(Headline USA) They’ve been fighting in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania over the cutoff date for counting mailed ballots, and in North Carolina over witness requirements.
Ohio is grappling with drop boxes for ballots as Texas faces a court challenge over extra days of early voting.
As Democrat officials at the state and local level, alongside litigious activist organizations, seek to use the coronavirus panic as a means to circumvent the legislative process and loosen election-integrity laws, the term “battleground state” has taken on a new meaning.
Measuring their anxiety over the November election is as simple as tallying the hundreds of voting-related lawsuits filed across the country in recent months.
The lawsuits are all the more important because President Donald Trump has raised the prospect that the election may wind up before a Supreme Court with the likely addition of another conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, added to the bench.
“This is a president who has expressed his opposition to access to mail ballots and has also seemed to almost foreshadow the inevitability that this election will be one decided by the courts,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the National Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Pointing to clear evidence of systemic vote fraud in many blue areas—as well as in some red ones like a recent North Carolina ballot harvesting case—Republicans have fought the corrupt attempt to allow regions to mail out ballots with reckless abandon, offering no assurances the the recipients will be eligible voters or—in some cases, even living human beings.
Democrats have been clamoring for the measures to increase voting by mail since early-March, even before Trump had declared a national emergency over the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump has repeatedly indicated that he has no issues with solicited absentee ballots, which undergo a screening process to confirm eligibility.
However, the Left and its liberal media allies have sought misleadingly to portray the president as the one trying to undermine election integrity due to his efforts to preserve normal voting procedures.
Trump’s opposition was on display Tuesday during the first presidential debate when Trump launched into an extended argument warning that the massive influx of mail-in ballots this election made it ripe for fraud and manipulation.
“This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen,” the president said.
The lawsuits are a likely precursor for what will come afterward. Republicans say they have retained outside law firms, along with thousands of volunteer lawyers at the ready.
Democrats have announced a legal war room of heavyweights, including a pair of former solicitors general.
The race is already regarded as the most litigated in American history, due in large part to the massive expansion of mail and absentee voting.
Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt, an Obama-era Justice Department elections official, has tallied some 260 lawsuits arising from the coronavirus.
The Republican National Committee says it’s involved in more than 40 lawsuits, and a website operated by a chief Democrat lawyer lists active cases worth watching in about 15 states.
Democrats are focusing their legal onslaught in multiple core areas:
- securing free postage for mail ballots
- relaxing signature-match laws that were designed ensure voters are who they claim to be
- allowing ballot harvesting by third-parties like activist community organizations—or, in some cases, those affiliated with partisan campaign efforts
- ensuring that ballots postmarked by Election Day can count, regardless of when they are actually received
Republicans warn that those efforts open the door to voter fraud and confusion, and they are countering efforts to relax rules on how voters cast ballots this November.
“We’re trying to prevent chaos in the process,” RNC chief counsel Justin Riemer said in an interview. “Nothing creates more chaos than rewriting a bunch of rules at the last minute.”
Some of the states being targeted by leftist legal maneuvers are not traditionally thought of as election battlegrounds, such as Montana.
A judge Wednesday rejected an effort by Trump’s reelection campaign and Republican groups to block counties from holding the general election mostly by mail.
In Ohio, a coalition of activist groups and Democrats have sued to force an expansion of ballot drop boxes from more than just one per county.
Separately on Monday, a federal judge rejected changes to Ohio’s signature-matching requirement for ballots and ballot applications, handing a win to the state’s Republican election chief who has been engulfed with litigation this election season.
In Arizona, a judge’s ruling that voters who forget to sign their early ballots have up to five days after the election to fix the problem is now on appeal before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a six-day extension for counting absentee ballots in Wisconsin as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. The ruling gave Democrats in the state at least a temporary victory in a case that could nonetheless by appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In neighboring Michigan, the GOP is suing to try to overturn a judicial fiat that lets the state count absentee ballots up to 14 days after the election.
In North Carolina, with voting already in progress, the state’s board of elections, controlled by corrupt Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper, made shocking last-minute policy changes recently without consulting the GOP legislature.
In response, the RNC and Trump’s campaign committee have sued over the arbitrary and capricious measures, such as one that would permit ballots with incomplete witness information to be fixed by affidavit from the voter without having to fill out a new blank ballot. The rule effectively circumvents the legal requirement for a witness.
In Iowa, the Trump campaign and Republican groups have won a series of sweeping legal victories in their attempts to ensure checks and regulations on absentee voting. Judges have thrown out tens of thousands of invalid absentee ballot applications in three counties.
Pennsylvania has been a particular hive of activity, with much attention on Philadelphia in the wake of a federal probe that exposed a widespread, systemic ballot-stuffing ring led by a corrupt former Democratic congressman.
Nonetheless, the state’s far-left Supreme Court and Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf have brazenly pressed forward with radical rule changes while circumventing the GOP-led legislature.
One new policy change allows mail-in vote counting to happen in specially designated offices where poll-watchers are not permitted.
Republican lawmakers also asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to put a hold on a ruling by the state’s highest court that extends the deadline for receiving and counting mailed-in ballots.
And they have objected to a portion of the state court’s ruling that orders counties to count ballots that arrive during the three-day extension period even if they lack a postmark or legible postmark.
Meanwhile in federal court, Republicans are suing to, among other things, outlaw un-monitored drop boxes or other sites used to collect mail-in ballots.
The Supreme Court itself has already been asked to get involved in several cases, as it did in April, when conservative justices blocked Democratic efforts to extend absentee voting in Wisconsin during the primary.
There is, of course, precedent for an election that ends in the courts. In 2000, the Supreme Court ended a weeks-long recount in several left-leaning Florida counties by allowing the state’s Secretary of State to certify the election. The result was a victory for Republican George W. Bush after his opponent, Al Gore, had pressed to allow previously disputed votes to continue being counted.
Barry Richard, a Florida lawyer who represented Bush during that litigation, said there’s no guarantee the Supreme Court will want to get involved again, or that any lawsuit over the election will present a compelling issue for the bench to address.
One significant difference between then and now, he said, is that neither candidate in the contest between Bush and Gore raised the prospect of not accepting the results, although Gore did retract a concession he had already made when it appeared Florida was within his grasp.
Many partisan leftists remained bitter afterward and claimed that the Bush presidency was invalid since the election was ‘stolen.’
Nonetheless, “there was never any question, in 2000, about the essential integrity of the system. Neither candidate challenged it,” Richard said. “Nobody even talked about whether or not the losing candidate would accept the results of the election. That was just assumed.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
