Election Day is 12 days away. But in courtrooms across the country, efforts to sow doubt over the outcome have already begun.
More than 100 lawsuits have been filed this year around the upcoming midterm elections. The suits, largely by Republicans, target rules over mail-in voting, early voting, voter access, voting machines, voting registration, the counting of mismarked absentee ballots and access for partisan poll watchers.
Democrats, too, have similar efforts underway. But their legal effort ahead of the election focuses on making voting easier and helping those denied a chance to vote, through legal hotlines and volunteers. A team led by attorney Marc Elias and his firm is litigating roughly 40 cases in 19 states, some in which they have intervened in Republican-led lawsuits.
In 2020, pro-Trump attorneys filed roughly 60 lawsuits across the nation and asked judges to set aside votes. Those lawsuits were roundly rejected. Trump’s own leadership found the election was fair, and state election officials nationwide saw no widespread evidence of fraud. Biden earned 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, the same margin in Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, which he repeatedly described as a “landslide.
This year, the focus is on offense. The RNC said it has built a multimillion-dollar “election integrity” team, hiring 37 lawyers in key states, holding more than 5,000 trainings to teach volunteers to look for voter fraud, which is rare, and filing 73 lawsuits in 20 states. Other Trump-allied legal teams are also ramping up and preparing for litigation, including America First Legal, run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
Election workers have increasingly been subjected to abuse and threats of violence. In battleground states, voter intimidation cases are on the rise. There’s growing concern among election officials and law enforcement about overly aggressive poll watchers or people pretending to be poll watchers intimidating voters.