WASHINGTON — Republicans are setting off a slew of legal fights in the battleground states ahead of the November election, raising suspicions among Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies that the underlying goal is to gin up doubts about the result if Donald Trump loses.
Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Election Board is trying to give local officials the power to decide on their own whether something untoward happened during the balloting, which could slow the process of identifying the winner.
In Michigan, Republicans are suing over whether the city of Detroit hired enough GOP poll workers, and in North Carolina, they’re alleging that the state’s voter rolls could allow noncitizens to vote.
All those claims look different on the surface. But the Harris campaign says there’s a pattern tying them together: Trump and his Republican allies want to sow confusion about the outcome should he lose. Democrats have submitted legal filings in at least one case that convey their misgivings about what they contend is the true purpose of the GOP litigation.
A defeated Trump could invoke the cases to revive his unfounded claim that election procedures are tainted in ways that should nullify the result, Harris campaign officials say. Trump and his allies filed dozens of unsuccessful cases after the 2020 election in a drumbeat of false claims of election fraud that culminated in a mob’s attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory.
“We believe that every case they’ve filed is a brick in the foundation of an argument that they will make in November to say that the election is rigged,” a Harris campaign official said on condition of anonymity. “That is fundamentally our view of what their litigation is about. That is why we are prepared, we are winning in court, and we will ensure this election is free and fair.”
The Trump campaign referred questions to the Republican National Committee.
A spokesperson for the RNC, Claire Zunk, said in a statement: “President Trump’s election integrity effort is dedicated to protecting every legal vote, mitigating threats to the voting process, and securing the election. While Democrats continue their election interference against President Trump and the American people, our operation is confronting their schemes and preparing for November.”
With rare exceptions, the two-month interregnum between the election and Inauguration Day tends to be quiet. That wasn’t the case in 2020, when Trump worked to overturn the result and remain in office.
He still faces federal criminal charges stemming from that quixotic effort. He has been indicted by special counsel Jack Smith on charges of trying to defraud the American public and disenfranchise voters across several states, but the trial has been delayed, and it is unlikely to take place before the election. Trump has denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty.
Both sides are girding for a contested postelection period. Chris LaCivita, a Trump co-campaign manager, suggested at a Politico event over the summer that Democrats could try to overturn the results if Trump wins: “It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath. It’s not over until then. It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day, because I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.”
Democrats began preparations years ago, with lawyers drafting briefs in anticipation that Republican officeholders might, for example, refuse to certify election results, a second Harris campaign official said.
“This is the most prepared that any Democratic campaign has been at this point, because we knew this was coming," the official said. "It’s critical to have these people in the states who know the law and the players and have lived through 2020, saw what happened there and learned from it.”
Among other legal challenges, Republicans have opposed Arizona’s election procedures manual and Nevada’s law allowing mail ballots to be counted after Election Day as long as they were postmarked beforehand.
Ground zero might be Georgia, a state that Biden narrowly won in 2020 and that Harris is aggressively working to hold. Trump faces criminal charges in Georgia over his efforts to overturn his defeat in the state four years ago. He has pleaded not guilty.
At issue this year is whether county election boards in Georgia are free to use their own discretion in certifying election results. The Republican-controlled State Election Board voted 3-2 last month to expand the powers of local officials, enabling them to certify results after having conducted a “reasonable inquiry” into their accuracy. There was no definition of what a "reasonable inquiry" entails.
Trump has praised the three Republicans who voted for the rules as “pit bulls” for honesty.
But Democrats caution that the new rules could disrupt the hard-and-fast timetable to certify elections in Georgia. Furthermore, local election boards have never had that kind of authority, and they are supposed to perform merely the straightforward task of adding up the vote totals, Democrats argue. If anyone alleges fraud occurred in an election, the proper place to test the claim is the courts, they add.
