Inside the multimillion-dollar effort to contest US voting procedures

Good morning and welcome to US Election Countdown. We’re three weeks out from election day and there’s a lot to discuss:

• The Trump allies sowing election doubts

• Insight from a top Trump economic adviser

• A surge in election betting

Despite the resonance that Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election had with his supporters, it appeared chaotically thrown together. This time around, he and his allies have laid the foundation to challenge the election results with four years’ worth of conspiracy theories. [Free to read]

Rightwing organisations have pumped millions of dollars into contesting election procedures, recruiting poll watchers and challenging the eligibility of thousands of voters. In doing so, they claim to be protecting the election’s integrity.

These groups have disputed the registrations of more than 100,000 people in states including the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin since November 2020, according to an FT analysis of findings from more than 200 public records requests.

The election result will almost certainly be close, making it a recipe for controversy. The false claim that Trump lost in 2020 because of widespread voter fraud has grown into a vast web of conspiracy theories spun across the country. A CNN poll last year found that about a third of Americans — and more than two-thirds of Republicans — thought Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate.

The US election system is complex and in some places underfunded. With rules and procedures varying by state it can be easy to take advantage of confusion to claim voter fraud. It is within this unsettled environment that Republican-led groups are launching legal efforts to crack down on what they say is voter fraud.

In September, a court sided with the Republican National Committee, ruling that only physical forms of identification could be used to vote in North Carolina. This disqualifies smartphone IDs used by students at one of the state’s largest universities, who are largely Democratic voters.

The RNC has also accused some state governments of improperly maintaining voter rolls. Other claims involve the vulnerability of mail-in ballots and concerns that non-citizens are voting.

However, experts urge faith in the court system to guard against the overturning of election results. As Andrew Garber, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, put it to the FT’s Eva Xiao and Peter Andringa:

Our system has a lot of robustness built into it . . . to make sure that the correct counts are the ones that ultimately get certified and ultimately govern the outcome of the election.

Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

Behind the scenes

Meet Scott Bessent, one of Trump’s top economic advisers and potential Treasury secretary pick.

He’s a hedge fund manager who has given more than $2mn to the Trump campaign this year, and has fundraised for the Republican throughout the US and in London. Bessent made his name in finance as part of the team that shorted the British pound for George Soros in 1992.

Speaking to the FT’s Alex Rogers and James Politi, the billionaire investor dismissed worries that Trump would weaken the dollar:

[Trump] stands by the US as a reserve currency.

The reserve currency can go up and down based on the market. I believe that if you have good economic policies, you’re naturally going to have a strong dollar.

Bessent also stood by Trump’s proposal to slap sweeping tariffs on imports (up to 20 per cent on all goods), saying they were “maximalist” plans that would probably be toned down through negotiations with trading partners.

“My general view is that at the end of the day, he’s a free trader,” said Bessent. “It’s escalate to de-escalate.”

Amid fears that Trump would politicise the Federal Reserve if he was re-elected, Bessent said that while the former president would appoint a new Fed chair when Jay Powell’s term ended, he wouldn’t interfere with the central bank’s independence.

“He’s going to make his views known,” said Bessent. “I think what’s different about Trump is he’s a businessman — and he understands economics.”

Datapoint

US betting platforms are pulling in millions of dollars in new wagers on the election after a court ruling opened the floodgates for domestic pundits, professional or amateur, to pile in.

And these bets are narrowly favouring Trump.

Platform Kalshi is offering institutional investors the chance to bet as much as $100mn on either Harris or Trump after a court victory over a US regulator lifted a domestic ban.

The market went live on October 4 and since then, more than $12mn in wagers have been placed. That figure is expected to grow rapidly in the last stretch of the race.

Contracts betting on Trump yesterday were going for 54 cents while those for Harris were worth 47 cents, widening the gap between the two candidates since Friday.

US residents can now partake after an appeals court lifted an emergency stay requested by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which had blocked Kalshi’s initial application to host election betting. The CFTC had argued that election betting was too much like gaming and put the integrity of the democratic process at risk.

But founder of the PredictIt platform John Aristotle Phillips thinks that’s misguided:

These markets are not just valuable and important — and legal and constitutionally protected in my opinion — but they’re also a lot of fun. It’s engaging if you have a little skin in the game.

Viewpoints