By NICHOLAS RICCARDI Associated Press

With early voting fast approaching, the rhetoric by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has turned more ominous with a pledge to prosecute anyone who “cheats” in the election in the same way he believes they did in 2020, when he falsely claimed he won and attacked those who stood by their accurate vote tallies.

He also told a gathering of police officers last Friday that they should “watch for the voter fraud,” an apparent attempt to enlist law enforcement that would be legally dubious.

Trump has contended, without providing evidence, that he lost the 2020 election only because of cheating by Democrats, election officials and other, unspecified forces. On Saturday, Trump promised that this year those who cheat “will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law” should he win in November. He said he was referencing everyone from election officials to attorneys, political staffers and donors.

“Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country,” Trump wrote in the post on his social media network Truth Social that he later also posted on X, the site once known as Twitter.

The former President’s warning — he prefaced it with the words “CEASE & DESIST” — is the latest increase in rhetoric that mimics that used by authoritarian leaders.

Election experts and several state and local election officials were quick to condemn the former president’s comment, which they viewed in part as an attempt at intimidation as offices are preparing for the start of voting.

Barb Byrum, the clerk of Ingham County, Michigan, said she thinks Trump’s post is an attack on democracy aimed at driving election officials out of the profession.

“But I know that we are not going to be bullied,” said Byrum, a Democrat. “We are civil servants that signed up to make sure every qualified registered voter has the opportunity to exercise their right to vote, and we will do that.”

To be clear, Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden in both the Electoral College and in the popular vote, where Biden received 7 million more votes. Trump’s own attorney general said there was no evidence of widespread fraud, Trump lost dozens of lawsuits challenging the results and an Associated Press investigation showed there was no level of fraud that could have tipped the election. Additionally, multiple reviews, recounts and audits in the battleground states where Trump contested his loss all confirmed Biden’s win.

Trump, who has spoken warmly of authoritarians and mused recently that “sometimes you need a strongman,” has already pledged to prosecute his political adversaries if he returns to power. His allies have drawn up plans to make federal prosecutors more able to target the president’s opponents.

In one possible conservative outline for a new Trump administration known as Project 2025, a former Trump Justice Department official writes that Pennsylvania’s top election official should have been prosecuted for a policy dispute —- in deciding that voters there have a chance to fix signature errors on their mail ballots.

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Trump has disavowed Project 2025, but his rhetoric matches that example, said Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department official and Biden White House staffer who now teaches law at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles.

“He is increasingly showing us what type of president he hopes to be, and that involves using the Justice Department to punish people he disagrees with — whether they committed crimes or not,” Levitt said.

Levitt said he was skeptical that a Trump Justice Department would be able to simply file charges against people who contradicted his election lies, but he and others said the suggestion was dangerous nevertheless.

“Threatening people with punishment for cheating is deeply disturbing if ‘cheating’ simply means that you don’t like the outcome of the election,” Steve Simon, a Democrat who is Minnesota’s secretary of state and the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said in a post on X.

Trump’s campaign said the former president was simply talking about the importance of clean elections.

“President Trump believes anyone who breaks the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, including criminals who engage in election fraud. Without free and fair elections, you can’t have a country,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Trump already has lodged threats against people who engaged in no apparent illegal activity during the 2020 election. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg, in 2020 donated more than $400 million to local election offices to help them deal with the pandemic. In a book released earlier this month, Trump threatened that Zuckerberg will “ spend the rest of his life in prison ” if he makes any more contributions.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State, said in an interview Monday that Trump’s comments have prompted election officials, already reeling from years of threats due to Trump’s false claims of 2020 corruption, to increase their level of vigilance and security planning.

“That is a level of vitriol and threats that we have not seen before, and it is very alarming and concerning,” Benson said. “We worry that individuals will read that rhetoric and take it on themselves to exact the vengeance prior to the election — or immediately following, if their candidate doesn’t win — that their candidate has called for.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that Trump’s rhetoric was dangerous: “This is not who we are as a country. This is a democracy.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Stephen Richer, the Republican Recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, who’s been repeatedly attacked by Trump and his supporters for standing by the accuracy of that county’s 2020 vote count, took to X to point to one election official who has been charged for her actions that year — Tina Peters. The former clerk of Mesa County in Colorado was convicted in August of helping activists access her county’s voting machines to try to prove Trump’s lies.

“She was on your side of this,” Richer wrote to Trump in his post. Earlier this summer, Richer was defeated in the Republican primary in his bid for reelection.

Trump’s call for police officers to watch polling stations in case of fraud in November came Friday as he addressed a gathering of the Fraternal Order of Police, an organization that has endorsed him.

“I hope you can watch and you’re all over the place. Watch for the voter fraud. Because we win. Without voter fraud, we win so easily,” he told the officers. “You can keep it down just by watching. Because believe it or not, they’re afraid of that badge. They’re afraid of you people.”

What he’s suggesting could violate several federal and state laws against voter intimidation — some of which specifically prohibit uniformed officers from being at the polls unless they are responding to an emergency or casting a ballot themselves, according to Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center.

Diaz said those laws emerged from the nation’s fraught history of law enforcement officers abusing their power to stop Black people from voting.

“We have to remember that history when we think of the presence of law enforcement at the polls,” he said. “Even the best-intentioned officers who are there really just to keep people safe with no ill will, their presence might be perceived by voters in a way that is different than they intended.”

Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy in Detroit and Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.