CHICAGO– As President Joe Biden and Donald Trump ramp up their campaigns in swing states, a quieter battle is taking place in the shadow of their rematch in the White House.
The Republican National Committee, recently reconstituted under Trump, has filed election-related lawsuits in nearly half the states. Recent lawsuits over the maintenance of voter rolls in Michigan and Nevada are part of a larger strategy targeting various aspects of voting and election administration.
It’s not a new strategy. But with recent internal changes at the RNC and added pressure from the former president, legal maneuvering is expected to play an increasingly important role for the party as Election Day approaches in November. The lawsuits are useful for campaign messages, fundraising and raising doubts about the validity of the election.
Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the RNC and the Trump campaign, said the lawsuits were one of the organization’s top priorities this year.
“This is something that is very important to President Trump,” she said. “He has said this is something the RNC should do year-round.”
Democrats and legal experts warn the lawsuits could overwhelm election officials and undermine voters’ confidence in the outcome of the election.
The Democratic National Committee has its own legal strategy, building “a robust voter protection operation, investing tens of millions of dollars” to counter the Republican Party’s efforts to limit access to the ballot box, spokesman Alex Floyd said.
“The RNC is actively deploying an army of lawyers to make it more difficult to count America’s ballots,” he said.
The number of election disputes soared after the 2020 election, when Trump and his allies unsuccessfully challenged his loss to Biden in dozens of lawsuits.
Experts that year wondered whether the burst of legal action was an aberration caused by false claims about a stolen election and changes in voting processes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, said Miriam Seifter, an attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin. Law School.
They quickly realized that this was not the case, as the 2022 midterm elections also generated a large number of election-related lawsuits. This year is expected to be similar, she said.
“Litigation now appears to have become an integral part of every party’s political and electoral strategies,” Seifter said.
Voter identification rules, mail-in ballots and voter roll maintenance are among the RNC’s targets in the lawsuits. The latest is a lawsuit this month alleging that Michigan has failed to keep its voter rolls up to date.
Maintaining accurate voter rolls by updating voter status is routine for election officials, who watch for obituaries, changes in motor vehicle records or election mail that is repeatedly returned. Michigan also uses ERIC, an interstate data-sharing pact that helps states update voter rolls but has been the target of conspiracy theories.
Opponents of the lawsuit have said it relies on unsubstantiated, flawed data and risks purging legitimate voters.
“They claim there’s a problem because one piece of data doesn’t match another piece of data,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School. “But the pieces of data they’re trying to match don’t measure the same thing. It’s like saying, ‘I just looked at the clock and it’s different from the temperature on my thermometer.’”
This is not a new tactic, said Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters, which has filed to intervene in the Michigan lawsuit. She said most previous lawsuits came from “more fringe groups” rather than directly from the RNC.
“Now that we see a prominent political party trying to purge people from the list, it is very worrying,” she said.
In the past four years, Michigan’s voter rolls have been the target of three similar, failed lawsuits. Just days after the lawsuit was filed in Michigan, the RNC filed a similar lawsuit in Nevada.
A federal appeals court previously sided with the RNC in a Pennsylvania lawsuit questioning whether officials should count improperly dated absentee ballots. A lawsuit in Wisconsin focuses on absentee voting procedures and ballot drop boxes. An RNC lawsuit in Arizona seeks to invalidate or amend the state’s 200-page election manual, while another in Mississippi seeks to prevent mail-in ballots from being counted if they are postmarked by Election Day but are returned days later are received.
Several other groups have recently filed similar lawsuits, including one against the Maryland State Board of Elections, alleging that the state’s voting system does not comply with federal and state law.
Marly Hornik, CEO of United Sovereign Americans, one of the groups behind the Maryland lawsuit, said more lawsuits are planned in other states this year. On its website, United Sovereign Americans, which Hornik said was formed last summer, announced plans to file lawsuits in 23 states.
The GOP and affiliated groups are involved in dozens of other cases and more are on the way, RNC officials say. During this election cycle, the RNC’s legal team has been involved in more than 80 lawsuits in 23 states, said Alvarez, the RNC spokesman.
She said part of the reason for the flood of lawsuits was the lifting of a federal consent decree in 2018, which had sharply limited the RNC’s ability to challenge voter verification and other “voting security.”
During an interview this month with Fox News, RNC Chairman Michael Whatley highlighted the party’s plans to prioritize election-related lawsuits. He said the RNC is recruiting and training tens of thousands of poll workers and working with thousands of attorneys.
On Friday, the RNC announced plans to train poll watchers, poll watchers and lawyers and to deploy more than 100,000 lawyers and volunteers to monitor the November vote counting in battleground states.
The prioritization of election disputes is also reflected in recent changes within the RNC since Whatley and Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, took power and reshaped the organization with a renewed focus on “election integrity.” The RNC now has “election integrity directors” in 13 states.
Christina Bobb, who promoted false claims about a stolen 2020 election and was part of a Trump-backed fake voter scheme, was tapped to lead the department.
“One of our biggest changes from last cycle this cycle was to make the Election Integrity Division its own department with its own specific budget and focus,” Alvarez said.
Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said most lawsuits are unlikely to win in court but “serve as a foundation for fundraising and trying to keep this issue front and center as a campaign. problem.”
Democracy groups and legal experts said the lawsuits could pave the way for false narratives questioning the validity of the 2024 election, while costing time and staff at election offices across the country. Post-election lawsuits could also delay or hinder the certification of results.
“I am concerned about these lawsuits that are not intended to clarify the rules, but instead to lay the foundation for false claims that an election their party lost was stolen or rigged,” said David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation. & Research, which advises local election officials across the country. “We saw this in 2020. We saw it in 2022. And in 2024 we will start to see seeds of doubt in the minds of the electorate again.”
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Associated Press writer Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, contributed to this report.
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