Originally Published: March 5, 2024 9:40 a.m.

The last presidential election flipped democracy on its head after conspiracy theories and Trump's desperation to stay in power helped fuel a violent insurrection, an attempted legal coup and the spread of election disinformation at a national and local level. Heading into 2024, experts who spoke to TPM warn those same threats, and more sinister outgrowths of them, will plague this year's presidential election too. 

Even though this time around election officials might have a better sense of what sorts of threats to expect and just how dangerous these threats are, there are not yet clear answers on how to mitigate them completely. Instead, voting experts say that it may fall on the very election workers being targeted to rebut disinformation and defend the democratic process, by preemptively flooding the scene with factual information on how elections work in their jurisdictions to minimize the threat of misinformation. They also recommend election workers develop relationships with local law enforcement to protect against violent harassment and intimidation to voters and officials. It's a bleak time to take the job. 

According to elections experts and voting officials, the most pressing threats to the 2024 election can be narrowed down to five categories.

1. Election Deniers Are Running The Show 

One of the most significant threats to the upcoming election is that many of the elected representatives who denied the integrity of the 2020 election, remain in power and threaten to once again disrupt the country's democratic processes — an outgrowth of 2020 election denialism. 

"If representatives still remain committed to anti-democratic forces, they still have the power to create a fair amount of disruption," Justin Levitt, a professor of law at Loyola Law School, told TPM.  

Almost a third of sitting members of Congress attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election either by refusing to certify the results on Jan. 6, spreading baseless voter fraud claims, refusing to concede a race, or supporting meritless legal challenges to the results of the election, according to data from the nonpartisan States United Action. 

The excuse for the 147 members of Congress who signed onto a baseless election challenge, even after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, were largely rooted in debunked election fraud claims that typically originated at the local level — the type of commonplace election administration glitches or errors that conspiracy theorists seize upon to bolster their baseless widespread fraud claims.

In places like Antrim County, Michigan, for example, bogus allegations of voter fraud circulated after the county inadvertently misreported a number of unofficial votes in 2020. The mistake, which Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced was simply a "human error" was quickly corrected and did not impact the results of the election. But despite the explanation, the incident has persisted as a talking point for many election deniers who hold public office. 

"Incidents like the one in Antrim County simply serve as an excuse," explained Levitt,  "this is a fact free political protest, and so it doesn't need fuel. They will invent their own fuel, unfortunately, because they invented the fuel in 2020."

2. Election misinformation and disinformation

Another deluge of misinformation and disinformation is inevitable in November, and among the most pressing threats to the election.  

From fake robocalls in New Hampshire impersonating President Biden's voice to social media companies deregulating their content moderation, experts told TPM they're bracing for another onslaught of voter misinformation and disinformation in 2024.

False election information can generate both from "well-meaning people" who simply don't know how election systems work, and bad actors — foreign or domestic — who are attempting to disrupt the election process and deliberately spread false information and disinformation. The former registrar of voters for Orange County, California Neal Kelley told TPM he expects to see both this cycle.

That disinformation could take several forms in 2024, from vintage claims of mass "voter fraud" to debunked conspiracy theories  about hacked voting machines that spread after the 2020 election.

"I think that there is going to be widespread disinformation about voter fraud, about election rigging, about voting machines," David Becker, the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, as well as the co-founder of ERIC, a voter roll maintenance system recently demonized by the far-right. "And that will be designed to lay the groundwork for further attacks on the legitimacy of an election that the preferred candidates of those who are spreading it might lose."

And there's no surefire way to prevent misinformation and disinformation, but, explained Levitt, it can be helpful to think about it as a supply and demand issue.

"You are never going to get at the issue solely by trying to limit supply," he said. "It's just not possible." Instead, he said, the best way to counter misinformation and disinformation is to flood the zone with accurate information. 

David Levine, senior elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, also emphasized that foreign adversaries continue to be an issue in the upcoming election. In particular, he mentioned Russia and China as potential foreign interference threats, both of which he said "have rapidly evolving capabilities" to use things like AI to perpetuate disinformation, a step advanced from the Russian troll farm interference and Trump campaign collusion of both 2016 and 2020. 

GOP Stunned To Discover It's Not Running Against A Cadaver In 2024

By David Kurtz

Republicans who have turned Joseph R. Biden into a caricature of falling-down dementia and drooling incontinence have set the bar so low that anything above a flatline EKG from the president knocks them back on their heels.

They were left spluttering that Biden's State of the Union was too loud and too campaign-y. They couldn't maintain a basic level of decorum in the chamber, giving Biden the chance to knock them around with ad libs and direct call outs, directly facing the GOP side of the chamber. He turned the call and response of the Black church into whack-a-MTG.

The weird media expectations-setting and gamesmanship of American politics set the stage for this kind of performance, a Monty Python-esque "I'm not dead yet." But Biden still had to pull it off, and he did, in rousing fashion.

The stakes of this election are so high and the historic moment so great that Biden has to show a willingness to fight by actually fighting. Otherwise, the content of the message falls flat. If it really is this important, you have to act like it, not just say it. He did that, too.