Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas. Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility. The FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election.
These were among the far-fetched scenarios imagined by a simulation of threats to the 2024 election showcased Thursday by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. The presentation, delivered at the foundation’s Washington headquarters, stated as a given that the Biden administration was already engaged in a sweeping conspiracy to use multiple forms of federal power to influence the presidential election. It did not supply any evidence.
“As things stand right now, there’s a zero percent chance of a free and fair election,” said Mike Howell, executive director of Heritage’s Oversight Project. “I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.”
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The report said a key finding was that the sitting president is the greatest danger to the peaceful transition of power, with no mention of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss. Instead it offered that conclusion as justification for doubting the outcome of the 2024 election and trying to reject anything other than a Trump victory. Trump himself has repeatedly declined to say he will accept the results or rule out a violent response. He has told his supporters that he can only lose through cheating.
Howell said the exercise would lead Heritage to file more litigation over election procedures. He also said it should help the public resist “psychological operations” that he claimed were used in 2020 and are being used again. He didn’t say who supposedly ran the operations.
“The upshot is that we will see a contested election the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said Adam Ellwanger, a rhetoric professor at the University of Houston-Downtown who helped lead the simulation. “If we see the kind of manipulations that we saw in 2020, I wonder if average Americans who are supporters of the president [Trump] will swallow that so easily as they did in 2020.”
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The simulation, known as the “2024 Transition Integrity Project,” is technically independent of the Heritage Foundation but included multiple Heritage employees. The full list of participants was withheld, which Howell said was for their safety. Another participant present Thursday was Josh Findlay, who was until recently the Republican National Committee’s director of election integrity operations. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts spoke at the end of the event.
The Heritage Foundation, a longtime bastion of conservative orthodoxy that has more recently reinvented itself for the Trump era, has become a lightning rod in the campaign because of its role in convening “Project 2025.” That project published detailed policy proposals for every federal agency, ready for the next Republican administration to implement. Some of the most controversial ideas including banning abortion medication, facilitating White House involvement in law enforcement and rolling back legal protections for LGBTQ+ Americans.
As some of those proposals have garnered scrutiny, Trump and his campaign have repeatedly distanced themselves from the effort. Many of the proposals were written by alumni of his administration and are likely to be appointees if he wins another term.
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The Republican National Committee has its own election integrity operations, including litigation.
Attendees on Thursday walked past a mobile billboard criticizing Trump and Project 2025, which the Democratic National Committee positioned outside Heritage’s headquarters. Biden campaign spokesman James Singer called Thursday’s presentation “nothing more than an attempt to justify their efforts to suppress the vote, undermine the election, and ultimately another January 6.”
Howell said the election threats project was devised in response to a 2020 bipartisan group of academics, former officials, journalists and others that tried to anticipate and prepare for ways that then-President Trump might try to disrupt the election or the peaceful transfer of power. Their report raised concerns about violence but did not imagine the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol that temporarily disrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s win.
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Both that effort and the 2024 project used tabletop exercises, also known as “war games,” that assign participants various roles to simulate how they might interact. In the 2024 project at Heritage, President Biden was played by former senator Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.). Those war games included contemplating surprise emergencies such as the Streisand kidnapping. (In the war game, she was rescued the next day.)
Howell accused the Biden administration of a “coordinated invasion over our southern border for the purposes of impacting this election.” As evidence, he said a camera crew went door to door in an apartment complex outside Charlotte, asking people whether they were noncitizens registered to vote, with 10 percent responding yes. Howell said his team did not verify those registrations. Noncitizen voting is extremely rare.
One scenario in the war games involved people flooding the FBI with reports of civil rights violations as a staged provocation for the Justice Department to take over local election authorities. Howell and Ellwanger objected to those observers using a version of arguments that have been consistently made against civil rights legislation since the Civil War.
“To put it simply, the federal government should have a very limited role in our election systems. They should be left to the states to decide,” he said.
