In the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his voters faced media interference, suspicious ballot dumps, politicized censorship of information, low-security election laws, polling place issues, and legally dubious Democrat get-out-the-vote operations.
In the 2024 election, Donald Trump and his voters faced media interference, suspicious ballot dumps, politicized censorship of information, low-security election laws, polling place issues, and legally dubious Democrat get-out-the-vote operations. On top of those, he faced two assassination attempts and a political lawfare campaign designed to bankrupt and jail him. The fact that Trump succeeded in making this election “too big to rig” doesn’t make those problems any less threatening to self-governance.
After 2020, concerned Americans started paying more attention to the security of our elections. Often on their own time, they perused voter rolls, filed public records requests, and researched election law. After 2020, they uncovered shady schemes like “Zuckbucks” — an effort to dump billions in “grants” into left-leaning jurisdictions in swing states to juice Democrat turnout — that had influenced that election.
By 2024, they had accumulated a body of research on proven or potential flaws in our elections. States that automatically register residents to vote, but don’t require proof of citizenship to do so, created opportunities for noncitizens to end up on voter rolls, sometimes unknowingly so. Overly broad laws governing overseas voters allowed people to vote in certain swing states despite never setting foot there. States with mass mail voting regimes ended up sending ballots to the wrong places, with no way to make sure they didn’t wind up in the hands of bad actors. Laws allowing undated ballots to be turned in after Election Day welcomed illegitimate behavior. States that don’t require ID to vote — or that treat noncitizen licenses as qualifying IDs — invited fraud and decreased confidence in elections. Election officials’ decision to keep dead, moved, or otherwise unqualified “voters” on the voter rolls practically invited abuse.
Despite the attention drawn to them, all of those problems still exist.
Other problems were reincarnated as new ones. As quickly as sunlight dried up the Zuckbucks pipeline, the federal government replaced it with something worse: a taxpayer-funded scheme to target likely Democrat votes. While Elon Musk transformed Twitter from the chief censorship engine to a free speech platform, actors like Facebook, YouTube, and Google doubled down. While alternative media outlets drew attention to election red flags, the legacy press labeled anyone who questioned the process “election deniers.”
Donald Trump’s win proved the Democrat election rigging machine isn’t impregnable. But it also showed just how much “rigging” you have to overcome to win. And in several Senate races around the country, other Republicans didn’t.
Americans are vastly better informed about the vulnerabilities in their elections than they were one presidential election cycle ago. Newly galvanized poll watchers and citizen journalists had a much better idea of what to watch for this time around, and were better equipped to call it out quickly.
The institutions that make American elections less free and fair, from the corporate press to corrupt election offices, are weakened but not reformed. Commonsense measures like requiring voter ID and keeping noncitizens out of American elections are widely popular, and Republicans in Washington have a mandate to restore trust by making our electoral process more secure. Complicated laws that have been weaponized or taken advantage of, like the National Voter Registration Act and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, should be improved.
State legislatures should pass laws enshrining voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements, prohibiting ballot harvesting, ditching insecure practices like automatic voter registration and ballot drop boxes, and limiting the opportunities mail voting provides for fraud. The Federal Communications Commission and Federal Elections Commission should challenge what amount to in-kind donations to Democrat campaigns from corporate media outlets. States should turn election week month season back into Election Day, stop accepting ballots that show up after Election Day, and finish counting on election night.
The Democrats who benefit from making our elections less secure won’t close up shop just because Donald Trump beat them on Nov. 5. Whenever they gain power again, they will fulfill their promises to ban voter ID laws, legalize ballot trafficking, and amass federal control of elections. You can bet they’ll find a way to turn the millions of illegal aliens they’ve dumped in swing states into voting citizens. They’ll also keep pushing to get rid of the Electoral College and institutionalize low-security mail voting.
If our elections aren’t proofed against such blatantly unconstitutional rigging, all the strides the election integrity movement has made will add up to a four-year postponement. The roughly 76 million Americans who cast ballots for Donald Trump voted against the coalition that tried to “fortify” our electoral process against him. Defeating that machine will take a lot more effort than defeating the incompetent, cackling candidate it propped up.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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