'It's a near guarantee': Experts warn Trump will claim victory no matter what voters say

Experts are warning that Donald Trump will once again exploit likely delays in counting heavily Democratic- leaning absentee and mail-in ballots in November to push new conspiracy theories about election fraud to overcome a potential loss to Kamala Harris.

The vote totals could be even tighter this November in toss-up states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than in 2020, when Trump and his allies filed ultimately unsuccessful legal challenges and assembled slates of fake electors to keep him in office despite his loss to Joe Biden. Experts worry that he'll try it again, reported Axios.

"It is a near guarantee that Donald Trump will declare victory the night of Nov. 5 and the margin won't matter," said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

"It won't matter whether he's accurate and he actually won, or whether he was defeated soundly. I think we should absolutely expect that super-spreaders of disinformation will parrot the lies about the election in the immediate aftermath."

Trump has refused to say whether he would accept an election loss as legitimate and has threatened to imprison anybody who engages in "unscrupulous" election behavior. He told law enforcement to "watch for voter fraud," and Democrats worry that the 175,000 poll watchers and workers recruited by his campaign could be used to intimidate voters.

"Sowing doubt ... is not enough to get the election overturned," said election law expert Rick Hasen. "[But] it's enough to create the conditions where people are more willing to do radical things to try to overturn the results, because they are more apt to believe that the election is being stolen."

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Trump claimed victory on Election Night four years ago, before absentee and mail-in ballots were processed in some key states, but an analysis later found the share of votes counted after Election Day was similar to the pattern of results from 2016, while the only difference was the "willful misrepresentation" of those patterns by the former president and his allies.

"We are sure to see the 'red mirage' and the 'blue wave' once again in 2024, where the early tally is likely to favor the Republicans, and then the absentees, cast largely by Democrats, are going to come in after that," said Anthony Chergosky, a University of Wisconsin-La Crosse political science professor.

Both parties are preparing for an even more litigious post-election period than four years ago, when Trump's team filed more than 60 ultimately unsuccessful legal challenges to his loss. Republicans have already filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging election procedures, while Kamala Harris' campaign says its election legal team is 10 times larger than Biden's was in 2020.

"Pre-election litigation has been pretty heavy," said GOP election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg.