Knife edge US election could drag on

The spectre of election disruption is spooking American voters this Halloween season, amid fears that the 2024 US presidential race could be won not in the ballot box on election day but in a messy court battle sometime after.

It has happened before.

In 2000, the Supreme Court ultimately decided that George Bush beat Al Gore, after a contentious manual recount in Florida.

The difference then, of course, was that Mr Gore conceded, following a prized American tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

Donald Trump upended all of that, by refusing to accept the results of the last election.

"If you count the legal votes," Mr Trump said in November 2020, "I easily win".

Now, there is a very real chance that many Americans will not trust the outcome of this one either.

Declaring the election "stolen" by Joe Biden and the Democrats, Mr Trump’s supporters famously overran the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a bid to stop the certification of the vote.

In tandem, a slew of lawsuits hit local courts across the country, alleging widespread election fraud through everything from the miscounting of ballots to rigged voting machines.

Most of those cases since been dismissed or dropped. Fox News famously settled a nearly $800m defamation case taken against the network by Dominion Voting Systems over false fraud claims.

The State of Georgia brought a criminal case against Donald Trump and his allies for an attempt to fraudulently overturn the election. It is still pending.

But all of this did little to settle the matter for MAGA Republicans, who continue to maintain 2020 was rigged or stolen.

Since 2023, 164 lawsuits have been filed, by both Democrats and Republicans. Many are aimed at altering the election process to introduce additional checks before certification - something that is likely to delay the election result.

But this week, decisions by two separate judges in Georgia struck down new rules that would allow "reasonable enquiry" into election results in one case and the mandatory hand-counting of ballots in another.

In his ruling, which threw out a bid by county election board members to block certification if they suspected error or fraud, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, wrote: "This election season is fraught; memories of 6 January have not faded away, regardless of one’s view of that date’s fame or infamy. Anything that adds uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process disserves the public."

But beyond this week’s rulings, many more cases still before the courts are unlikely to be resolved before election day.

The lawsuits raise questions over who is entitled to vote, how they can vote, and how the result is determined.

The clamour of court filings has certainly helped to sow doubt in the integrity of this election.

But it is part of a wider trend.

Over the past few election cycles, confidence in the American electoral process has plummeted.

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A recent poll carried out by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion found that nearly two thirds of American voters were concerned about voter fraud. Republicans make up the majority, but a lot of Democrats are worried too.

As well as fears over how the mechanics of the election on the day - many US states have their own rules and systems for casting and counting ballots - there are also concerns over foreign interference, disinformation and AI-generated deepfake images.

Hundreds of websites and social media accounts repeatedly publish false or misleading claims, according to the 2024 Election Misinformation Monitoring Center, set up earlier this year by an online news-monitoring company, called NewsGuard.

Foreign interference operations have even been found to be masquerading as local American newspapers online.

"NewsGuard found a Russian disinformation operation using AI to claim falsely that Kamala Harris committed a hit and run automobile accident that allegedly injured a young woman," Gordon Crovitz, CEO of NewsGuard told RTÉ News; "and an Iranian disinformation effort falsely claiming Donald Trump said 9/11 was an inside job by the US government."

"These claims spread widely online at a time when people have little idea who's feeding them the news on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, X and TikTok," he added.

But disinformation tends to exploit the existing rift in American politics, according to Claire Wardle, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University.

"America is already so divided that people are already in their camps, you don't need to persuade people of anything," she said.

Attempts at voter suppression may be a bigger concern.

"If anything's going to happen in the next two weeks, it is going to be campaigns to make people not come out to vote, like spreading fear to say that there'll be violence at the polls," she said.

That could make the difference in an election already so close that it is likely to be decided in just a handful of precincts around the country.

If there is no clear winner on election night, it could open the floodgates not only for legal challenges but also for conspiracy theories.

And it is going to be about who controls the narrative from that point onwards, said Claire Wardle.

"To me, everything starts on the 6th November," she said.