The 2020 US presidential election saw dozens of legal challenges from the losing candidate, Republican Donald Trump, which were summarily thrown out by the courts.
This year’s nail-biter, the White House race between the former president and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, has seen a flurry of lawsuits from both parties even before Election Day.
Democrats argue that Republicans are paving the way for Trump to challenge the results if he loses and still declare victory — as he did four years ago.
“Trump is using lawsuits to create a grievance structure that allows him to claim he is a victim if he loses fairly,” Marc Elias, a leading Democratic Party election attorney, said on X.
Republicans say they are filing the lawsuits in the name of “election integrity,” with Trump claiming the only way Harris can win on Tuesday is if Democrats “cheat.”
“I know, better than most, the rampant deceit and deceit that Democrats committed during the 2020 presidential election,” he said in a Truth Social post.
Trump, 78, has never conceded the election he lost to Joe Biden and defeat this time could pave the way for the former president to be tried on federal and state charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 results.
The Republican National Committee (RNC), co-chaired by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara, has filed more than 130 cases, mainly targeting the seven swing states that could decide the election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The lawsuits filed by the RNC and associated groups involved ballot counting procedures, voting machines, voter registration, absentee ballots, the certification of results, and a host of other issues.
Republicans are particularly focused on preventing non-US citizens from voting, over-exaggerating what watchdog groups say is a very rare occurrence.
In several states, they have targeted mail-in ballot rules, which Democrats have historically used far more often than Republicans.
Democrats have filed dozens of lawsuits of their own, trying to protect mail-in voting and overseas ballots and increase the number of ballot drop boxes. They have recruited an army of lawyers to litigate disputes before and after the elections.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said many of the Republican pre-election lawsuits, most of which have been dismissed, are not intended to legitimately clarify voting rules but to “clear the way to make claims that the elections were unsuccessful’. stolen.”
“We will see these claims revived depending on the outcome,” Becker said during a panel at the advocacy group Free Press.
The Republican legal efforts are better organized this time than they were four years ago, when they were haphazardly led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, was eventually indicted in Georgia and Arizona for his efforts to undermine the election results and ordered to fork out nearly $150 million for defaming two poll watchers.
“In 2020, Trump had a motley crew of lawyers, many of whom had as little legal acumen as they did many wild conspiracy theories,” said Donald Nieman, a professor of history at Binghamton University.
Some of the highest-profile pre-election lawsuits have occurred in Georgia, where Biden defeated Trump by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020 and election board members affiliated with Trump sought to enforce new rules.
Courts in Georgia blocked the changes, one of which would have required a manual hand count of ballots and another that would have given board members the power to refuse to certify the results.
Derek Muller, who teaches election law at the University of Notre Dame, said the number of votes potentially affected by each election case is “very small”: 1,000 or 2,000 voters or ballots.
At the same time, “when the election is extremely close — and in 2000 Florida was decided by 537 votes — then everything matters,” Muller said in a reference to Republican George W. Bush’s margin of victory over Democrat Al Gore .
The conservative-dominated Supreme Court controversially settled a recount dispute in Bush’s favor in the 2000 election and could play a role again this time.
The Supreme Court has largely stayed on the sidelines of the current campaign but intervened on Wednesday, allowing the Republican-led state of Virginia to remove about 1,600 people from the voter rolls for allegedly not being U.S. citizens.
It was a 6-3 vote, with the three liberal justices dissenting.