Donald Trump has gone back to the same message, time and time again, as he criss-crosses the United States to try to fire up his Make America Great Again base.
At nearly every campaign stop and in all-caps screeds on social media, he is unequivocal: The only way he will lose the presidential election on November 5 is if his Democratic rivals cheat.
“Now we have two things we have to do,” he told a crowd in the battleground state of Georgia in early August. “We have to vote, and we have to make sure that we stop them from cheating because they cheat like dogs.”
The former president’s false claims — widely debunked as misinformation, or outright lies — aren’t new: He’s been saying for years that the US electoral system is rife with voter fraud.
But as the election fast approaches, experts say his rhetoric is intensifying, and they warn that Trump appears poised to try to subvert the results just as he did in 2020.
“We are seeing this constant narrative that there’s something nefarious at work within our election system,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The idea that there is voter fraud at play, she told Al Jazeera, could potentially cause “a lot of mischief” in the election — and most importantly, undermine its outcome.
“We saw this particular playbook before, unfortunately,” she said. “And it very much looks like there is a doubling-down of that particular strategy going on right now, in a very hyper-intensified kind of way.”
World News
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