WaPo:
Donald Trump, who blamed his 2020 defeat on false claims of vast election malfeasance, has spent much of the final week of his third presidential campaign trying to discredit the legitimacy of this year’s election.
His latest unsubstantiated claims could set the stage for an attempt to fight a potential loss not only in the courts but also by spreading falsehoods about the nation’s election systems. The former president and his allies have produced no evidence of widespread fraud or Democratic attempts to rig this election or the previous one, which he lost to Joe Biden. Election officials who have spent four years dealing with the fallout of his 2020 falsehoods fear his latest claims could lead to violence.
“They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing. … Look at what’s going on in your state, every day they’re talking about extending hours; whoever heard of this stuff?” Trump, visibly frustrated, said in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Sunday. “We should have one-day voting and paper ballots.” He added: “It’s a damn shame, and I’m the only one that talks about it because everyone’s afraid to damn talk about it, and then they accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist. … The ones that should be locked up are the ones that cheat on these horrible elections that we go through in our country.”
In Salem, Virginia, on Saturday, he told the crowd: “I’d love to win the popular vote with them cheating. Let them cheat, because that’s what they do, they do it very well, they’re very professional. But I think we have a really good chance to win the popular vote.” Later at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, a prerecorded message from Trump encouraged attendees to vote and to “keep your eyes open because these people want to cheat, and they do cheat. And frankly it’s the only thing they do well.”
And in Milwaukee on Friday night, he falsely claimed to have won Wisconsin twice, saying that “these are minor details.” Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 but lost the state to Biden in 2020.
During a Nov. 3, Pennsylvania rally former president Donald Trump fueled election conspiracies within the state, while lashing out at Democrats and the media. (Video: The Washington Post)
Trump’s preemptive warnings about election fraud, despite no evidence of widespread cheating, are part of a pattern that dates back to his 2016 presidential campaign, an election he also claimed was “rigged” before he won it….