WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 19: Rudy Giuliani stands next to a map during a press conference about various lawsuits related to the 2020 election, inside the Republican National Committee headquarters on November 19, 2020 in Washington, DC.
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 19: Rudy Giuliani stands next to a map during a press conference about various lawsuits related to the 2020 election, inside the Republican National Committee headquarters on November 19, 2020 in Washington, DC.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Election day is almost here, and we could soon find out who will become our next president.
But winning doesn’t only happen at the ballot box, and the results of this election are already being litigated in court. It conjures memories of the 2020 election, with former President Donald Trump claiming he was the real winner, saying,
“We think we will win the election very easily. We think there’s going to be a lot of litigation because we have so much evidence, so much proof. And it’s going to end up, perhaps, at the highest court in the land. We’ll see. But we think there’ll be a lot of litigation because we can’t have an election stolen like this.”
Trump and his allies filed a slew of lawsuits alleging widespread fraud. These efforts failed. But four years later, they are already trying to employ the same strategies again.
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Expectations for this election
Tens of millions of Americans have already voted in the 2024 election, and no matter what happens on November 5th, Republicans and Democrats are preparing for a lengthy battle over the results.
Already, there have been dozens and dozens of lawsuits filed that challenge how elections are run in this country.
Jessica Marsden is the director of impact programs for free and fair elections at Protect Democracy, who says a large of number of these suits have to do with attempts to disenfranchise voters on the basis of eligibility.
“One is we’ve seen a number of suits from the RNC and affiliated conservative organizations challenging voter eligibility, saying, in essence, that there are a number, thousands in some cases, of voters who are registered to vote who shouldn’t be. Whether that be because they are non-citizens or there’s some other issue with their eligibility. “
Marsden says other suits also have to do with overseas voting. Just in the past few weeks, she says there have been cases filed in North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania challenging those states’ procedures for allowing overseas citizens, including members of the military, to participate in the election this fall.
The future of this strategy
So, what does Marsden believe the strategy is attempting to get at? Filing lawsuits early so they’ll have a better chance of succeeding than they did in 2020.
“Many of those cases were dismissed by courts because the cases were brought too late. You can’t wait until after an election to challenge a voter’s eligibility to cast his or her ballot. So it seems likely that by filing some of these cases now, even though they don’t stand a chance of getting relief before the election, the RNC may be readying to make some of those same arguments after the election and hoping that the existence of these earlier suits somehow helps their cause then.”
Democrats have also been involved in election litigation. But Marsden says that they have filed significantly fewer cases, with a large focus of theirs serving as interventions against the Republican suits.
“The Democrats have been bringing fewer cases than the Republicans this year, and often they are intervening in cases that were initially brought by Republicans. So you do end up with the two parties on opposite sides of a lawsuit. But one unusual thing this year is that I think we’ve seen more of these cases coming from Republican groups.”
This episode was produced by Karen Zamora, with audio engineering by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez and Zo vanGinhoven