特朗普在选举夜似乎接受了结果，但否认选举的机器从未停止运转Trump seemed to accept the results on election night. But the election denial machinery never stopped.

In the end, the midterm elections unfolded without the worst-case scenarios. Despite his refusal to rule it out, President Donald Trump didn’t send immigration officers or National Guard members to polling places. An effort to restrict mail ballots through the U.S. Postal Service was blocked by the courts. On election night many Republican losers conceded, and Trump himself initially seemed resigned to the results.

It’s tempting to declare the crisis averted and move on. But Trump returned to social media Monday morning to signal that election denial isn’t going away anytime soon.

After the 2020 election, Trump claimed without evidence that an early lead among Republican candidates that slowly diminished as more ballots were counted — the “red mirage” caused by differences in how states counted early and Election Day ballots — was a sign of fraud. This time, he claimed that an early lead among Democrats was somehow suspicious. “Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest?” he wrote.

It may be too late to stir up this kind of trouble. Researchers with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public found that election-integrity rumors failed to catch fire on election night after Trump initially said he would accept the results. It’s too early to say if a new round of election denial now will spark the same kind of online conspiracy theories, or if the size and scale of Democratic wins is simply too much to deny.

But that’s just the surface level of election denial. Behind the scenes, a separate effort is looking to possible overturn Republican losses in two states, and it’s not showing any signs of slowing down.

Trump began laying the groundwork before the election. On Oct. 22 he said he had directed the Justice Department to sue Alaska to block certification if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan lost a re-election campaign he could have won if votes cast for a second candidate named Dan Sullivan had gone to him instead. Then, after The New York Times reported that people connected to Democratic candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee may have helped recruit the second Sullivan, Trump called for votes cast for that candidate to be reassigned to the incumbent.

Peltola denies any involvement, but the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation. It has issued more than 100 subpoenas and sent more than 20 target or records-preservation letters, according to news reports. No charges have been filed. A federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking to delay certification, but the department appealed. Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy ordered a separate state investigation, while House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer sought testimony from two Democratic operatives.

Some Republicans, including Sens. Tim Sheehy of Montana and Tim Scott of South Carolina, have also left open the possibility of refusing to seat Peltola. Never mind that the Alaska Supreme Court ruled months ago that the second Dan Sullivan had the right to run, and that Sen. Sullivan was distinguished from the other Dan Sullivan on the ballot with the words “incumbent” and “Republican.”This echoes the pattern of Trump’s 2020 election denial: claims of fraud, demands for extraordinary remedies, legal efforts to overturn the result and, now, threats of a last-ditch challenge in Congress.

Even if these efforts fail, they can still undermine trust in the result and intimidate the people who run elections.

A second fight is unfolding in Mississippi, where Democrat Scott Colom narrowly leads Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. Hyde-Smith’s campaign has demanded that counties keep affidavit ballots — Mississippi’s term for provisional ballots — separate, saying they may be needed as evidence in a legal challenge. Colom’s lawyers called the request unlawful and warned that it could undermine the secret ballot.

There’s a parallel here to Pennsylvania in 2020. Republicans asked the U.S. Supreme Court to separate mail ballots that arrived after Election Day under a deadline extended by the state Supreme Court. Justice Samuel Alito ordered those ballots segregated and, if counted, tallied separately. The full court ultimately declined to decide the case on the merits after it became clear that the roughly 10,000 late-arriving ballots could not overcome Joe Biden’s margin of victory. But by keeping those ballots in legal limbo, the court left open a consequential question: Could it decide an election after the votes were cast by ruling which ballots count?

Mississippi’s affidavit ballots have drawn more scrutiny this year because of the changes to the state’s voter-roll maintenance process. The secretary of state’s office supplied counties with commercial address data from Experian to help flag voters who might have moved — even though the credit agency’s own contract said it could not guarantee the accuracy of the data. Some eligible voters were wrongly marked inactive and had to cast affidavit ballots, though it’s unclear how many of the state’s more than 230,000 inactive registrations resulted from Experian data.

Democrats have won at least 54 Senate seats, so neither Alaska nor Mississippi will determine control of the chamber. But the fights over these two races show how the election denial playbook works through over-the-top rhetoric, investigations meant to cast doubt on results, pressure on local and state officials, legal challenges to ballot counting and last-minute attempts to overturn the result in Congress.

Even if these efforts fail, you can expect this playbook to be used again in a future election.

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