The lawsuit was filed by a county Republican Party only after the state Republican Party in Georgia refused, despite requests from “Trump inner circle/high up in RNC,” Alex B. Kaufman, the state party’s general counsel, wrote in a text to another Republican official last month.

“We had immense pressure from above and below to bring this, and said absolutely not,” he added in another message.

Josh McKoon, chair of the Georgia Republican Party, denied that the Republican National Committee or the Trump team had asked the state party to file the lawsuit.

“I, at no time, was under any pressure from anyone,” he said.

The Trump campaign and Kaufman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Theories about voting machines were some of the most far-fetched and easily debunked of the claims that Trump tossed out in his attempt to hold on to power after his defeat in 2020. Kaufman, in his texts, said the state party’s priority was “protecting sensible” election rules. While the machines are not without potential vulnerabilities, there has been no evidence to support the conspiracy theories that have proliferated – the most prominent being that the machines are programmed to flip votes away from Trump.

Those claims have brought legal consequences. State prosecutors have charged nine Trump allies in three states with crimes related to tampering with the machines and to data breaches in futile efforts to prove they were faulty. Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, two machine companies, filed defamation lawsuits against news media companies and figures that repeated the claims.

“We remain fully prepared to defend our company and our customers against lies, and to seek accountability from those who spread them,” Dominion said in a statement to the Times.

Yet, those cases have not ended the misinformation. Trump has said machines slow down the vote count, when they actually speed it up.

“We expect to have the results like seven days after the election. If you had paper ballots, you get them at 10 o’clock,” he recently told supporters in Pennsylvania. Paper ballots are actually common, in some cases as a backup.

Several of his allies – including Elon Musk and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser – have called for voting machines, which have been used widely for decades, to be banned. Election officials deride the notion as impractical and based on a misunderstanding of how the devices work.

Grassroots activists have taken up the cause, pressuring local election officials to revamp their procedures. This month, several activists showed up at an election board meeting in Atlanta wearing black T-shirts emblazoned with what activists claimed was an old voting machine password (“dvscorp08!”) and implored officials to switch to emergency paper ballots.

“My whole thing is to get rid of machines in the election and go to paper ballots, hand counted,” Mike Lindell, the Trump ally and pillow company owner who has built a network of conspiracy-minded activists – and who has been sued for defamation by Dominion – said in an interview.

In remarks at a Trump rally this summer, Lindell told the crowd, “Here in the USA, we have the worst election platforms in the world”.

The resurgence is part of a continuing effort to lay the groundwork for another contested election, if Trump loses again. The theories are expected to surface in postelection legal challenges and online misinformation campaigns if Trump supporters again try to disrupt the process of certifying the results. Democrats are doubtful those claims will succeed.

“Will Trump, in the postelection, say that all the machines in every county that he lost in America were rigged? Absolutely,” Marc Elias, an election lawyer for Vice-President Kamala Harris’ campaign, said in an interview. “Will there be litigation? Yes. Will those claims have any chance at all of affecting the outcome of a postelection contest? Zero point zero, zero, zero percent.”

‘Don’t read this password’

Brandon Wales, former acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said that “machines are probably the most secure part of the entire system” because, despite the claims that they have been hacked, “they are not connected to the internet”.

Yet, the distrust has spawned a movement to turn back the clock and return to hand-counting paper ballots, a tedious process that election officials say would be riddled with errors and result in long delays.

In Georgia, the State Election Board, which was recently taken over by a right-wing majority, passed a law requiring all clerks to hand-count ballots to verify that the total number of ballots matches the machine count. The move was assailed by local election officials as well as by Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, and it was blocked by a local judge.

But such efforts continue, even at this late stage. This month, in Waynesboro, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, two of the county’s three election board members filed a lawsuit against the state and county elections departments. They vowed not to certify results unless they were able to hand-count ballots, saying it would violate their oaths.

Sharon Van Name, the third board member and a Democrat who did not participate in the suit, said it seemed to come out of the blue for a community of around 20,000 people that has not seen a lot of turmoil over elections recently.

“I think the whole thing is part of the general GOP push to undermine confidence,” she said.

In rural Nevada, Elko County tried an eleventh-hour change to its tabulation procedures and explored hand-counting ballots for the 22,000 registered voters there, despite pleas from the county clerk and previous guidance from the secretary of state.

At a county meeting in early September, one attendee, wearing a pro-Trump sweatshirt, said machines were helping “them” cheat in elections, adding, “We know they’re cheating”.

The case in Georgia, in DeKalb County, alleges that machines operated by Dominion Voting Systems did not have the proper encryption. It was tossed out but is being appealed.

The lawyers involved in the lawsuit are familiar figures. Trump himself has recently been in contact with one of them, Kurt Olsen, who has been sanctioned in Arizona by both a federal judge and a state judge for making false election claims.

William Olson, a lawyer who filed an amicus brief in the DeKalb suit, also played a role in false machine claims after the last presidential election, when he tried to get the Justice Department to intervene on Trump’s behalf.

The lawsuit was filed against Raffensperger, who has been a thorn in Trump’s side since he refused to reverse Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia. The claims it advances draw in part on software obtained through the data breaches after that election, episodes that resulted in criminal charges against local officials and one of Trump’s former lawyers, Sidney Powell.

And it was the DeKalb lawsuit that surfaced the old password publicised by the activists at the recent Georgia State Election Board meeting.

“Don’t read this password,” one of the activists, Richard Schroeder, said during the meeting, as he placed a hand over the symbols written on his T-shirt. “This is the password that’s all over the United States for the Dominion machines.”

Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said the activists misunderstood the systems. Even if the password was real, new passwords are created regularly, he said, adding, “Their shirts might as well have said ‘admin’”.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Danny Hakim, Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon

Photographs by: Michelle Gustafson

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

Loomer said this week she does “not work” for Trump, but the campaign has declined to say why she has been travelling with him amid increasing harsh scrutiny from Democrats and some Republicans.

Trump has repeatedly pushed debunked claims and conspiracy theories, including peddling the lie that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and amplified falsehoods from the deep recesses of the internet. Loomer regularly espouses conspiracy theories – including claims the 2018 school massacres in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, were staged. Loomer, 31, has provided plenty of fodder for the Republican presidential nominee.

Loomer said she stands by “everything I have said”. A former two-time congressional candidate, Loomer previously gained notoriety for her strident anti-Muslim rhetoric, once labelling herself a “proud Islamophobe”.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Republican-Georgia), a Trump loyalist who has long feuded with Loomer, told reporters Thursday that Loomer’s “rhetoric and hateful tone” are a “huge problem” for Republicans. The congresswoman previously spoke out against Loomer last year when reports surfaced that Trump wanted to hire her for his campaign; he ultimately decided against it.

“[Loomer’s rhetoric] doesn’t represent MAGA as a whole. It doesn’t represent who we are as Republicans,” Greene said Friday, adding she does not think Loomer “has the experience or the right mentality to advise a very important presidential election”.

Loomer, on social media, quickly lashed out at Graham and Greene after their comments criticising her presence in Trump’s entourage.

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Loomer’s association with Trump, but at the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “No leader should ever associate with someone who spreads this kind of ugliness, this kind of racist poison.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (Democratic-New York) told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference that Loomer’s attendance at Trump’s 9/11 stops should “shock the conscience of all decent Americans”.

“It was shocking and irresponsible and offensive to the thousands of people who lost their lives on September 11, including hundreds of brave first responders, members of the NYPD, FDNY and others, who raced toward the danger in order to help people escape the danger – and lost their lives as a result of it,” Jeffries said, adding that Trump “is a conspiracy theory-peddling racial arsonist and pathological liar”.

Trump’s campaign did not directly respond to questions about Loomer’s latest involvement in the campaign, instead seeking to emphasise the 9/11 anniversary.

“The day wasn’t about anyone other than the souls who are no longer with us, their families, and the heroes who courageously stepped up to save their fellow Americans on that fateful day,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement.

Graham said he has not gotten clarity on what role Loomer is playing in the campaign. He added he was not previously aware of all her statements and that “some of the stuff is just cruel”, citing Loomer’s personal attacks on Claudia Conway, the daughter of former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.

Loomer first gained national notoriety as an undercover agent for Project Veritas, focusing her efforts on infiltrating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. She left the group in 2017 to do stunts under her own name, such as chaining herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters and leading a group of undocumented immigrants to hop the fence at a Napa, California, home owned by former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democratic-California).

Loomer banned from social media apps for anti-Muslim rhetoric

Loomer ran for Congress in Florida twice, in 2020 and 2022, and lost both times. Her anti-Muslim rhetoric, among other alleged terms-of-use violations, have led Facebook, Instagram, Lyft, Uber, Venmo, PayPal, GoFundMe and Cash App to all ban her, Loomer claims.

She fashioned herself as a social media warrior for Trump during the 2024 Republican presidential primary, crusading against one of his rivals, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. She repeatedly accused DeSantis and his wife, Casey DeSantis, of using the latter’s breast cancer diagnosis to generate sympathy from voters.

These days, Loomer identifies as an investigative journalist in service of Trump’s re-election.

“I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything,” she told the Washington Post last March. She said she had been in talks to work for Trump’s re-election campaign in early 2023.

The New York Times reported Trump wanted to hire her; a backlash from Trump loyalists ensued, including a fierce rebuke from Greene. No job ultimately materialised – an outcome for which Loomer holds Greene responsible.

The lack of formal campaign employment, however, put little distance between Loomer and the former President. Trump invited Loomer to his private balcony at his Bedminster golf course last year, and she has made several trips on Trump Force One with the former President, joining him and his campaign team on flights to rallies throughout the Republican primary. At a rally in Iowa last January, Trump told the gathered crowd that Loomer was a “very important person, politically”. In March, he called her out as a “woman with courage” at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago.

“The great Laura Loomer – some of you know Laura – she’s fantastic person, great woman,” Trump said during a July speech in Nashville.

Trump routinely reposts Loomer’s content to his Truth Social account. She supplied the first post the former President ever made questioning Harris’s racial identity: a graphic that compared a headline from Harris’s historic US Senate win in 2016, which noted her as the “first Indian-American US Senator”, and one from 2020, which noted she was the “first black woman” to be selected as a presidential running mate. A friend had made the graphic for her; Loomer thinks she was “probably” the first person to bring Harris’s racial identity to Trump’s attention. Later that week, he raised the issue at the National Association of Black Journalists’ conference in Chicago.

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said in July. “I did not know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black.”

Loomer has also amplified the baseless conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town are abducting and eating pets, a claim Trump echoed in his Tuesday debate against Harris.

Loomer’s recent attack on Harris over her Indian heritage comes at a time when Harris is not the only Indian American playing a prominent role in the presidential race. Vance’s wife, lawyer Usha Vance, is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

A Vance spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Loomer post saying the White House would smell like curry if Harris wins.

Greene responded on X, calling Loomer’s post “appalling and extremely racist”. The congresswoman told reporters Friday that she usually tries to ignore Loomer’s posts, but the attack on Harris as an Indian American “bothered me so much”.

Graham called the attack “abhorrent”. He said he spoke with Greene about the matter and that she is “very concerned about the political impact this will have in Georgia”, a battleground state that is home to one of the largest Indian American populations in the country.