Elections are legitimate when all qualified citizens can vote without interference, and when the ballots are counted accurately. But that may not assure victory, which is the gospel that MAGA leader Steve Bannon began preaching to his flock in spring 2021, taking a lesson from the failed January 6th insurrection. That May, Bannon issued a battle cry on his War Room podcast that quickly went viral, calling on his angry supporters to shift gears and become “precinct warriors” all across America. Soon, GOP election offices were reporting a big spike in people signing up to become election officers.

Bannon focused listeners on how to control elections while claiming to protect them. Since then, “election integrity” has become the cri de coeur of MAGAland – how to assure their guys come out on top next time, regardless of what votes are cast. That includes local GOP candidates. There are myriad strategies to do that, and Bannon urged conservatives to unleash them all. Since then, stop the steal has morphed to become own the vote – by any means necessary.

Stop the steal has morphed to become own the vote – by any means necessary.

Bannon urged people to sign up to become GOP precinct officers and join GOP precinct committees. At the local level, these officers oversee how elections are run and which ballots get counted – or challenged and discarded. Precinct officers are the grunt workers of political parties who organize phone banking and knock-on-door canvassing. They also pick and oversee the poll workers on election day who prep the site, securing voting machines, checking the digital system for verifying voter credentials, and, critically, counting the ballots and delivering them to higher-ups. They also help pick election board members – the critical decision-makers tasked to reject or certify results when a race is too close to call.

As Bannon puts it, you need your people to be in charge at each step of the process. You want them at the election sites, as poll watchers, monitoring election inspectors. Many MAGA supporters appear to have heeded his message. “We’re signing up election inspectors like crazy right now,” one Florida election officer told ProPublica in September 2021. They include election deniers – people deliberately recruited as election officers who deny that Biden won the 2020 election and thus may refuse to accept the 2024 results (see Election Deniers list).

By now, MAGAland has flooded the precincts, ready for the ballot battle, but that’s not all.

Bannon and other far-right pundits and GOP leaders have amplified an unfounded warning that the election is being rigged by the other side. It’s a neat trick, a bit of national gaslighting, given that right-wing groups, including Turning Point America, a GOP PAC, and America First Legal, among legal think tanks, have taken the lead to file hundreds of voter lawsuits since 2020 (see main story). Right-wing organizations have even developed a handy software app for reviewing the voter rolls, now a go-to tool for local would-be precinct warriors. They’re inundating local election officials across America with challenges, audits, and sometimes serious threats, causing intimidated officials to quit or demand greater security.

That, too, is part of Bannon’s battle plan. As he put it to reporters in July, as he headed for prison to serve a four-month sentence for his role in the January 6th insurrection, “We’re relentless. I will never back off.”

The Trump administration declared the 2020 election the “most secure in American history.” Then Trump lost, and they changed their minds.

Lately, conservatives have weaponized the election integrity attack by focusing on undocumented immigrants as a threat to election, falsely claiming that the Biden administration has actively recruited them to vote – which is illegal. That’s also a false accusation – and firmly rejected by the Biden camp. That hasn’t stopped candidates Trump and JD Vance from picking up the baton, giving it a fresh racist spin with nativist attacks against immigrants. At campaign rallies, they’ve doubled down on unfounded accusations that undocumented Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and Venezuelans in Aurora, Colorado, have “invaded” America’s heartland and will illegally vote. The truth is, many of these residents are citizens, but Trump and Vance view them as illegal anyway.

While the nonpartisan League of Women Voters states, “there is absolutely no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting in federal or state elections,” the racist dog-whistles are being amplified across conservative airwaves. They’re also linked to a parallel right-wing goal: to deny the legitimacy of foreign-born citizens and eventually deport them (see story on Remigration).

Truth is also beside the point, as JD Vance was recently forced to admit to reporters, acknowledging he accused Springfield Haitian immigrants of eating the pets of locals when he had already been told that was false by Springfield officials. Vance justified the lie to make a larger point – and stoke fears of election fraud. The MAGA goal is to make Americans worried enough about the elections that they’ll show up, some armed like a Proud Boy to do existential battle, looking for fraud and dirty tricks, expecting violence and prepared for conflict, with MAGA precinct officials on site already primed to challenge results they don’t like.

Meanwhile, Bannon is impatiently awaiting his release on November 1, in time to retake the mic and rally the troops on War Room for a final battle cry: take control on November 5th!