***New from Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng, Justin Glawe, and Andrew Perez:***

*The former president and his allies have worked to make sure 2024 mail-in ballots are counted slowly, so he can again demand officials “stop the count."*

With just weeks left in the 2024 presidential contest, Donald Trump already has plans in place to aggressively challenge the election results if he fails to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris. According to four conservative attorneys and other sources who’ve spoken to the former president on this matter, Trump intends to declare — as soon as on Election Night — that the race is being “rigged” or “stolen” from him, by pointing to slow vote-counts of mail-in ballots in crucial battleground states as his evidence for supposed Democratic shenanigans afoot.

“He has mentioned many times that this is what we have to watch out for on Election Day, because that’s where \[the steal is\] going to happen,” one of the Trump-aligned lawyers tells Rolling Stone. Trump, in these private conversations with close allies and advisers in recent months, has stressed that “you gotta call them out very early in the process, like that night, otherwise they can get away with it and cover their tracks,” this source adds.

But the reason that slow counts are expected in key states is precisely because Trump and his elite Republican allies in those states want it that way. As a result, Americans can expect a replay of what happened in 2020, when Trump lost.

Read more: [https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-election-rigged-slow-vote-count-2024-1235133890/](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-election-rigged-slow-vote-count-2024-1235133890/)