While preelection litigation might not feel essential democratic presidential elections, they’re becoming a keystone political strategy.
With the 2024 US presidential election just days away, the high-stakes race is already the most litigated in modern American history.
For months, Republican allies of former President Donald Trump and Democratic allies of Vice President Kamala Harris, have been involved in a barrage of pre-election lawsuits, with Republicans waging the majority of the legal challenges in key battleground ground states. And while preelection litigation might not feel like a fundamental part of democratic presidential elections in the US, the 2024 cycle has proved it to be a keystone political strategy.
“Probably the most discouraging part of this whole litigation experiment is that it has little or no connection to democracy and credible elections”, said John Hardin Young, an election law expert and senior counsel at the Washington, DC, law firm Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock.
“It’s gamesmanship”, said Young, who said litigation has “become part of the political strategy.”
“It’s, in a way, a prelude to postelection challenges where the political message has been mangled together with the litigation”, he added.
Legal experts told Business Insider some of the lawsuits brought by Republicans could set the stage for potential court challenges after the election on November 5.
But it all really depends on how close the election between Trump and Harris is, the experts said. National polls suggest the race for the White House will be a tight one.
The Republican National Committee said that the party’s “election integrity” operation, announced earlier this year with the Trump campaign, has been involved in 130 lawsuits across 26 states this election cycle.
Many of the lawsuits center on the handling of mail-in voting, overseas ballots, and voter rolls. Democrats have intervened in a slew of them.
When the RNC announced the “election integrity” program back in April, it said it would deploy more than 100,000 volunteers and attorneys across all battleground states.
“This gives voters confidence that their ballot will be counted properly, and in turn, inspires voter turnout”, RNC spokeswoman Claire Zunk told BI in a statement. “While Democrats continue to interfere in our election and dismantle election safeguards, we are protecting the vote for all Americans.”
The Trump campaign declined to comment for this story, referring BI to Zunk’s statement. Harris’ campaign referred BI to a previous interview with a campaign spokesperson discussing litigation strategy.
