A look at the legal challenges that could prolong or disrupt the election

David Becker:

Well, I think we’ve seen a lot of lawsuits before the election. It is very likely to be the most pre-election trial we have ever seen before.

And we should put that in context. In 2020, there were a lot of pre-election lawsuits trying to clarify the rules, especially changes to adjustments that were made due to COVID. And it should be noted that Republicans won about 85 percent of those cases before the 2020 election.

In the 2024 election, we’re seeing some cases like the one we’re looking to clarify the rules, but we’re seeing Republicans push far more for last-minute changes, and we’re seeing them lose a majority of the cases. We see things like cases filed about the voter lists that they have known about for days, weeks, months, years and could have filed at any given time.

We see challenges to mail-in voting laws that have existed in some cases for decades in states like Nevada. And then we see challenges with even military and overseas voting procedures, which in some cases have been around for as long as 40 years.

So those kinds of cases have been dismissed by the courts, even by judges appointed by former President Trump himself. And then we move on to the post-election period. We will of course have to see what happens.

In a really close election, there are legitimate lawsuits that can be brought. Think Florida 2000 when it’s so close, hundreds of votes. But when we see an election decided by margins like we saw in 2020, it’s very, very unlikely that any post-election lawsuits will succeed.

And this is largely because the candidate who is behind still has to bring evidence that they can somehow make up the margin. And once you get over a few hundred votes, it’s almost impossible to do that.