Former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, escalated their false attacks about the security of the Pennsylvania elections Thursday, ramping up baseless accusations about voter fraud that could erode confidence of the results in one of the most critical battleground states.

On Thursday, Trump posted on his social media site that Pennsylvania was “cheating” and breaking the law. He called for prosecutions, though he made no specific allegations. Earlier in the day, Vance seized on deceptive posts online claiming that Democratic Party volunteers were impersonating election officials at polling sites.

The remarks followed a script similar to the final days of his 2020 campaign, when the former president spread dozens of falsehoods about voting before trying to overturn the election. This year, he is focusing most of his false claims on Pennsylvania, the battleground state with the most Electoral College votes and where polls show him tied with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Throughout the past week, election officials in Pennsylvania have been rebutting specious claims of fraud while also reporting when systems flagged suspicious activity, informing voters of issues and enforcing the law where necessary. This is the system working exactly as it should, they have said.

Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who served as Pennsylvania’s attorney general during the 2020 election, criticized Trump this week for spreading false claims about the state’s elections.

“Let’s remember, in 2020, Donald Trump attacked our elections over and over,” Shapiro said in a post on social media. “He’s now trying to use the same playbook to stoke chaos, but hear me on this: we will again have a free and fair, safe and secure election — and the will of the people will be respected.”

GOP secretary of state responds to falsehoods

Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state, used his daily news briefing Thursday to offer a calm yet pointed response to some of the false allegations gaining traction online.

Schmidt pointed to false reports that partisan organizations were impersonating election officials in Allegheny County, which were amplified by Vance, who cited the reports as evidence of “fraud.” Schmidt said the workers in question were properly identified partisan volunteers acting lawfully.

“Criticizing volunteers for properly engaging in permissible electioneering damages our efforts to address the serious issues that can arise from voter intimidation,” Schmidt said, making no mention of Vance or any other politician. “True instances should be reported to law enforcement, not irresponsibly shared online.”

Democratic officials and democracy experts said the allegations spread by Trump could be a first step in a potential attempt to overturn an election loss, spreading doubt and conspiracy theories before the vote to justify challenges afterward.

“There is disinformation that’s being created around the inevitability of particularly a Trump victory,” said David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, who advises both Democratic and Republican election officials on rules and procedures and has been tracking election-related litigation, during a virtual news briefing Thursday. “It’s potentially very dangerous.”

“Nobody should be surprised if either candidate wins this election,” Becker said.

Trump has been homing in on Pennsylvania over the past few days. Recent early-vote totals show Democrats continuing to lead Republicans almost 2-1, but that is a significant improvement for Republicans, who lagged in mail voting almost 3-1 in 2020.

On Tuesday, at an event in Mar-a-Lago, Trump said there “are some bad spots in Pennsylvania where, uh, some serious things have been caught or in the process of being caught.” But he added, “The election itself is going very well.”

Later in the day, though, he was making allegations of cheating.

“They’re already cheating in Lancaster,” Trump said at a rally in Allentown, referring to a county in the southern part of the state that reported receiving 2,600 problematic voter registration applications. Election officials and law enforcement are investigating the findings, and county officials were the first to make them public, noting that it was an instance of the system working as it should.

Trump qualifies terms for election acceptance

But Lancaster was a point Trump would keep returning to. “These are cheaters, and today they got caught. Think of it. They got caught cheating in Lancaster County. They got caught in York.”

During a question-and-answer session with reporters in Green Bay, Wis., on Wednesday, Trump repeated claims about cheating in Pennsylvania, laying out a clear qualifier as he explained whether he would accept the election results.

“If they find no evidence of cheating anywhere, I’ll accept the results,” he told reporters. “I hope that’s going to be the case. Win, lose or draw, I hope that’s going to be the case.”

The false claims from Trump and Vance come as their campaign has filed multiple lawsuits in Pennsylvania. Some efforts, like one to prevent counties from allowing voters to fix errors on their mail ballots, have been defeated.

But the campaign notched a victory in Bucks County, filing a lawsuit this week claiming that voters had been improperly turned away on the final day of in-person absentee voting. A court agreed, and granted two additional days in the critical swing county.

And on Thursday, Republicans wasted no time in appealing a Pennsylvania court decision that would relax the rules for mail ballots, asking the state Supreme Court to reverse a lower-court opinion issued one day earlier.

The state and national GOP filed an emergency request that justices put on hold a Commonwealth Court ruling that envelopes voters use to send in mail ballots don’t need to have been accurately hand-dated, as required under state law.

The Republican groups said that if the high court does not stay the order it should at least modify it to say it’s not in force for the voting that concludes on Tuesday.

Commonwealth Court, in a 3-2 decision, said 69 mail ballots that lacked dates or had inaccurate dates should be counted in two Philadelphia state House of Representatives special elections held in September.

The judges emphasized they were ruling on an election that has already occurred — and involved unopposed candidates.

This report includes information from the Associated Press.