EagleAI and IV3 have used incomplete, unverifiable data and flawed methodologies to challenge voter registration lists, making them unreliable sources. Challenges based on these flawed datasets put a significant burden on election officials and risk disenfranchising or intimidating lawful voters. In many cases, these faulty systems have flagged voters who are already inactivated or removed.

If a county or state were to remove or inactivate voters based on mass challenges at this point in time, it would be a violation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), which requires that all routine maintenance be completed 90 days before the election — in this case, August 7, 2024. Recent Department of Justice guidelines clarified that the 90-day “quiet period” would apply to challenges put forth by a third party. The only removals that can occur during the quiet period are at the request of the registrant or due to death, criminal conviction, or mental incapacity.

In addition to potential NVRA violations, schemes to file frivolous mass challenges likely violate several other federal laws, including the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the Ku Klux Klan Act, and various state laws. Mass challenges casting undue suspicion on voters and creating administrative barriers to vote could violate both the section 11(b) anti-voter intimidation provisions of the VRA and the Klan Act provision that outlaws conspiracies to intimidate voters. In addition, various states have laws against voter intimidation and fraudulent misrepresentations, which baseless mass challenges may violate. Both individuals and organizations that file challenges, and any boards of election that accept them, could be liable for their conduct.

Voting by noncitizens is virtually nonexistent, and repeating this disinformation — even to rebut it (as we are admittedly doing here) — could lend these lies an air of legitimacy. Past efforts to identify noncitizen voting have identified only statistically insignificant attempts. Even the Heritage Foundation, which is spreading disinformation on this topic, compiled data that found only 24 instances of noncitizens voting in the 20 years between 2003 and 2023. Any claim that “potential noncitizens” were found on voter rolls should be thoroughly scrutinized. 

Such claims were recently advanced in Alabama as a pretext for a voter purge; in fact, it turned out that many of the affected voters were recently naturalized citizens who are legally entitled to vote. Still, other governors are taking a similar path. In late August, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose claimed to have found 1,930 and 138, respectively, potential noncitizens with voting history. (It’s worth calculating: Even if these claims were confirmed, this would represent at most 0.00011% of votes cast in Texas and 0.00002% in Ohio, based on the current numbers of registered voters there.)

The timing of when the Texas and Ohio claims went public — both in late August 2024 — is also notable. This is because states do routine list maintenance and should have caught any potential noncitizens before the 90-day “quiet period” under the NVRA, which began on August 5, 2024. If these officials had serious concerns about ineligible voters on their lists, they had the opportunity to investigate and air those claims long before the law prohibited them from taking action.

It would be nearly impossible for a noncitizen to cast a vote. Even if they did accidentally end up on the voter rolls (because, for example, they checked the wrong box on a form), states would find and remove them, alongside other ineligible voters during routine voter list maintenance outside the quiet period. The NVRA requires that states use a common voter registration form on which an applicant must attest that they are a U.S. citizen, under penalty of perjury. Further, it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in a federal or state election, and anyone who casts an unlawful vote risks jail time and (in the case of noncitizens — even documented immigrants) deportation. 

These overreaches can also be prosecuted, as unlawful voter purges rob people of their right to vote. In late September, the Department of Justice filed suit against Alabama after the state started a process to remove what it said were more than 3,200 non-citizen voters from the rolls during the 90-day “quiet period.” The Department of Justice said in its filings, “This list of impacted individuals included both natural-born and naturalized U.S. citizens who were registered, eligible voters in the State.” At the time of the filing, according to the DOJ, “at least 717 individuals targeted by the Program have so far confirmed that they are in fact U.S. citizens.”

Elections are complex processes run by humans. Many election officials in 2024 will face new rules and procedures. Others, because of high turnover, will lack experience — estimates indicate that at least 23% of election workers in 2024 will be handling their first presidential election. Even the most seasoned election officials might make a mistake despite their best efforts, especially if they are understaffed, under-resourced, or under threat. While some problems and mistakes are inevitable, multiple safeguards exist to catch them. Hiccups are usually resolved quickly, and ultimately, they are unlikely to impact an election’s outcome. 

But the 2022 election demonstrated how simple mistakes that are quickly fixed can become conspiracy fodder. In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, the printer glitch was caught within 15 minutes, and county officials correctly tabulated the votes. Still, prominent election-denying influencers twisted the facts and spread rumors that the machines were rigged. In Maricopa County, Arizona, the use of the wrong ballot paper was solved when officials sent ballots to a county office where more sophisticated scanners could read and tabulate the votes. Nonetheless, the uproar spilled over into another county, well outside of Maricopa: Commissioners in Cochise County, Arizona, refused to certify their election in protest of what happened in Maricopa. 

Going forward, these types of claims should be met with rigorous questions: When did the problem occur? Has it been resolved? How many voters were affected? Were their votes eventually tabulated properly? How long did that take?

Poll workers are trained to catch and fix errors quickly, and provisional ballots are an option for voters if the issue cannot be remedied quickly. Further, state laws provide mechanisms throughout the canvass process (and even after certification) to challenge results or correct errors — whether the result of benign accident or malicious interference. These safeguards vary by state but often include ballot curing, reporting unlawful activity to law enforcement, recounts, audits, and election contests. Also, knowingly spreading false information about election workers can result in civil liabilities and defamation lawsuits.

Support for hand counts relies on unfounded criticisms of the reliability of tabulation machines, which are routinely subjected to multiple layers of required testing and security controls. Some examples from Verified Voting show why voting machines are more reliable than hand-counting:

• York County, Pennsylvania – It took staff four hours to audit two races on 1,842 ballots in 2022 — a process that would have taken nearly 17 days of round-the-clock counting to count all races on all of the county’s 184,594 ballots.
• Nye County, Nevada – One day into the 2022 midterm hand count, the county clerk acknowledged a 25% error rate, attributing the discrepancies between hand- and machine-tabulated vote totals to mistakes by volunteer counters.
• Shasta County, California – The county clerk and voters’ registrar estimated that hand-counting the ballots of 112,000 registered voters and meeting the 30-day certification deadline would require 1,200 additional workers and cost at least $1,651,209.

While hand counting may be appropriate in certain small jurisdictions, in most places, hand counting will be much slower, less accurate, and more expensive than using electronic tabulators. Calls for hand counts should be understood as calls for delay, and attempts to fabricate “evidence” that voting machines, and therefore election results, are not trustworthy enough to accept.

Efforts to get courts to force hand counts have generally failed. The U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to take up a case seeking to ban electronic tabulator machines, and a U.S. District Judge sanctioned the attorneys for making “false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions” in their lawsuit. The Georgia hand-count regulation is currently being challenged in court, as it likely violates state law. At least one state, California, has banned using hand counts in jurisdictions with more than 1,000 registered voters. Arizona prohibits using hand counts as the main tabulation system, and Nevada requires counties to submit a comprehensive plan for conducting a hand count to the Secretary of State no less than 90 days before an election. 

The majority of these lawsuits make, at best, questionable legal claims and are almost certain to fail. In Nevada, the RNC is arguing that Department of Motor Vehicles data suggests that 6,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in Nevada — but if past cases are prologue, the vast majority of those will turn out to be recently naturalized citizens. However, success in the courtroom is not the primary aim of these suits. Putting false claims in the form of a lawsuit is a way to sanitize and add legitimacy to them. 

Further, if Republicans lose the presidential election, the RNC and others are likely to point to one of these lawsuits as “evidence” that the results are illegitimate and refuse to accept the outcome. The large number of cases and their pre-election timing are indicative of strategy. For context, in 2020 Trump filed approximately 60 meritless lawsuits to challenge the results after the election; at the time of publication of this report in October 2024, the RNC has already filed more than 100.

While some of these cases may not be resolved ahead of the November election, they are unlikely to succeed — mirroring the more than 60 cases Trump brought after the 2020 election, all of which were dismissed for lack of merit. At the time of publication, courts have already dismissed cases in Georgia, Nevada and Maryland, and plaintiffs have withdrawn their own case in Pennsylvania.

Security measures for ballot drop boxes vary by jurisdiction, but election officials effectively employ three common practices to keep them secure:

1. Official monitoring – Most drop boxes either have cameras recording 24 hours a day or are located inside a facility that is staffed the entire time it is open and accessible to voters.
2. Bipartisan collection teams – Nearly universally, teams of two people from different parties collect the ballots from drop boxes and bring them together to a secure location for counting.
3. Chain of custody documentation – Ballot accounting is a thorough process at each stage of a ballot’s journey. Collection teams record the date, location, and arrival and departure times. These teams are trained to verify seal numbers and confirm the ballot has not been tampered with and is locked. Before the ballots move to the next step, teams place new seals on the ballot boxes and re-verify that the box is locked.

Private monitoring of drop boxes may violate state and federal voter intimidation laws when participants engage in surveillance, harassment, and doxxing of voters. In 2022, an Arizona court entered a restraining order against a group that organized volunteers to surveil drop boxes, citing their intimidating conduct (e.g., following and harassing voters at drop boxes, taking pictures or videos of them, and disseminating them online with false claims, dressing in body armor and carrying firearms). These are actions that violate federal anti-voter intimidation laws, including section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act (outlawing intimidation, threats, or coercion of voters) and section 1985(3) of the Ku Klux Klan Act (prohibiting conspiracies to suppress voters by force, intimidation, or threat).

Almost all states allow independent or partisan poll watchers to monitor voting and vote-counting activities in some form. Poll watchers oversee election procedures to ensure fairness for their respective parties, but they are to refrain from interfering in the electoral process except to report any concerns to polling place authorities and party officials. Nevertheless, since 2021, when some states changed their laws and election conspiracies exploded, election workers have reported numerous incidents of intrusive or intimidating behavior by poll watchers. In Wisconsin’s 2024 state primary, various observers had to be removed by police for disruptive and confrontational behavior directed at poll workers. 

Different state laws spell out clear procedures for who can — and who cannot — monitor elections, limit the actions of poll watchers, and authorize the removal of disruptive individuals serving as poll watchers. Additionally, anti-intimidation laws protect voters and poll workers from any attempts at intimidation by poll watchers.

In many cases, officials targeted by election disinformation face a wave of threats after being named in those conspiracy theories. This contributes to high turnover in election officials, which raises the risk of mistakes in running complex election processes.

Threatening or intimidating election officials is illegal under federal law. Knowingly spreading false information about election workers can result in civil liabilities and defamation lawsuits. Many states have enacted new laws to provide additional protections for election officials and poll workers, including stiffer penalties for intimidation and safeguards against “doxxing.”

While public records requests can be a powerful tool for greater government transparency, the process is being abused by election deniers to perpetuate falsehoods about the election and unreasonably burden election officials. Responding to public records requests is time-consuming, sometimes taking weeks, and can divert an election office’s already limited resources away from administering the election. Requests like this can also cause harm, as requests for election materials like cast vote records and ballot images may jeopardize ballot secrecy.

State laws often require officials to make timely responses to all incoming records requests. Election officials have sometimes been able to streamline this process by issuing guidance to facilitate responses and, where funds allow, hiring temporary staff to handle incoming requests.

Since roughly 2000, we have seen a “blue shift” as presidential election results are tabulated on and after Election Night. The proportion of votes counted for Democratic candidates has generally increased as counting went on, sometimes quite drastically, as votes are counted. This pattern is caused by various factors, but it escalated dramatically in 2020, when Democrats were much more likely to cast mail ballots, which are often counted later than ballots cast in-person on Election Day. 

One reason for the “blue shift” in some states? State laws that don’t allow election officials to start processing absentee ballots until after Election Day. Since 2020, election experts have called on states to take steps to speed up absentee ballot processing — but in two key states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Republican legislators have refused to support expanded pre-processing. And Republican-controlled legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina have added other new requirements that will likely slow down results.

Media “calls” and declarations of victory have no bearing on the official vote-counting process. The vote-counting process will begin on Election Day and may well continue for several days until all ballots are counted. Even once initial results are public, canvass procedures, recounts, and election contest procedures must be completed before the results for each state are finally certified by December 11.

Certification is a legal duty that local officials are required by state law to complete. Certification marks the end of the local vote-counting process and allows state officials to begin the next phase of verifying election results, including recounts, audits, and election contests as provided by state law.

Because certification is a legal duty, local officials can be ordered by a court to complete it. Those required to certify elections are like scorekeepers. Their job is to record the results, and then, if there are any issues that need to be addressed, the states have established laws and procedures (listed above) to resolve them in a timely manner. Local certifiers do not have the power to challenge results, launch investigations, or otherwise stall the process. For these reasons, officials who refuse to certify election results may be subject to criminal charges — for example, two Cochise County, Arizona, officials are being prosecuted on conspiracy charges for refusing to certify the 2022 election results.

Post-election court challenges and audits are a normal and important part of the election process, but they must be grounded in fact. State officials oversee and conduct these processes regularly and have a proven model of fairly managing these operations. The National Association of Secretaries of State maintains a list of best practices:

1. State audits should have a defined requirement and timeframe
2. Election officials must adhere to the chain of custody procedures at all times
3. Any third-party involvement should be determined before the election and by the chief election official or a legislative act
4. Processes and methods must be transparent
5. Voting machines should only be audited in accredited test labs
6. States should keep the public updated about the process and progress

Courts have imposed sanctions to hold to account the candidates and attorneys who filed baseless challenges and spread conspiracy theories. The Arizona Senate and the (now defunct) Cyber Ninjas were sued for withholding official documents, and the Senate president who led those efforts faced public backlash and is no longer in office.

The Electoral Count Reform Act was passed in 2022 to remove ambiguity from the process of finalizing presidential results and prevent future efforts to undermine and subvert the election. Three components of the ECRA that are now in place would help avoid a crisis at this stage:

• The provision that only a governor (unless otherwise specified) can file the state’s certificates of ascertainment indicating the winning slate of electors
• An expedited judicial review of disputes regarding the certificate to allow for a rapid judicial process between December 11 and December 17
• Language clarifying that electors can only be selected on Election Day, with a limited potential exception to extend voting in the event of a catastrophic event, such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack

In addition to the safeguards built into the ECRA, as outlined above, state laws provide officials with tools to keep the certification process moving forward. State officials can allocate additional resources to help counties complete their canvass (the process that accounts for every ballot and verifies that every eligible vote appears in the final tally) or ask a court to intervene and compel certification. In some cases, a state executive may have the authority to certify on behalf of a county or to exclude that county’s votes from the state’s final tally.

Before the passage of the ECRA, the law only required one senator and one representative to lodge an objection to a slate of electoral votes and force a vote on the issue. That has changed. Now, it takes at least one-fifth of each chamber — 20 Senators and 87 members of the House — to lodge an objection, and the ECRA limits the permissible reasons members can invoke for objecting to a state’s slate. And, as was the case before the ECRA passed, Congress can only go on to reject those electoral votes if a majority of both chambers then votes to sustain that objection, although doing so would be highly improper under all but a very unlikely set of circumstances.  

The ECRA also clarified the vice president’s role in certification, stating that the vice president’s role at the joint session of Congress is ministerial — to facilitate the counting of votes, not to adjudicate which state’s votes should or should not be counted.

Besides the safeguards built into the ECRA, as outlined above, the Department of Homeland Security has elevated the status of the congressional electoral count on January 6, 2025, to a “National Special Security Event.” This unlocks additional resources for security and planning to protect the congressional vote-counting process from violence like we saw on January 6, 2021.