There is analysis that former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, is laying the groundwork for refusing to accept the election results by filing a series of lawsuits challenging the rules and practices of the November presidential election.
According to the New York Times (NYT) on the 29th, Republican groups have recently been fiercely attacking the rules and practices of the presidential election through lawsuits, including about 90 lawsuits filed across the United States this year. According to Democracy Docket, an election lawsuit tracking platform established by the Democratic Party, this legal offensive by former President Trump is already more than three times the number of lawsuits filed before the 2020 presidential election.
These lawsuits are concentrated in swing states and key counties that will determine the outcome of the presidential election. The Republican lawsuits are focused on disqualifying voters who are likely to be Democrats. They are challenging President Joe Biden’s executive order to expand voting access and are seeking to create stricter mail-in voting requirements. However, most election experts, including some Republicans, say that the lawsuits are either filed too late or are based on baseless and obviously false claims, and are bound to fail.
The New York Times pointed out that “given the size of the lawsuits and the late timing of the filing, comments from Republican officials and Trump associates suggest a larger goal behind these efforts: to lay the groundwork for challenging the results after the election.” The argument in these lawsuits could be revived in court or in the media if former President Trump challenges them after the election. The Republican National Committee (RNC) is leading the lawsuits filed by former President Trump.
The RNC has been more aggressive since former President Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and her associates took over in March. In particular, the Times reported that to expand these lawsuits, the Republican Party and the Trump campaign outsourced most of their organizational activities that directly deal with voters to increase voter turnout and reallocated resources to lawsuits and so-called “election integrity efforts.”
Supporters of former President Trump are also joining the lawsuit. The America First Policy Institute, led by former Small Business Administration chief Linda McMahon, who chairs Trump’s transition team, has filed lawsuits in Georgia, Arizona, and Texas. United Sovereign Americans has filed lawsuits in nine states. The group describes itself as “bipartisan,” but its lead attorney is Bruce Caster, who represented Trump during his Senate impeachment trial in 2021.
Caster acknowledged that if the lawsuits it is currently filing are not successful before the election, the claims in the lawsuits could continue to be used to challenge the election afterward. In a close election, the losing candidate could use the group to find evidence of voting errors and challenge the results. In response, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s campaign has a legal team of hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers.
The Harris campaign has been intervening in several key areas, including recently filing a lawsuit against the Georgia election board after it allowed its board to easily refuse to certify the election results. “We are more defensive and more involved than ever before,” Mark Elias, a Democratic campaign lawyer, told the Times. “I firmly believe that Republicans should not be allowed to file serious lawsuits that we will not respond to.”