WASHINGTON — Republicans are waging a series of legal battles in swing states ahead of the November election, raising suspicions among Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies that the underlying goal is to cast doubt on the outcome if Donald Trump loses.
In Georgia, the Republican-controlled election board is trying to give local officials the power to decide for themselves whether something unforeseen happened during the vote that could delay the process of identifying the winner.
In Michigan, Republicans are suing over whether the city of Detroit has enough GOP poll workers. In North Carolina, they are arguing that the state’s voter rolls could be used by non-citizens to vote.
All of these claims seem different at first glance. But the Harris campaign says there’s a pattern that ties them together: Trump and his Republican allies want to sow confusion about the outcome if he loses. Democrats have filed legal documents in at least one case raising reservations about what they say is the true purpose of the GOP lawsuit.
A defeated Trump could invoke the cases to revive his baseless claim that election procedures were corrupted in ways that should invalidate the results, Harris campaign officials say. Trump and his allies filed dozens of unsuccessful cases after the 2020 election in a series of false claims of election fraud that culminated in a mob attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to try to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
“We believe that every case they’ve filed is a foundation stone for an argument they’re going to make in November that the election was rigged,” said a Harris campaign official who asked not to be named. “That’s fundamentally our view of what their lawsuit is about. That’s why we’re prepared, we’re going to win in court, and we’re going to make sure that this election is free and fair.”
The Trump campaign referred questions to the Republican National Committee.
RNC spokesperson Claire Zunk said in a prepared statement: “President Trump’s election integrity efforts are focused on protecting every legal vote, mitigating threats to the voting process, and securing the election. As Democrats continue their election interference against President Trump and the American people, we confront their agenda and prepare for November.”
With rare exceptions in American politics, the two-month interregnum between an election and Inauguration Day is typically quiet. That wasn’t the case in 2020, when Trump worked to overturn the result and stay in office.
He still faces federal criminal charges stemming from that quixotic effort. He has been indicted by special counsel Jack Smith on charges of attempting to defraud the American public and disenfranchising voters in several states, but the trial has been postponed and is unlikely to take place before the election. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty.
Both sides are bracing for a contested post-election period. Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager, suggested at a Politico event last summer that Democrats might try to overturn the results if Trump wins: “It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath. Until then, it’s not over. It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day, because I wouldn’t wish anything on anybody.”
Democrats began preparing years ago, with lawyers drafting briefs, anticipating that Republican officials, for example, would refuse to certify the election results, a second Harris campaign official said.
“This is the best-prepared Democratic campaign to date because we knew this was coming,” the official said. “It’s critical to have these people in the states who know the law and the players and who lived through 2020, saw what happened there and learned from it.”
Among other legal actions, Republicans are challenging Arizona’s election procedures manual and Nevada’s law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted after Election Day as long as they are postmarked in advance.
Ground zero could be Georgia, a state Biden narrowly won in 2020 and Harris is aggressively trying to retain. Trump is facing criminal charges in Georgia for his efforts to overturn his defeat in the state four years ago. He has pleaded not guilty.
At issue this year is whether Georgia’s county election boards are free to use their own discretion in certifying election results. The Republican-controlled Georgia Election Commission voted 3-2 last month to expand the powers of local officials, allowing them to certify results after conducting a “reasonable investigation” of their accuracy. There was no definition of what constitutes a “reasonable investigation.”
Trump has praised the three Republicans who voted in favor of the rules as “pit bulls” for their honesty.
But Democrats warn that the new rules could disrupt the hard-and-fast schedule for certifying elections in Georgia. Moreover, local election boards have never had that kind of authority and should only perform the simple task of tallying vote totals, Democrats argue. If someone alleges fraud in an election, the proper place to test that claim is in court, they add.
“If someone thinks there’s a reason to throw out ballots, that’s a decision that’s made by the courts,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on Georgia’s State Election Board, said in an interview. “That’s not a decision that’s made by a partisan group of citizens on election boards, many of whom have no background in any of this other than their partisan affiliations.”
Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School and a former Biden White House official who specializes in democracy and voting rights, said the role of a county election board comes down to simple enumeration.
“It’s a process of saying 1 + 1 equals 2. It’s not saying, ‘1 + 1 equals I don’t know if there’s bamboo fiber in the ballots.’ That’s not what they [local election boards] “That’s what we’re here for,” he said, referring to a conspiracy theory that circulated in 2020 about fraudulent ballots from Asia.
The Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit against the board last week to block the new procedures.
In its submission, the committee argued that the new rule would introduce “significant uncertainty into the post-electoral process” and “create chaos by creating new processes that run counter to existing legal duties.”
Both the Harris and Trump campaigns have been flexing their legal muscles over the election and its aftermath. An RNC memo released in February said the committee was involved in 78 lawsuits in 23 states.
“Should Democrats decide to continue their attacks on election safeguards through Election Day, we stand prepared to litigate and ensure that the election is fair, transparent, legal and accurate,” Zunk said.
Harris’ campaign says it has hired hundreds of lawyers across the country to protect its legal interests. The team’s election defense legal efforts are being led by Dana Remus, Biden’s former White House counsel.
The campaign is also getting some outside help. Jim Messina, who led Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, has started a political action committee that can raise unlimited amounts of money and will also help with lawsuits. Norm Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for Trump’s first impeachment trial, is serving as outside counsel to the group.
One casualty of contested election results is public confidence in the system, election experts warn. Voters may feel that democracy is broken and react by refusing to participate or by reacting with anger.
Trump has cast doubt on the reliability of American elections with both victories and defeats.
When he won in 2016, he claimed without any basis that he had only lost the popular vote because millions of people had illegally voted for his opponent Hillary Clinton. And when he lost in 2020, he claimed the election had been “rigged” in Biden’s favor.
Although he lost in California that year by more than five million votes, Trump recently said he would win the state if Jesus Christ or, alternatively, an honest human being counted the votes.
“Trump said if it wasn’t for manipulation, he would have won California. That’s like me saying if it wasn’t for manipulation, I would be a supermodel,” Messina said.
In the years since Trump made false claims about voter fraud, partisan divisions over election integrity have grown. A poll last year found that only 22% of Republicans were very confident that votes in the 2024 presidential election would be counted accurately, compared with 71% of Democrats.
“There are already people in the public who are 100% convinced that there is no way to hold free and fair elections in Georgia,” Ghazal said.
Many of Trump’s supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 did so under the mistaken belief that he had been robbed of victory in 2020. The first rioter to storm the building, Michael Sparks, told a judge during a hearing last week that he believes “to this day” that the election was stolen from Trump. Sparks was sentenced to more than four years in prison.
Some election experts fear Trump’s voters will again use violence if he loses in November.
“I worry about the potential for chaos,” Levitt said. “For people who are told the election was stolen, it’s natural to take to the streets if you don’t think you have the power to peacefully influence the outcome.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
