Trump isn’t the only candidate who is making election integrity an issue in 2024.
The 2024 GOP presidential primary season is now in full swing with essentially all of the top, likely candidates having committed and key issues emerging such as the economy and the war in Ukraine – as well as election fraud and election integrity, which remain at the top on front-running former President Trump’s list.
Even in arguably Trump’s most high-profile appearance so far in the 2024 election cycle, the CNN town hall last month, the former president again leaned hard into his concerns about the 2020 election that he lost.
“Most people understand what happened,” he said. “It was a rigged election, and it was a shame we had to go through it.”
However, Trump’s top five challengers are also concerned, but have varying views.
Here are the positions of each of the six candidates on the 2020 presidential election and election integrity:
1.Trump. The former president has repeatedly said that the 2020 election was “rigged,” initially alleging after the election that there were large vote dumps overnight, voting machines that switched votes from him to now-President Biden, and ballots casted for dead voters.
In a CNN town hall, Trump said there was stuffing of ballot drop boxes. He also said during the primetime TV event that he would continue to point out election fraud when he sees it and suggested implementing some election integrity measures.
“If I see election fraud, I think I have an obligation to say it,” Trump said. “And what we went through a short while ago has really put our country in a big problem. I hope to do that. I hope we’re going to have very honest elections. We should have voter ID. We should have one-day elections. We should have paper ballots, instead of these mail-in votes.”
2. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. While DeSantis has avoided saying whether he believes that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, he campaigned for Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake, who were Trump-endorsed 2022 gubernatorial candidates for Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively, and have said that the 2020 election was stolen.