At first glance, the Trump administration’s deployment of more than 200 F.B.I. analysts to Georgia this week seems to be another stubborn assault on a fact that has refused to budge: Despite the president’s baseless claims, no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election has ever surfaced there.
But critics contend that it is just one piece of a broader effort to sow doubt about the electoral process itself and the integrity of elections to come. And no matter how often President Trump loses in court, he continues to use the machinery of the federal government to investigate or try to overhaul the nation’s election infrastructure to his benefit.
The assigning of 260 investigative analysts from the F.BI. to a “priority” investigation in Fulton County, Ga., came days after the Supreme Court ruled that states could count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, rejecting Mr. Trump’s plans. And just last week, a federal judge permanently barred Mr. Trump from carrying out an early executive order that would have required people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote.
“It is incredibly concerning,” said Marisa Pyle, a senior staffer with All Voting Is Local, a nonpartisan advocacy organization. “We’re heading toward very consequential elections and they, whether intentionally or not, are using this both as a tool for relitigating past grievances and trying to undermine people’s confidence in the system to keep people from voting.”
As with the prosecutions of Mr. Trump’s political enemies, again front and center is the Justice Department, which has traditionally carried out investigations independent of a president’s wishes and grudges.
The Justice Department continues to conduct a criminal investigation into the 2020 election in Georgia. In January, the F.B.I. raided an election warehouse in Fulton County, seizing more than 600 boxes of election materials — including original ballots from the 2020 election.
That raid relied heavily on debunked claims about ballot anomalies in 2020, according to an unsealed affidavit, that have been revived by Kurt Olsen, an election denier who works in the Trump administration. In June, federal agents conducted searches on a group in Ohio that conducts voter registration drives.
Mr. Trump has also gutted the homeland security agency tasked with supporting states on election security, while officials across the federal government have undertaken dozens of actions aimed at insulating Republicans from potential losses in November.
As Mr. Trump’s popularity dips and as the primary season has ramped up, Mr. Trump has continued to amplify his rhetoric of rigged elections. He has tried to force Congress to pass legislation that codifies parts of his executive orders meant to change national elections, often justifying the legislation, again, with false claims of fraud.
Last month, he repeatedly attacked California’s slow counting of votes as evidence of fraud, even though voters in the state have long relied on mail-in balloting. (The president himself votes by mail,)
“I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California and I said, ‘Do me a favor, take a look, they’re trying to steal that election, too,’” Mr. Trump said in an extraordinary admission during a Pennsylvania rally last month.
Richard L. Hasen, the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, said the totality of Mr. Trump’s actions had sent a “double whammy” effect on how two separate voting blocs view elections.
“The first is he does this to try and convince his supporters that there’s fraud,” Mr. Hasen said. “And then by taking actions, whether that’s a lawsuit or an F.B.I. investigation, it convinces Democrats that he’s trying to steal the election. And so it actually undermines confidence in both sides.”
“So the public doesn’t believe elections are free and fair; they think that there’s problems,” Mr. Hasen added. “Public confidence in the elections has been volatile and plummeting.”
Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman for the White House, said Mr. Trump was “committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered noncitizen voters.”
“This campaign pledge from the president is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House,” she added.
In the more than five years since the 2020 election, Mr. Trump’s false claims about election workers and his pushing of conspiracy theories have been investigated and debunked. But polling has shown that voter confidence in the election has diminished.
A PBS News-NPR-Marist poll from earlier this year found that the percentage of Americans who are confident their state and local government would run a fair and accurate election had dropped to its lowest since at least 2020.
The actions by the administration have raised alarm not just about voter confidence, but also about added pressure on election workers.
On Thursday, Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted Mr. Trump over efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, expressed concern for those working to protect elections.
“I’m very concerned about what’s going to happen in the next election, absolutely,” Mr. Smith said in an interview with MS NOW.
Vanita Gupta, who was the associate attorney general in the Biden administration, said in an interview that Mr. Trump had a “need to redeem the false narrative that he won the 2020 election that is rooted in his retribution campaign.”
But she was also concerned about the effect his actions would have on the future.
“The collateral goal is to cast doubt in voters’ minds about the legitimacy of future election results,” Ms. Gupta said. “But folks are onto this playbook and preparing to ensure eligible voters can cast their votes and have their votes counted, as the law requires.”
