Transcript of Stop the Steal 2.0

The 2024 election is less than two weeks away.

It's neck and neck, and Donald Trump is yet again saying that if he loses, it'll only be because of election fraud.

If I lose, I'll tell you what's possible, because they cheat. That's the only way we're going to lose, because they cheat. Our primary focus is not to get out the vote. It's to make sure they don't cheat, because we have all the votes you need. Now we have two things we have to do. We have to vote, and we have to make sure that we stop them from cheating because they cheat like dog.

If Trump loses again, there's now a significant infrastructure in place to help him challenge the election. The former President and his allies have pumped more than $140 million in to stop this deal 2.0. Election officials worry that the effort will sow doubt and confusion about the results, and so many are preparing for chaos. Less or worse. One of the places where this tension is boiling over is Maricopa County, Arizona. Our colleague Jim Carleton took a tour of the county's election headquarters office. He said it looked like a fortress.

You get there and you see this black rod iron fence all around. It's brand new. It's like seven feet high. They've put in newly installed K-Rill concrete barriers, and there's security everywhere. Every entrance There's multiple Sheriff's deputies with magnometers. They put ballots in cages. They put cages, and that's for more protective measures with 24/7 cameras. So it feels very militarized and just like an arm camp. Very, very strange.

Maricopa County's election workers have been conducting active shooter drills and learning how to repel armed mobs.

It's trauma training. It's almost like you're going to war. How to apply a tourniquet, body armor, They're going to have drones. They're going to have police snipers on the rooftops just in case.

For an elections office?

Right. I've been covering elections for decades. I've never seen procedures like this.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Wednesday, October 23rd. Coming up on the show, how election offices are preparing for a tense election day, and how Trump and his allies are gearing up for Stop the Steel 2.0. Courage.

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In Maricopa County, one of the people in charge of overseeing the 2024 election is Stephen Richer. He's the county recorder, and he's in charge of all the mail-in voting. He was elected four years ago, and right away, he was faced with people challenging Arizona's 2020 presidential results. He's looked at the data and the subsequent audits and says the process was accurate and fair, and that Joe Biden won. Here he is in 2021.

All the tests came back clean. The parties themselves oversaw the hand count auditing of 47,000 plus votes. Those votes matched with the machines tabulated 100 %.

What was interesting about Steven is he's a Republican, and he's a longtime Republican. He voted for Trump in 2020. And yet, because he defended the election in 2020 as fair, he became singled out as a traitor, and the election deniers have made his life a living hell.

How so? How has his life become a living hell?

I mean, there's been threats. The threat started really almost immediately against him, his family. The Justice Department has charged three individuals for threats against Richard, including a Missouri man who allegedly called his cell phone and warned, You need to do your effing job right or your ass will never make it to your next little board meeting.

Did Stephen Richard ever think about just saying, Okay, yeah, no, the election was stolen or just going along with it?

I asked him that, Ryan. Actually, that was a really good question. I said, Why didn't you just... Did you feel like going along with it?

Here's Richard talking to Jim.

Did you ever think, though, it was... I mean, maybe you're- Easier?

Of course, it would have been easier. Yeah. Did you ever think about it? Of course, no. No. Wrong thing to do. Too big of a lie. Too big of a lie and felt very dystopian. To me, the fascinating part of this is the dystopian contortion of facts, facts that are very ascertainable, facts that are very concrete.

By defending the results, Richard has continued to face threats and harassment, and so has his staff. He says the 10 of them have quit because they don't feel safe. In In the lead up to the 2022 midterms, some of Richard's staff are harassed on their way to work. He remembers one of his employees breaking down in tears after election deniers took pictures of her and her license plate.

She signed up for just a job where she thought she could help her community, and she didn't sign up for this. And she went to her car crying. I went out with her, and then she didn't show up the next day, and we called her, and she just had decided to leave.

After Democrats won Arizona Senate seating governorship in 2022, voters lined up to testify at the Board of Supervisors meeting, where they were certifying the county's election results. The meeting went on for hours. Those who make your peaceful revolution impossible make a violent revolution necessary. It's disgusting. Watching you pledge allegiance to my flag was disgusting the way that you sold us out.

This is a war between good and evil, and you all represent evil, including excluding you.

When Richard defended those results, he got booed.

Fighting over conspiracy theories promoted on social media by people who know nothing about...

Okay, all right. Again, I've asked you before, please do not boo, do not cheer.

Let's let the recorder- Richard has tried to combat the conspiracy theories by making everything more transparent. He says his office has given over 300 public tours. They put cameras in the office, feeding a 24-hour livestream. The is to educate people on the process.

We have tried about as hard as possible over the last three and a half years to get information about the process into the hands of Maricopa County voters. And I don't know of an election jurisdiction in the United States that has invested more in terms of voter outreach and voter communication, in terms of tours of our facility, in terms of video live streams, in terms of teletown halls, in terms of videos, in terms of articles, in terms of reports, in terms of even virtual reality tours of the election facility. So I hope that some of that pays dividends for this election.

So has all the stuff that Richard has been doing, has it been enough to try to calm people down in Maricopa?

Well, from my experience, going down there, no.

Richard ran for re-election this year and lost. So the 2024 election will be the last one he will oversee. And he's preparing for the possibility that the results will again be challenged.

I don't know of anyone who expects Donald Trump to quietly accept the results if he loses.

Maricopa County isn't the only place where elections officials are taking precautions. In one Ohio County, polling locations will have radios to keep in constant communication with law enforcement on election day. In Colorado, death threats have led some elections officials to have bulletproof vests on hand. And across the country, Trump and his allies have spent the last four years building up a huge infrastructure to challenge the results if he loses. That's after the break. How would you describe what the Stop the Steel campaign was like in in 2020.

It was this very fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation.

That's our colleague, Rebecca Ballhaus. She's been digging into the evolution of the Stop the Steel movement.

It was led by a disorganized and very chaotic group of lawyers, and it seemed like Trump was trying to throw everything at the wall to see what would stick.

What kinds of things was he throwing at the wall?

They were filing lawsuits, asking for recoups. They were trying to void tens of millions of votes. They were leading this public campaign where they were challenging the vote count. You saw people holding press conferences and Trump saying on Twitter that the election had been rigged and all these different efforts, but it was a total mess.

Last time around, Stop the Steel culminated in January sixth, where Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try and stop the certification of election results.

Stop the Steal. Stop the Steel.

In the end, Stop the Steal didn't succeed in overturning the election. While Trump lawyers filed dozens of lawsuits claiming election fraud, no court found those claims to be valid. But the idea has spread. A Gallup poll this year says that only 28% of Republicans have confidence in the accuracy of presidential elections. For this election, Rebecca says Trump and his allies have been working to take that distrust and build on top of it.

I think in the last four years, we've seen a professionalization of Stop the Steal. While there are still plenty of conspiracy theories and strange characters who are involved in the effort, we've also seen the movement get a DC treatment where you have nonprofits, you have superpacks, and you have all kinds of outside groups that have cropped up to work on this effort that they call election integrity.

In recent years, election integrity groups have been raising tons of money. Rebecca has been working to trace that money through an analysis of tax and campaign finance filings and other records. And she found that a network of GOP donors and conservative billionaires have given more than $140 million to nearly 50 election integrity groups since in 2020.

And for what was a much more fringe operation in 2020, we've also seen tens of millions of dollars pouring in from some of the wealthiest conservative families in the country to groups that are promoting claims of election fraud this time around.

And to be clear, is there any evidence that this year's election is vulnerable to fraud or that the integrity is in any way in doubt?

There is not. I mean, election officials, both Democrats and Republicans, in many states, say that this movement is basically targeting problems that don't exist.

What these groups can do is slow down the voter count and bury local elections officials and paperwork and lawsuits.

The RNC has already filed more than 120 lawsuits in various states on election rules in the lead up to election day. I think what we'll see after the election is the continuation of those kinds of efforts, both trying to change the rules for the future, but also contesting various outcomes, demanding recoups in various states, requesting that certain votes be thrown out because of the way in which they were cast. I'd expect those to be the sorts of lawsuits we see.

I mean, those are all thrown out in 2020.

Yeah, and the lawsuits that the RNC has filed so far have also been largely unsuccessful. But I think those are also really a part of this larger public awareness campaign. Every time the RNC proceeds in one lawsuit, they hail it as an election integrity victory.

Another way these groups are preparing to fight the election is by challenging voter registrations.

So states have to do maintenance on their voter rolls because people move, or they change their addresses, or they change their names, and you want to make sure that the same people aren't registered to vote in a number of different places.

In most states, it's legal for any voter to go to their local government and challenge someone else's ability to vote. These Trump-aligned groups have created online tools that make it easier for their supporters to challenge voter registrations in mass. For example, Rebecca reported that one single volunteer challenged the legitimacy of 30,000 voters in Fulton County, Georgia alone.

And that creates an enormous amount of work for election officials who are having to comb through tens of thousands of these challenges to determine what's right and what's wrong.

Often, the tools don't work that well.

What these tools are missing is some of the personal identifying information, like a social security number or a full date of birth in many situations. And so they end up flagging a lot of names that are actually correct voter registrations.

Because of this, some counties have refused to consider the challenges from one of the tools called EGLE AI. These groups have also been mobilizing people in another way by recruiting poll watchers.

They're people who are there when people are casting their ballots on election day or before election day, and they're just there to observe the process. This is something that has long been a part of elections, that people are watching the process unfold. But what's unusual here is that you have these outside groups that have spent a lot of effort training people to sign up for these positions and also telling for years and years that voter fraud is around every corner.

If the poll watchers see anything suspicious, they've been trained on how to report it.

There's one group that started what's basically Facebook for election fraud, where users can post or comment or share any, possibly, I think they call it, election irregularities, and then submit reports to the group. It's just intended to keep this influx of reports of potential issues coming in over the course of the election. I think in a year where election officials have already faced threats and all kinds of potential violence and are doing all sorts of training to prepare for that, having poll watchers who are coming into this with a real agenda and are documenting everything they see could really heighten the tension there.

What does everything that we've talked about, the poll watchers, the challenging of the voter rolls, what does that mean for how elections officials in places like Maricopa County will handle election day?

What that means is that you have election offices that are left underfunded and understaffed, and it's at a time where they're facing more security threats than ever. And so what people who watch this space carefully say is that it could mean that there's more chaos and less organization at the polls on election day.

And if there is more chaos and less organization on election day, then that presumably makes it a bit easier to say that there are problems and therefore the result can't be trusted.

That's right. I mean, what election experts who are following these groups closely say is that their goal is just to have there be more anomalies that they can point to after the election. And so if you have all these things that are going wrong on election day, it does make it that much easier to say, look at all the room there was for fraud. I think that's probably ultimately the point of this, is that even if Trump loses the election and does not successfully overturn the results in his favor, half of the country will think he won, and that is not good for democracy.

Okay. It's going to be an exciting November.

And December.

And January, too, probably. For today, Wednesday, October 23rd. The Journal is a coproduction of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Vera Bergengrunnen and Mariah Thims. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.