Voting-related lawsuits filed in several states could be a way to challenge the presidential election

Even before voters begin casting ballots, Democrats and Republicans are locked in a sprawling legal battle over how the 2024 election will be run, a series of court disputes that could extend beyond Election Day if the outcome is close.

Both parties have beefed up their legal teams for the fight. Republicans have filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of ballot casting after being repeatedly rebuked by judges in 2020 for raising complaints about how the election was run only after votes were counted.

After Donald Trump 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 monitor the polls in November.

Democrats are responding with what they call “voter protection,” going to court to fight GOP cases and assembling their own team with more than 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 small-scale, unlikely to have any impact on most voters.

“When you have all this money to spend on litigation, you end up litigating less and less important things,” 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 was what he tried in 2020, but the court system rejected him in every case. Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits trying to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.

This year’s success, experts say, will hinge on the outcome of the election. A difference 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 through litigation. A tighter difference of a few hundred votes, like the 547-vote margin that separated George W. Bush and Al Gore in Florida in 2000, is far more likely to hinge on court decisions about which ballots are legitimate.

“If he loses, he’ll say he won. That goes without saying,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said of Trump. “If it’s anything like what we had last time … I expect we’ll see the same thing.”

Trump has done nothing to dampen that expectation as he seeks to return to the White House. He has said he would accept the election results only if they are “free and fair,” raising the possibility that they might not be — something he continues to falsely claim was the case in 2020. He 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 battleground states where Trump contested his loss four years ago confirmed that Biden won, and Trump’s own attorney general said there was no evidence that fraud tipped the election.

Trump named his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, co-chair of the Republican National Committee, which then named attorney Christina Bobb as director of its election integrity division. Bobb is a former reporter for the conservative One America News Network who has been charged by Arizona’s attorney general for being part of an effort to promote a slate of Trump electors in the state, despite Biden winning it.

Echoing its presidential candidate, the RNC said it is trying to counter Democratic antics.

“President Trump’s election integrity initiative 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. “As Democrats continue their election interference against President Trump and the American people, our operation is standing up to their plans and preparing for November.”

This time, Democrats say they are prepared for whatever Trump and the RNC might do.

“For four years, Donald Trump and his MAGA allies have been plotting to sow distrust in our elections and undermine our democracy so they can protest when they lose,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris, said in a statement. “But for four years, Democrats have also been preparing for this moment and are ready for anything.”

The highest-profile litigation so far has been in Georgia, over new rules by a Republican-appointed majority on Georgia’s State Board of Elections that have echoed 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 tactic Trump supporters have unsuccessfully sought to overturn losses in 2020 and 2022.

A Trump-aligned group has filed a lawsuit asking the courts to declare that election board members 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 changing procedures so close to the election. Legal experts say the state board’s rules conflict with Georgia’s longstanding law that says certification is not optional.

The growing concern is whether local boards will delay or refuse to certify the results of this year’s presidential election, 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, in large part because most state laws clearly state that state or local boards must certify official results submitted to them by election offices. The courts remain the most important forum for candidates who want to challenge election results.

So far, the litigation has often dealt with relatively esoteric issues, but some cases could have implications beyond November if Trump loses the election. The RNC has filed lawsuits in Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina alleging that states must purge inactive or ineligible voters from their rolls. Late last month, Republicans sued North Carolina over a favorite issue: the risk of noncitizens voting, which is rare. They contend the state was not doing enough to protect against that.

So far, none of the lawsuits have been successful, but if Trump loses the election in those states by a narrow margin, such pre-election litigation could pave the way for him to argue in court that the vote was invalid.

The other issue that could have ramifications in November and beyond is whether mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day can be counted. Nineteen states allow this as long as ballots are mailed before polls close. The RNC filed lawsuits to overturn this provision in Nevada and Mississippi, but both cases were dismissed by judges.

The Republican National Committee has appealed those cases, with the first of them scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit later this month. It’s the kind of matter that could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Some of Trump’s allies in 2020 had hoped the court would declare him the winner, but the litigation over mail-in voting, which came late at the time, showed the limits of that tactic.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the state had to count mail-in ballots that arrived up to four days after Election Day. Republicans appealed that decision to the nation’s highest court, and late-arriving mail was counted separately in November 2020 while everyone waited for the Supreme Court to rule.

In the end, the Supreme Court did not take up the case. Trump lost Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes, so the 10,000 mail-in ballots that arrived late would not even have made a difference.