Before voters even begin casting ballots, Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a sprawling legal fight over how the 2024 election will be run, a series of court disputes that could even run past Election Day if the outcome is close.
Both parties have bulked up their legal teams for the fight. Republicans have filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of vote-casting after being chastised repeatedly by judges in 2020 for bringing complaints about how the election was run only after votes were tallied.
After Donald Trump has made “ election integrity “ a key part of his party’s platform following his false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020, the Republican National Committee says it has more than 165,000 volunteers ready to watch the polls in November.
Democrats are countering with what they are calling “voter protection,” rushing to court to fight back against the GOP cases and building their own team with over 100 staffers, several hundred lawyers and what they say are thousands of volunteers for November.
Despite the flurry of litigation, the cases have tended to be fairly small-bore, with few likely impacts for most voters.
“When you have all this money to spend on litigation, you end up litigating less and less important stuff,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame University.
The stakes would increase dramatically should Trump lose the election and then try to overturn the result. That’s what he attempted in 2020, but the court system rejected him across the board. Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits trying to reverse President Joe Biden’s win.
Whether they could be successful this year depends on the result of the election, experts said. A gap of about 10,000 votes — roughly the number that separated Biden and Trump in Arizona and Georgia four years ago — is almost impossible to reverse through litigation. A closer one of a few hundred votes, like the 547-vote margin that separated George W. Bush and Al Gore in Florida in 2000, is much more likely to hinge on court rulings about which ballots are legitimate.
“If he loses, he’s going to claim that he won. That goes without saying,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said of Trump. “If it looks like what we had last time … I expect we’ll see the same kind of thing.”
Trump has done nothing to discourage that expectation as he seeks his return to the White House. He has said he would accept the results of the election only if it’s “free and fair,” which raises the possibility it would not be, something he continues to falsely contend was the case in 2020. He also continued to insist that he could only lose due to fraud.
“The only way they can beat us is to cheat,” Trump said at a Las Vegas rally in June.
To be clear, there was no widespread fraud in 2020 or any election since then. Reviews, recounts and audits in the battleground states where Trump disputed his loss four years ago all affirmed that Biden won, and Trump’s own attorney general said there was no evidence that fraud tipped the election.
Trump installed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, which then named attorney Christina Bobb as the head of its election integrity division. Bobb is a former reporter for the conservative One America News Network who has been indicted by Arizona’s attorney general for being part of an effort to promote a slate of Trump electors in the state, even though Biden won it.
Echoing its presidential candidate, the RNC said it’s trying to counter Democratic mischief.
“President Trump’s election integrity effort is dedicated to protecting every legal vote, mitigating threats to the voting process and securing the election,” RNC spokeswoman Claire Zunk said in a statement. “While Democrats continue their election interference against President Trump and the American people, our operation is confronting their schemes and preparing for November.”
