Republicans have unleashed a flurry of lawsuits challenging voting rules and practices ahead of the November elections, setting the stage for what could be a far larger and more contentious legal battle over the White House after Election Day.
The onslaught of litigation, much of it landing in recent weeks, includes nearly 90 lawsuits filed across the country by Republican groups this year. The legal push is already more than three times the number of lawsuits filed before Election Day in 2020, according to Democracy Docket, a Democratically aligned group that tracks election cases.
Voting rights experts say the legal campaign appears to be an effort to prepare to contest the results of the presidential election after Election Day should former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, lose and refuse to accept his defeat as he did four years ago. The lawsuits are concentrated in swing states — and key counties — likely to determine the race. Several embrace debunked theories about voter fraud and so-called stolen elections that Trump has promoted since 2020.
In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the state’s third-largest county, the party is seeking to force local officials to count ballots by hand, evoking debunked conspiracy theories about corrupted voting machines. A case filed by the Republican National Committee in Nevada this month falsely asserts that nearly 4,000 noncitizens voted in the state in 2020, a claim that was rejected at the time by the state’s top election official, a Republican.
If successful, the Republicans’ lawsuits would shrink the electorate, largely by disqualifying voters more likely to be Democrats. They seek purges of voter rolls, challenge executive orders from President Joe Biden aimed at expanding ballot access and create stricter requirements to voting by mail.
Election experts, including some Republicans, say a vast majority of the cases are destined to fail, either because they were filed too late or because they are based on unfounded, or outright false, claims.
The volume and last minute timing of the cases, along with statements from party officials and Trump allies, suggest a broader aim behind the effort: Laying the groundwork to challenge results after the vote. The claims in the lawsuits may well be revived — either in court or in the media — if Trump contests the outcome.
“Many of these cases reinforce particular narratives, particularly those about immigrants and voting,” said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that monitors elections. “Putting false claims in the form of a lawsuit is a way to sanitize and add legitimacy.”
Republican lawyers involved said their work was aimed at creating more confidence in elections.
“Our legal efforts are fighting to fix the problems in the system, hold election officials accountable, protect election safeguards and defend the law,” Gineen Bresso, who is running the election integrity operation for the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, said in a statement. “While Democrats want a system open to fraud without safeguards, that counts illegal votes, we are committed to securing the election so every legal vote is protected.”
The RNC is leading a broad network of conservative legal groups in the effort. Trump’s allies, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, took over the committee last March, placing Bresso in charge of the legal operation and promising a more aggressive strategy. After the 2020 election, the party’s lawyers had at times refused to participate in Donald Trump’s legal campaign, forcing him to rely on a collection of outsiders who filed cases rife with errors and false claims. Several Trump lawyers have since been criminally charged.
Among them is Christina Bobb, who is now senior counsel on the RNC’s election integrity team. Bobb recently suggested that she was braced for more litigation after Election Day.
“I’m kind of holding my breath for that,” she said on a recent podcast. “I think we’re in probably, at least litigation-wise, as good of a place as we can be before the election.”
Democrats, too, say they are prepared. Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign says it has a legal team of hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers. They have played more defense than offense, but have picked some key places to intervene. The campaign recently filed a lawsuit in Georgia against the state Election Board after it made refusing to certify results easier for its members.
“We’re doing more defensive interventions than we’ve ever done before,” Marc Elias, a leading Democratic election lawyer working for the Harris campaign, said in an interview. “I am a big believer that you do not allow the Republicans to bring serious litigation that goes unresponded to.”
New faces, new strategy
The expanded legal effort represents a strategic gamble for the RNC. The party has typically spent much of its energy on turning out voters — funding extensive organizing operations that knock on doors, run phone banks and track voters. This year, the Republicans and the Trump campaign have largely outsourced those efforts to allied organizations and redirected resources to litigation and other so-called election integrity efforts.
Many of the leaders are new to the party’s legal team.
Several lawyers aligned with Trump from the last presidential election — including Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman — have suffered personal consequences, including disbarment and criminal charges, connected to their work.
Two of the GOP lawyers facing felony charges in Arizona related to their work four years ago, Bobb and Boris Epshteyn, are still in the Trump fold. (All four lawyers have pleaded not guilty.)
Bobb has remained defiant. “I had the audacity to tell everybody that the election was stolen,” she said in the recent podcast interview, adding, “I think they thought that we would be easier to break.”
Bresso, however, has a history as an establishment Republican election lawyer. She served on the federal Election Assistance Commission and was for a time associated with a GOP election law firm, Holtzman Vogel. She has said relatively little publicly about Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, although it appears her views may have shifted.
In the early days of the pandemic, she co-wrote an opinion piece arguing that state and local governments needed to be given “flexibility” to adjust to the crisis and that expanded access to mail-in votes “might be part of the solution” though it was “no cure all.”
That perspective was soon rejected by Republicans aligned with Trump, who came to see the surge of mail voting as an attempt to steal the election. After the 2020 election, Bresso blamed the COVID-era changes to voting procedures for “this landscape that we have in place right now.”
Since then, Bresso repeatedly participated in meetings of the Election Integrity Network, a leading group of activists who promote or buy into conspiracy theories about voting. During a panel discussion in 2022, she urged those in attendance to “go out and be a poll worker,” adding, “we need to have eyes on the process.”
Under her direction, the RNC has filed several lawsuits seeking to restrict mail voting, including active cases in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and North Carolina.
The committee has also sought to remove voters from the rolls, filing several recent cases based on false claims that Democrats are signing up vast numbers of immigrants without legal status to vote. Some have already been dismissed.
“Democrats continue to put noncitizens first and Americans last as they allow noncitizens to vote,” Michael Whatley, the chair of the RNC, said in a recent news release announcing the Nevada lawsuit.
Studies of prosecutions and state voter data have shown it is very rare for noncitizens to cast ballots.
“The one thing they need in court is evidence,” said Ty Cobb, a former White House lawyer under Trump, who bemoaned the revival of old falsehoods. “They didn’t have any last time, and they’re unlikely to have any this time.”
Activating a legal network
Yet, Republicans have found no shortage of allies eager to jump into the legal work.
The list includes America First Legal, a group run by Stephen Miller, a close Trump associate and former policy adviser, and the America First Policy Institute, led by Linda McMahon, a leader of Trump’s transition team.
The institute has filed election cases in Georgia, Arizona and Texas. In Wisconsin it is defending the town of Thornapple, a tiny community that last week was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for banning voting machines. The Justice Department says the ban violates accessibility requirements, and election experts argue it will disrupt the vote count.
Some of the institute’s lawsuits are aimed at giving local election officials authority to refuse to certify results.
United Sovereign Americans, a group that describes itself as nonpartisan, has filed lawsuits in nine states. The cases zero in on potential anomalies and minor errors in the voting rolls. The group contends the issues must be resolved before election officials certify the results.
State lawyers have pointed to problems with both the group’s numbers and its approach. A lawyer responding for Pennsylvania wrote in a filing, “Their questions about dates on paperwork, for example, are both factually baseless and irrelevant” to federal law.
Marly Hornik, a co-founder of the group, said it is trying to ensure that U.S. citizens can participate in “an election that is fairly and honestly conducted.”
The group’s lead lawyer is Bruce Castor, a former district attorney in Pennsylvania and Trump’s defense lawyer in his second impeachment trial. Castor acknowledged that if the group’s cases don’t succeed before November the arguments could be used to mount challenges after Election Day.
If the results are close enough, a losing candidate can look to the group for evidence of “anomalies” in the vote and decide to contest the result, he said.
“I’ll say, ‘How much money do you have left over from the campaign fund?’” Castor said. “If he has enough, I think I’d have to hire people to look into it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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