The New York Times: Republicans Who Led 2020 Election Denial Now Sowing Doubt in 2024 Votes

Starting in late 2020, Representative Scott Perry was one of the ringleaders of the Republican plot to use the House's constitutional role in certifying the electoral count to delegitimize the results in a bid to help Donald J. Trump overturn the outcome.

Now, Mr. Perry and a handful of his Republican colleagues are taking action to also call into question an aspect of this year's election, helping to lay the groundwork for what could become another effort to undermine the results should Mr. Trump lose again.

Mr. Perry and five other Republican members of Congress from Pennsylvania are plaintiffs in a lawsuit against their state's government that seeks to set aside ballots from members of the military and Americans living overseas, charging that the system for verifying them is insufficient.

Mr. Trump has encouraged the notion.

Election officials and other experts say that the claims from Mr. Trump are meritless and that the overseas voting system is safe from fraud. Yet the case is one of about 100 filed this year by Republican allies of Mr. Trump - about 30 have been lodged so far in the two months before Election Day - many of which make unfounded claims about voter rolls and noncitizen voters.

They coincide with widespread claims by Mr. Trump and others that the election will be rigged. Together they could help pave the way for yet another challenge to the results if the former president is defeated.

Mr. Perry is only one of a group of congressional Republicans, most of them central to the 2020 effort, who have begun to sow the seeds of distrust in the 2024 election results.

The moves by members of Congress suggest that the elected Republicans who were critical to spreading Mr. Trump's lie in 2020 that extensive voter fraud stole that election from him - fueling the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 - are unapologetic and emboldened to mount a similar effort after the 2024 contest.

"The election denial network that caused so many problems in 2020 through Jan. 6, 2021, is still very much intact, and no one should be surprised that they're at it once again," said Thomas Joscelyn, one of the main authors of the House Jan. 6 committee's final report, who studies extremism. "The greatest threat to election integrity comes from Republicans who say they are concerned about election integrity."

After the 2020 election, 147 Republican members of Congress voted to object to certifying one or more states President Biden won as part of a plan to help Mr. Trump cling to power. While Congress overhauled the Electoral Count Act last year to try to make it more difficult to challenge the election results, Republicans could still cause havoc on Jan. 6, 2025, if they vote en masse against certification.

Few members of Congress played a larger role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election than Mr. Perry, who was instrumental in trying to persuade Mr. Trump to appoint Jeffrey Clark as his acting attorney general over the objections of several top officials at the Justice Department. After senior officials at the agency threated to quit, Mr. Trump backed off the idea.

Mr. Perry's phone was seized by the F.B.I. as part of its investigation.

This month, Mr. Perry, who is himself in a pitched battle for re-election, filed the lawsuit to block overseas ballots from being counted in Pennsylvania.

He and the other lawmakers bringing the suit are represented by the Election Research Institute, whose director, Heather Honey, previously circulated inaccurate information claiming that more people voted than were registered in Pennsylvania in 2020. Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Trump picked up that false claim.

State election officials responded with outrage, noting in a recent filing that if successful, the lawsuit would disenfranchise Americans voting overseas, including members of the armed forces.

The Pennsylvania Democratic Party was more direct.

"This lawsuit," its response said, "is really an effort to sow public doubts about the election."