In a statement, Dana Remus, a top lawyer for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, said “it isn’t surprising that he is already questioning the results of a still ongoing election”, adding “he failed when he tried this in 2020, and he will fail again”.

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Polls show the race is effectively tied, leaving the possibility that Trump will win and have no reason to dispute the outcome.

In that case, the question of whether to accept the results would fall to Harris, who has said she would uphold “free and fair elections” and the “peaceful transfer of power”.

For all the similarities, there are important differences between now and 2020, some of which reassure the coalition of civil rights lawyers, Democrats, Republicans and election administrators working to prevent a repeat of 2020:

• Congress has passed a new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, meant to make it harder to stop the final certification of the results by Congress on January 6, as Trump tried to do four years ago.
• Trump no longer has control of the federal government – which he sought to use to press his 2020 case. In the states, there are fewer like-minded Republicans in key positions of power than there were four years ago.
• Some of the loudest clarions for stolen election theories have paid heavily for circulating them, including Fox News, which last year paid Dominion Voting Systems $US787 million to settle a lawsuit over the network’s promotion of false theories that Dominion’s machines had switched votes.
• The experience of 2020, along with more recent clashes over voting issues, has taught election administrators lessons about fortifying themselves against a similar effort this year.

While Trump no longer has control of the federal government, a movement of activists has succeeded in putting election-doubting conservatives in position across the voting system, as poll watchers, election workers and even local officials in charge of certifying results.

The new law has loopholes that Trump could try to exploit.

For instance, the law sets a new, hard deadline by which states must send their final, certified election results to Washington before the Electoral College vote.

But some Trump-aligned officials have called for blocking certification at the local level, raising the possibility that the process could be stalled before that deadline. The law has no clear remedy for cases where it is missed.

Finally, though some news organisations such as Fox and Newsmax have faced serious defamation claims for spreading conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines, the major social media platforms have dramatically scaled back efforts to curb false content.

None have gone farther than X, formerly Twitter, whose owner, Musk, has actively used the platform to promote the sense that Trump is destined to win and to spread his own false voting claims.

“There has been a lot of investment by allies of president Trump to suggest that his victory is inevitable,” said David Becker, executive director of the Centre for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan organisation that advises election officials. “That’s the expectation being set among some of his supporters.”

Step 1: Claim victory

The period leading up to election day has featured several scenes that seem to be ripped from court filings in the federal case charging Trump with election interference over his actions after his defeat in 2020. (Trump has pleaded not guilty.)

When Steve Bannon, an influential right-wing media figure and close Trump adviser, was released from prison on Tuesday, he quickly told reporters that Trump should act pre-emptively on election night and simply claim victory.

As Bannon said, “he should stand up and say, ‘Hey, I’ve won this. And we have teams right now that are going to make sure that this thing is not going to be stolen’.”

In recently filed court papers naming Bannon as a co-conspirator in Trump’s federal election interference case, the special counsel, Jack Smith, noted that Bannon had said the same thing four years ago.

“What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory, right?” he said, according to the records, later adding, “that doesn’t mean he’s the winner; he’s just going to say he’s the winner.”

Trump did just that, unleashing a barrage of lawsuits challenging swing-state results, nearly all of which failed as various judges found claims of fraud to be lacking.

That legal failure did not stop his efforts.

He and several allies then sought to convince Republican legislators in states that President Joe Biden had won that they had the power to submit their own slates of pro-Trump Electoral College delegates, effectively rejecting the popular vote. Several of those involved in that operation were later indicted.

The new law specifies that only governors or other executives can send electors to Washington, cutting state legislatures out of the process. Yet some Trump allies have already suggested they could again turn to state lawmakers.

An architect of the 2020 strategy, John Eastman, recently told Politico that he believed the new law was unconstitutional. (Eastman is under indictment in Arizona and Georgia over his 2020 election activities and has pleaded not guilty in both states.)

Step 2: Sow doubt

Elections always bring a range of human and technological errors, but Trump and his allies have distorted the nature of such events, painting them as evidence of Democratic wrongdoing.

In 2020, a fringe of Trump’s advisers and allies cheered him on. Now the entire party machinery – and prominent and influential allies – are using various levers to claim publicly that the only way Trump can lose is through cheating.

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The Republican National Committee, now under the joint leadership of the former president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and the one-time party counsel Michael Whatley has made “election integrity” a top priority. (The lawyer in charge of the committee’s “election integrity” team, Christina Bobb, was charged with conspiracy by the Arizona attorney-general in connection with her efforts to keep Trump in power four years ago; she pleaded not guilty.)

Last week, Whatley posted online about the arrest of a woman at a polling station in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, who had been urging voters to remain in line, calling the incident election interference. Local authorities later defended the arrest, saying the woman had been acting disruptively.

Using another tactic from 2020, Trump and his allies have also complained this year that states such as Pennsylvania and Arizona were unlikely to finish counting votes until well after election day, suggesting the delays are somehow improper or nefarious.

In 2020, conspiracy theories about the pace of the vote count were some of the first to swirl in the days after Trump’s defeat.

Election officials note that mail ballots can take more time to count and that delays are not a sign of trouble. Still, they have been working to speed the process, knowing they are in a race against misinformation.

Step 3: Disrupt

Trump’s 2020 effort was chiefly focused on disrupting the last step of the election – certification of the results in Congress – but his allies this year have also zeroed in on vulnerabilities at the beginning of the process.

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That starts with about 10,000 local jurisdictions in which officials have a mandate to certify the votes before sending them to their state capitals, which in turn certify and send their totals and delegate slates to Washington.

The task is prescribed by law as mandatory throughout the states, although board or commission members in at least 20 counties in eight states have moved to block certification, in some rare cases succeeding, at least temporarily.

Officials from the swing states have prepared legal papers to force any recalcitrant boards to certify results on time.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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