In the wake of Trump's attack on democracy, election officials fear for the future of American elections - CNN

Deeley, the chair of Philadelphia's three-member election commission and a Democrat, watched from home as Trump falsely claimed during the first 2020 presidential debate that poll watchers had already been turned away at early voting centers in Philadelphia.

"Bad things happen in Philadelphia," Trump said.

Greg Abbott signed an election bill into law last week over the fierce objection of the state's Democrats, who, in hopes of derailing similar restrictions proposed earlier this summer, had fled the state two times en masse.

The state legislative efforts are bolstered by a coordinated, behind-the-scenes push by conservative groups to raise millions to support restrictive voting laws, spread unproven claims about voter fraud and fund sham audits of election results.

"I think it's a huge danger because it's the first time that I've seen it being undermined -- our democracy being undermined from within."

CNN spoke to about a dozen state and county officials involved in elections for this story; all of them expressed concern that the widespread and unsubstantiated claims of a stolen election could take a lasting toll on American democracy.

we're told that we need to go in, go to jail -- either on social media, phone calls to the office, emails -- and the threats do continue," said Bill Gates, a Republican member of the board, adding that last month, "My colleagues and I all were treated to an orange jumpsuit that a gentleman sent to us and, you know, declared that we will end up in jail someday because we are traitors in the minds of these people."

Pressure campaign results in coup attempt

Just as he did in 2016, when he claimed the upcoming election was "rigged" against him, Trump started calling the integrity of the 2020 election into question long before any vote was cast.

He paid considerable attention to Georgia, another state that flipped from red to blue in November.

In a particularly stunning exchange, Trump tried to convince Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change the vote count -- a move that became part of a criminal state investigation into attempts to "influence the election."

During that call, Trump said he wanted to "find 11,780 votes" -- the amount he needed to win Georgia by a single vote.

Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, also made the rounds.

"That was bizarre and frightening."

Trump also convened multiple meetings with elected officials from purple states at the White House to discuss election fraud, even though his own Department of Homeland Security declared the election "the most secure in American history."

And on January 6 in Washington -- the day Vice President Mike Pence disregarded Trump's request to challenge the results -- Trump told tens of thousands of supporters who'd convened in DC that day to "fight like hell." A deadly riot ensued shortly after at the US Capitol.

In late July, the Department of Justice released documents showing that Trump in December had threatened to replace his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, with a midlevel attorney in the Justice Department named Jeffrey Clark, who'd been meeting with Trump and promoted wild conspiracy theories about election fraud -- such as that a Dominion voting machine had "accessed the Internet through a smart thermostat with a net connection trail leading back to China." Clark also urged his superiors -- Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue -- to sign a letter to Georgia's governor falsely claiming the Department of Justice had "identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia."

None of that worked to keep Trump in office.

"I think we're in grave danger."

New laws shift election powers

Five days before the November election, Georgia Gov.

The Justice Department is suing the state over its new voting restrictions.

In more than a dozen states -- including toss-ups like Georgia, Arizona and Florida -- Republican-led legislatures are enacting laws that could make it more difficult to vote.

They just need for point five percent of Black people not to be able to vote."

All told, experts and activists say, many of the new election laws share the quality of having been put forth as the solution to a nonexistent problem -- widespread voter fraud -- manufactured by Trump and the GOP.

Ron DeSantis boasted in November about how smoothly the 2020 election went in the Sunshine State, which Trump won.

The Heritage Foundation published a list of "best practices" for voting laws earlier this year that includes limiting absentee voting, banning same-day and automatic voter registration, and making it easier for state legislatures to sue other state officials over election rules.

(Iowa lawmakers have denied working with the group on their voting legislation, and a state ethics investigation found no evidence that Heritage lobbied state officials and lawmakers.)

And Heritage lobbyists and activists also worked with GOP legislators in Florida to shape their new restrictive voting law.

In a statement to CNN that echoed arguments made by Republican legislators around the country, Anderson said Heritage was "proud of our grassroots members' work to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat."

"Members of the press using their platforms to spin up paranoia and resentment instead of covering problems with our election systems and focusing on real efforts to secure our elections are doing a disservice to their audiences," she said.

Other conservative groups have also worked to challenge voting laws in the courts, sued states and counties to encourage more frequent purges of voter rolls, and recruited poll watchers to challenge voters' eligibility.

And many of the organizations are funded by the same big donors and deep-pocketed foundations, such as the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has given millions of dollars to groups that have advocated for more restrictive voting laws or pushed unproven claims about voting fraud, according to tax records.

The efforts by Trump to overturn the election result and conservatives to rewrite voting rules are deeply linked.

The Bradley Foundation's board includes Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer who joined Trump on his call to Georgia election officials in which the president asked them to "find" thousands of votes for him.

Hobbs, the Arizona secretary of state, said it was clear that conservatives trying to restrict voting rights were working together -- including in right-wing efforts to "audit" the 2020 election results.

In the subpoena, a GOP state legislator in Arizona demanded a list of items and data, including the "ballet cancel date." The word should have been "ballot."

The election materials seized from the subpoena were handed over to Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based cybersecurity company whose CEO, Doug Logan, has declared his support for Trump and repeatedly spread misinformation on social media insinuating that Biden stole the election.

(Some of the misinformation shared by Logan has come in the form of retweeted false claims of fraud by Powell, Flynn and Ron Watkins, a heavy promoter of QAnon conspiracy theories. Logan has since deleted his Twitter account.)

Since Cyber Ninjas' controversial examination began in April, two other Trump-backing state legislators -- one in Wisconsin, one in Pennsylvania -- have sent their own demands to election officials in their states.

A separate review, ordered by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, is being led by a former state supreme court justice who last year told a pro-Trump rally that a stolen election would be "systematically unjust."

In Pennsylvania, state Sen.

Cris Dush, who visited Arizona's audit this spring and said he "absolutely" wants to replicate the process there.

Taken together, the pseudo audits, the widespread claims of a stolen election despite a lack of credible evidence, the hounding of election officials by the White House, Trump's attempts to turn the Department of Justice into a weapon against a fair outcome, the threats of bodily harm to people in charge of counting the votes, the wave of new laws that restrict voting in response to false claims of election fraud and could put more partisans in charge of elections -- and all of it increasingly underwritten by the full force of a mighty political machine -- add up to a warning: Americans on the losing end of elections may become less and less willing to accept the results.