Even before voters can cast their ballots, Democrats and Republicans are already locked in a sprawling legal battle over how the 2024 election will be conducted. This series of legal disputes could extend beyond Election Day if the outcome is close.
Both sides have beefed up their legal teams for the fight. Republicans have filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of the voting process after being repeatedly rebuked by judges in 2020 for filing complaints about how the election was run only after the votes had been counted.
After Donald Trump made “election integrity” a key plank of the party 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 monitor the November polls.
Democrats are turning on voters with what they call “voter protection,” going to court to defend against the GOP lawsuits and assembling their own team of more than 100 staffers, several hundred lawyers and what they say are thousands of volunteers for November.
Despite the flood of lawsuits, the cases were generally quite small and likely had little impact on most voters.
“When you have that much money to spend on litigation, you end up litigating less and less important cases,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame.
The stakes would rise dramatically if Trump lost the election and then tried to overturn the result. That’s what he tried in 2020, but the legal system rejected him on every front. Trump and his allies have lost more than 60 lawsuits seeking to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.
Whether they can succeed this year depends on the outcome of the election, experts said. A margin of about 10,000 votes — roughly the number that separated Biden and Trump in Arizona and Georgia four years ago — is nearly impossible to overturn in court. A narrow margin 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 depend on court rulings on which ballots are legitimate.
“If he loses, he’ll claim he won. That stands to reason,” 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 thing.”
Trump has done nothing to dispel that expectation as he seeks a return to the White House. He has said he would only accept the election results if they were “free and fair,” raising the possibility that they might not be, something he continues to falsely claim was the case in 2020. He has also continued to insist that he could only lose because of fraud.
“The only way they can beat us is by cheating,” Trump said at a rally in Las Vegas in June.
To be clear, there was no widespread fraud in 2020 or any election since. Reviews, recounts and audits in the swing states where Trump contested his loss four years ago all confirmed that Biden won, and Trump’s own attorney general said there was no evidence that fraud swayed the election.
Trump installed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, which then appointed attorney Christina Bobb to head its election integrity division. Bobb, a former reporter for the conservative One America News Network who has been sued by Arizona’s attorney general for being part of an effort to promote a group of Trump voters in the state, even though Biden won.
The RNC, like its presidential candidate, said it wants to counter the Democrats’ plans for disaster.
“President Trump’s election integrity efforts are focused on protecting every legal vote, mitigating threats to the voting process, and securing the election,” RNC spokesperson Claire Zunk said in a statement. “As Democrats continue their election meddling against President Trump and the American people, we confront their agenda and prepare for November.”
This time, Democrats say they’re prepared for whatever Trump and the RNC do.
“For four years, Donald Trump and his MAGA allies have schemed to sow distrust in our elections and undermine our democracy so they can complain when they lose,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign manager, said in a statement. “But Democrats have also spent four years preparing for this moment, and we are ready for anything.”
The most high-profile lawsuit so far has been in Georgia, over new rules from a Republican-appointed majority on the Georgia State Board of Elections that echo the former president’s conspiracy theories about 2020. The rules could allow members of local election boards to try to refuse to certify elections, a ploy Trump supporters tried unsuccessfully to reverse losses in 2020 and 2022.
A Trump-supporting group has filed a lawsuit seeking to have the courts declare that members of the state election board have that power, while Democrats have sued to overturn the new rules. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has questioned the wisdom of the board in changing procedures so close to the election. Legal experts say the state board’s rules violate Georgia’s longstanding law that certification is not optional.
Whether local governments will delay or refuse to certify the results of this year’s presidential election is a growing concern, especially after a handful of local officials took that step during this year’s primaries. But election experts say fears of a certification crisis this fall are overblown, largely because most state laws clearly require state or local governments to certify official results submitted to them by election offices. The courtroom remains the primary venue for candidates seeking to challenge the election results.
The lawsuits so far have often focused on relatively arcane issues, but some could have ramifications beyond November if Trump loses the election. The RNC has filed lawsuits in Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina, claiming that the states should purge inactive or ineligible voters from their rolls. Late last month, Republicans sued North Carolina over a pet issue: the risk of noncitizens voting, which is rare. They argue that the state wasn’t doing enough to protect against it.
So far, none of the claims have been successful. But if Trump loses the election in those states by a narrow margin, such pre-election litigation could give him a path to arguing in court that the vote was invalid.
The other area that could have implications in November and beyond is whether mail ballots that arrive after Election Day can be counted. Nineteen states allow that, as long as the ballots are mailed before the polls close. The RNC sued to overturn that provision in Nevada and Mississippi, but both cases were dismissed by judges.
The RNC has appealed the cases, and the first is scheduled to be heard by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later this month. It’s the kind of issue that could eventually end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Some of Trump’s allies hoped in 2020 that the court would declare him the winner, but the late-breaking lawsuit over mail-in ballots at the time showed the limits of that tactic.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the state must count mail ballots that arrived up to four days after Election Day. Republicans then appealed that ruling to the nation’s highest court, and late-arriving mail was counted separately in November 2020 as everyone waited for the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court did not hear the case. Trump lost Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes, so the 10,000 late mail ballots would not have made a difference.
