Critics say the challenges are legally without merit, but they argue the lawsuits are dangerous nonetheless because they are intended to further erode public confidence in the election and lay the groundwork for overturning the results if Trump loses.
“This is how a narrative is created that allows for political interference in the post-election process,” said Jess Marsden, an attorney at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that oversees voting rights litigation and advocacy.
Trump’s demands that the Republican National Committee do more to address allegations of voter fraud were a key factor in the resignation of national chair Ronna McDaniel in March. Trump appointed Michael Whatley to replace her and chose his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair. The pair took over the central committee with an explicit focus on “election integrity” litigation and expanding oversight.
Since then, the party has filed new lawsuits and promoted them more aggressively. Recent memos touting the RNC’s accomplishments in the current election cycle included cases in Arizona, North Carolina and New York that Republicans lost, as well as a New York case that dealt with a local, not a federal, election and a Michigan case in 2022. Lara Trump regularly notes that the RNC has more than 90 lawsuits on its books, including 75 cases filed before 2024 and cases in which she played a supporting role in amicus briefs rather than leading the litigation.
“We are committed and very focused on election integrity,” Lara Trump said at the California Republican Party Convention in May. The new party platform approved on Monday added a platform on election rules, calling for “measures to ensure the security of our elections, including voter ID, highly sophisticated ballot paper, proof of citizenship and same-day voting.”
Marsden and others say it’s no coincidence that the sheer number of lawsuits involves areas that have long been targeted by Trump and other election conspiracy theorists, who have falsely claimed President Biden’s 2020 victory was tainted by widespread fraud.
For example, lawsuits in several states alleging that election officials are not properly maintaining voter rolls, allowing ineligible people to remain registered, coincide with one of Trump’s most common, unfounded claims: that millions of foreign nationals are allowed to vote in U.S. elections.
The lawsuits did not present evidence of large-scale voter fraud, and the Nevada case has already been dismissed. “The complaint alleges that voter fraud may have occurred,” Judge Christina D. Silva said in a hearing last month to dismiss the lawsuit. “As such, this is speculative at best.”
Democrats argued the lawsuit was performative because Republicans did not seek an expedited process that could take effect before the November election. The judge left open the possibility that Republicans could refile the lawsuit at a later date with new evidence and arguments.
“We’re open to continuing this litigation after the election,” Republican attorney Connor Woodfin said at the hearing.
Similarly, lawsuits in Michigan and Arizona stem from shared Republican frustration with changes to election rules, such as allowing ballot drop boxes and drive-through voting, to address health concerns during the pandemic. The lawsuits challenge state election manuals, which lay out detailed rules for how local officials should administer elections.
The Arizona lawsuit has already been dismissed. The Michigan lawsuit is still going through the courts. Democrats and other critics say the lawsuits seek to capitalize on a false notion that the election cannot be trusted.
“This is an attempt to delegitimize Democrats campaigning in battleground states and to completely delegitimize our election process in order to win post-election litigation,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. “No matter what happens, we live in a world where people are going to work during election season to try to invalidate as many votes as they can.”
Other lawsuits concern details and rules about absentee voting, which Trump has alleged without evidence are rife with fraud. In Michigan, the Republican National Committee is claiming victory in a lawsuit over rules about signature verification on ballot envelopes.
Benson said the lawsuit won’t change how clerks verify signatures, but some worry it could have a chilling effect among election workers who read headlines and hear false claims that thousands of fraudulent votes may have been fabricated.
Project Democracy has found that raising similar questions about how absentee ballot signatures are verified in the past has resulted in more ballots being rejected, though not necessarily fairly. There was a sharp increase in rejected signatures between Georgia’s 2020 general election and the two U.S. Senate runoff elections in January of the following year. Researchers attributed the increase to a surge in misinformation about how much fraud was occurring among voters using mail-in ballots, much of it attributed to President Trump.
Some of the Republican lawsuits are more substantive and could result in thousands of ballots and voters being deemed ineligible to vote. The most prominent lawsuit was filed in Pennsylvania, where state and federal judges have ruled in favor of the Republican National Committee that state law requires voters to write the date on their mail-in ballot envelopes before their votes can be counted.
Previous court rulings had said undated ballots could be counted if they arrived by Election Day, but Republicans successfully challenged thousands of such ballots in 2022. Voting rights activists have filed a new lawsuit to overturn that ruling.
“The only date that matters is the date that was stamped on the envelope when the ballot arrived at your local elections office,” said Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state and now an election security consultant.
In Nevada, Republicans sued in May to block the counting of mail-in ballots if they arrive after Election Day. Their argument that federal law requires national elections to be held on a single day has already been rejected by courts in Illinois and New Jersey. Democrats said adopting that theory would overturn widespread early and mail-in voting practices and “change how tens of millions of Americans vote in nearly every state.” A spokesman for the Republican National Committee said the party is open to voting in person or by mail before Election Day, but maintains there must be a deadline. Nearly two-thirds of states already require ballots to arrive by Election Day.
The flurry of lawsuits this year is in part a response to a surge in election conspiracy theories among Trump supporters and calls for the party to respond, but it also reflects a recognition that many of the lawsuits filed in 2020 came too late — after the election when many judges said it was no longer appropriate to consider changing the rules.
Democrats worry that Republican leaders are trying to lock in election rules in advance by challenging election policies months before November, but they also have a different agenda.
“Every MAGA lawsuit by Republicans targeting our right to vote is another brick in the foundation of their effort to steal this election if they lose in November,” Biden campaign spokesman Charles Luttwak said.
Claire Fortenberry Zank, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, accused Democrats of “fearing about the transparency of our election system to launch baseless attacks and smears.”
Even if some of the lawsuits are successful, it’s unclear whether these rules will favor Republican candidates over Democrats. In Pennsylvania, for example, officials in Republican-led counties have said they won’t notify voters whose ballots were rejected for being dated, while Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are likely to do the opposite. As a result, Democratic-dominated states could see more manipulation and counting of these ballots than Republican-run areas.
Moreover, recent polls have shown that the presidential election is likely to be decided by less-informed voters, those who are less familiar with the rules of voting and more likely to make mistakes such as not writing the date on their absentee ballot envelopes. This could include people who voted for Biden or Trump.
and Patrick Murray in Madison, Wisconsin, contributed to this report.
