The focus of former President Donald Trump’s 2024 post-election strategy may be to interfere with certification of the election results in the seven or eight battleground states. In 2020, Trump engaged in a multistate fake elector coordinated effort to file false voting certificates, tampering with voting machines in at least three states to figure out how to manipulate the voting machines and the Jan. 6 riot to prevent the counting of the electoral college votes. This year, we are likely to see the same illegal activity, with the additional strategy of local election officials delaying or refusing to certify the vote count.

This new strategy relies upon the confusion created by the vague and ambiguous presidential election rules in three different legal systems—federal, state and local. As I will explain below, the act of certifying election results is ministerial and not discretionary. The election is likely to be decided by the candidate who wins these two battleground states—Georgia and Pennsylvania.

Georgia