Mother Jones illustration

Back in June, during the CNN debate, former President Donald Trump said something very important: He promise to accept the results of the 2024 November race if they are “fair, legal and good elections”.

How does Trump define these terms? In 2020, he felt that the election was not legitimate because he did not win. This year, he seems to have a similar calculation, saying he wants his victory to be “too big to handle”. But unlike the last presidential cycle, where Trump’s camp filed more than 60 lawsuits alleging widespread fraud in hopes of overturning the results. after the election is over, the 2024 strategy is not haphazard and reactive. Led by the Republican National Committee, it has involved dozens of pre-election processes that appear largely designed to generate voter distrust.

“At the end of the day, these lawsuits are PR campaigns on legal wrapping paper. They do not reflect real legal concerns. They are designed to create chaos,” says Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the pro-democracy group States United. “After the fact, when the results come out — if they don’t like the results — it’s easier for them to undermine them.”

Like me reported in the September-October issue of Mother JonesThe RNC has laid the groundwork this year to assert that the election was not conducted properly by filing a wave of lawsuits alleging illegal voting and illegal election schemes. Experts fear the RNC and far-right groups will point to their pre-election lawsuits as evidence that they warned the election was rigged before it even began — opening the door to even more lawsuits challenging the results that could ultimately -make their way to a nice yard

“It’s a little bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall — kind of like everything all over the place, all at once,” says Lydgate, who was previously Massachusetts’ deputy attorney general. Plaintiffs can make a lot of equally dubious claims in the courts and then, says Lydgate, “see if they can get somebody, any judge, to validate them after the fact.”

While both political parties have filed pre- and post-election lawsuits over procedural issues over the years, many of the new claims the conservatives are making “really feel like they’re of a different nature,” says Nora Benavidez, a person with civil rights and free. speech lawyer. Citing court cases seeking to challenge voter status, Benavidez says the slew of lawsuits is an attempt to “reduce people’s opportunities to vote,” while hinting that the lawsuit “must be supported to fight corruption.”

Lawsuits challenging voter eligibility have been repeatedly dismissed by state and federal judges. Some of the voter roll cases were launched even after the legal 90-day window before the polls close, when states cannot change voter rolls. Some lawsuits don’t even seek immediate relief, raising the question of why the lawsuits were filed at all.

Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, says the agenda is obvious: “I have no doubt that those trying to sabotage or undermine elections could use any number of talking points to do so, including pointing it to frivolity. lawsuits they filed far too late.”

Trump’s colleague, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), isn’t hiding the ball here. In an October interview with New York Times, Vance boasted that the RNC had “filed nearly 100 lawsuits at the RNC” to ensure the votes were counted correctly. They define “correct” differently than the experts do.

Republicans in several states have sought to challenge procedures for handling ballots from members of the military and other voters living abroad. In Pennsylvania, a lawsuit by six GOP members of Congress sought to impose additional checks on the eligibility and identity of overseas military and expatriate citizens. (Since 2016, overseas citizens make up a larger share from the combined cohort than overseas military members and their families; this may lead Republicans to believe that the overseas population favors the Democrats.) A federal judge dismissed the suit on Tuesday and criticized members of Congress for filing the lawsuit so close to Election Day. The plaintiffs “provide no good excuse for waiting until barely a month before the election to bring this suit,” the judge wrote. Other judges dismissed comparable lawsuits in Michigan and North Carolina regarding overseas voters in the past month.

In both Nevada and Michigan, the RNC has argued that voting rolls are filled with ineligible voters who can vote on Election Day, which dilutes the views of real voters. Those cases were dismissed in October, but a similar case challenging voter rolls was filed in Arizona by 1789 Foundation, a right-wing group led by a lawyer known for lawsuits opposing vaccination mandates. On Oct. 30, long after the 90-day window for removing voters had passed, the group alleged that Arizona is allowing up to 1.2 million ineligible voters to remain illegally on its rolls. That case is ongoing.

While unlikely to work on a large scale, this legal attack can still have an impact. By filing lawsuits alleging improper maintenance of voter rolls or illegal election procedures, plaintiffs require already overworked election officials to spend time proving the lawsuits are without merit.

The lawsuits also give the systemic election fraud conspiracy a false sense of credibility. People who are incredibly unfamiliar with the legal system may be inclined to think that a legal complaint has merit just because it was filed in court and fail to understand that people can claim almost anything in lawsuits.

Nor is it implausible that plaintiffs could find a court that would accept their theories, no matter how legally flawed or politically motivated.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court suggested it was open to questionable arguments when it overthrow decisions of two lower courts and allowed Republican leaders in Virginia to continue (at least temporarily) efforts to remove 1,600 people from its voter rolls. This is apparently at odds with the 90-day window before an election in which federal law prohibits states from altering these lists.

The Supreme Court did not provide a justification for this decisionfrom which the court’s three liberal justices dissented.

The presidential campaigns are unlikely to be fully settled when the polls close on Tuesday. If the legal tussle is anything like 2020 – and there is ample evidence to suggest it could be worse – the courts will have the opportunity to vote on electoral issues as well.