The Daily Beast. Most have sought to change vote-counting rules, limit ballot access, or allege voter fraud, and may be aimed at helping Trump lay the groundwork to contest the election’s outcome if he loses.
Few of the GOP lawsuits have resulted in big wins in court, said Leah Tulin, an election law expert at New York University’s law school.
One such RNC-backed legal challenge was rejected by a Pennsylvania judge on Wednesday. The judge ruled that Philadelphia can’t refuse to count mail-in ballots that don’t have a handwritten date on the envelope.
But later in the day, a Bucks County judge granted the Trump campaign’s request to extend the mail ballot application deadline. Voters now have until the close of business on Friday to apply in person, reported The New York Times.
Meanwhile, an election fraud hoax aimed at sowing distrust in the election among voters in Pennsylvania and designed to benefit the Trump campaign has been making the rounds on social media for weeks. The video shows a stack of mail ballots with votes for Trump in Bucks County being torn up by an unidentified man, who also preserves votes for Harris.
The video quickly went viral but has since been discredited by Pennsylvania election officials as well as the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who issued a joint statement that the video was part of a Russian election disinformation plot.
Such false narratives of election fraud can still do damage, even when they are credibly debunked, warn seasoned political observers.
“Rampant disinformation about phantom voter fraud caused unimaginable chaos in 2020 and certainly motivated people to engage in political violence on Jan. 6,” Georgia State University law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis told Atlanta Black Star.
“The electoral process needs legitimacy to function well, and a healthy democracy requires faith in the system, and evidence-free allegations of fraud are highly corrosive,” he said. “It was true in 2020, and it is true in 2024.”
