Starting in late 2020, Representative Scott Perry was one of the ringleaders of the Republican plot to use the House’s constitutional role in certifying the electoral count to delegitimize the results in a bid to help Donald J. Trump overturn the outcome.
Now, Mr. Perry and a handful of his Republican colleagues are taking action to also call into question an aspect of this year’s election, helping to lay the groundwork for what could become another effort to undermine the results should Mr. Trump lose again.
Mr. Perry and five other Republican members of Congress from Pennsylvania are plaintiffs in a lawsuit against their state’s government that seeks to set aside ballots from members of the military and Americans living overseas, charging that the system for verifying them is insufficient.
Mr. Trump has encouraged the notion. He posted on Truth Social last month: “The Democrats are talking about how they’re working so hard to get millions of votes from Americans living overseas. Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT!”
Election officials and other experts say that the claims from Mr. Trump are meritless and that the overseas voting system is safe from fraud. Yet the case is one of about 100 filed this year by Republican allies of Mr. Trump — about 30 have been lodged so far in the two months before Election Day — many of which make unfounded claims about voter rolls and noncitizen voters.
They coincide with widespread claims by Mr. Trump and others that the election will be rigged. Together they could help pave the way for yet another challenge to the results if the former president is defeated.
Mr. Perry is only one of a group of congressional Republicans, most of them central to the 2020 effort, who have begun to sow the seeds of distrust in the 2024 election results.
Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas — two lawmakers who led objections to certifying the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020 — were among those who recently wrote a letter to the Justice Department warning of thousands of illegal immigrants voting. Dozens of Republican members of Congress signed it.
The letter promoted exaggerated statistics about the threat of noncitizens voting, which is exceedingly rare but which House Republican leaders cited in pressing for passage of legislation that would impose proof-of-citizenship requirements on voter registration.
Some of these efforts have been fueled in part by the Election Integrity Network, a sprawling and influential right-wing coalition of election denial activists and groups built by Cleta Mitchell, a former Trump lawyer who played a crucial role in trying to help Mr. Trump upend the 2020 election.
House Republicans and their aides who pushed for the voter registration bill coordinated with Ms. Mitchell, who has claimed credit for spearheading the legislation and started a citizen advocacy group to promote it. She appeared with Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republican lawmakers at a news conference in May announcing its introduction.
The moves by members of Congress suggest that the elected Republicans who were critical to spreading Mr. Trump’s lie in 2020 that extensive voter fraud stole that election from him — fueling the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — are unapologetic and emboldened to mount a similar effort after the 2024 contest.
“The election denial network that caused so many problems in 2020 through Jan. 6, 2021, is still very much intact, and no one should be surprised that they’re at it once again,” said Thomas Joscelyn, one of the main authors of the House Jan. 6 committee’s final report, who studies extremism. “The greatest threat to election integrity comes from Republicans who say they are concerned about election integrity.”
In a statement, Mr. Perry denied that he was working to disenfranchise military members and argued that the lawsuit’s aim was to prevent other nations, such as Iran, from meddling in the U.S. election with overseas ballots.
“As a combat veteran, no one believes more strongly in protecting the sanctity of our votes — particularly those of our service members abroad — than I do,” he said. “That’s exactly why I joined my colleagues to defend our election against the intrusion and interference of the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world: Iran.”
After the 2020 election, 147 Republican members of Congress voted to object to certifying one or more states President Biden won as part of a plan to help Mr. Trump cling to power. While Congress overhauled the Electoral Count Act last year to try to make it more difficult to challenge the election results, Republicans could still cause havoc on Jan. 6, 2025, if they vote en masse against certification.
At least seven congressional staff members — many of them part of the House Administration Committee, which oversees elections — have participated in conference calls with Ms. Mitchell’s group. The network includes leading activists in key swing states emboldened by Mr. Trump’s false election claims in 2020 as well as state legislators, national conservative groups and allies of the former president.
One of those participants is Thomas Lane, a former Trump campaign staff member who served in 2022 as the Republican National Committee’s top election integrity official for Virginia. The Justice Department issued him a subpoena related to its Jan. 6 investigation, and his house was searched.
Mr. Lane now works on the House Administration panel as the director of elections coalitions.
On a call with the network’s election machine committee last year, he assured activists that he would serve as a “stone wall” standing against Democrats’ ultimately unsuccessful efforts to pass voting rights legislation, according to records obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Cruz and Mr. Biggs, who led the effort to object to the 2020 election results, are now focused on the possibility — one that officials and experts have consistently said is not grounded in facts — that thousands of illegal immigrants are voting this year.
“We are deeply concerned by reports of noncitizens registering to vote and voting in federal elections,” the Republicans wrote to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.
The men based their statistics in part on data provided Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who initially claimed in a news release that “6,500 noncitizens” were removed from the voter rolls in his state before altering that to say “potential noncitizens.”
An investigation by The Texas Tribune found the true number of suspected noncitizens on the voter rolls was actually 581, and even that figure contained errors in which citizens were incorrectly categorized as noncitizens.
Few members of Congress played a larger role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election than Mr. Perry, who was instrumental in trying to persuade Mr. Trump to appoint Jeffrey Clark as his acting attorney general over the objections of several top officials at the Justice Department. After senior officials at the agency threated to quit, Mr. Trump backed off the idea.
Mr. Perry’s phone was seized by the F.B.I. as part of its investigation.
This month, Mr. Perry, who is himself in a pitched battle for re-election, filed the lawsuit to block overseas ballots from being counted in Pennsylvania.
He and the other lawmakers bringing the suit are represented by the Election Research Institute, whose director, Heather Honey, previously circulated inaccurate information claiming that more people voted than were registered in Pennsylvania in 2020. Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Trump picked up that false claim.
Ms. Honey plays a prominent role in Ms. Mitchell’s election denial network, including running the Pennsylvania subgroup. A lawyer on the case has been heavily involved in the network as well after he brought a case in 2020 suing Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to try to force the body to stop the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory. (A judge in that case said it was entirely devoid of merit and accused the lawyer of engaging in “gamesmanship” and “symbolic political gesture.”)
The Republicans argued that the overseas ballots should be set aside and not counted without further verification because they could be used by “foreign nations in efforts to interfere with U.S. elections.”
Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer for Election Research Institute, said in a statement that the case was meant to “ensure that legitimate votes would not be diluted by individuals not eligible to vote in Pennsylvania elections.”
State election officials responded with outrage, noting in a recent filing that if successful, the lawsuit would disenfranchise Americans voting overseas, including members of the armed forces.
The Pennsylvania Democratic Party was more direct.
“This lawsuit,” its response said, “is really an effort to sow public doubts about the election.”
The post Republicans Who Led 2020 Election Denial Now Sowing Doubt in 2024 Votes appeared first on New York Times.