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Hanging chads. Fake electors. “Reasonable inquiries” before certification of votes.
Closely fought presidential elections often introduce us to aspects of the electoral process — whether lawful or not — that few of us can anticipate.
And sometimes, the developments we think could derail the entire election fizzle out. For example, thanks to the Georgia Supreme Court, the effort to delay vote certification — or even the appointment of electors — through new rules from Georgia’s State Election Board has now sputtered.
But the GOP’s litigation strategy is both aggressive and multidimensional. And over the last week, we can see yet another way that Republicans are trying to change the outcomes of critical races well before votes are counted, much less cast. And that’s through a combination of:
- Implementing their own “voter roll maintenance” programs that, according to the Justice Department, violate federal law.
- Seeking court orders mandating that election officials remove allegedly “ineligible” voters from state and/or county registration lists.
- Trying to prevent citizens living abroad, including the spouses and children of service members, from voting at all.
So far, however, those tactics have backfired.
Last week in Alabama, for instance, the Justice Department obtained a preliminary injunction preventing Secretary of State Wes Allen from implementing a “purge program” to remove purported “noncitizen” voters from his state’s rolls less than 90 days before the election, in violation of the National Voter Registration Act.
As a result of the DOJ’s lawsuit, not only is Allen prohibited from systematically purging voters, he also must help restore more than 3,000 Alabama voters who had been inactivated through his program. The Justice Department has brought a similar lawsuit in Virginia, with a preliminary injunction hearing expected later this week.
But more significantly, with less than two weeks to go before Election Day, Republicans have suffered a series of courtroom losses over their voter “purge” efforts in swing states. The timing of these cases suggests the GOP never expected to win; rather, these lawsuits function more like news releases designed to sow doubt and create the space for voter fraud narratives yet to be constructed. And that’s why it’s almost more important that courts have shut them down now.
Consider these developments over just the past week:
- On Tuesday in Michigan, a federal court dismissed the Republican National Committee’s lawsuit against Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and the state’s highest-ranking elections administrator for allegedly failing to make “reasonable efforts” to remove ineligible voters under the National Voter Registration Act. The court not only found that the RNC had identified nothing more than a speculative injury, but also that the committee had not identified a single ineligible voter — and instead had merely contended that Michigan’s number of registered voters was “impossibly high.”
- On Monday in North Carolina, a state judge denied an “emergency” bid by the RNC and the state GOP to exclude overseas voters born abroad to parents or guardians who last lived in North Carolina. The plaintiffs charged that the state law at issue, a provision of the Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act, was “being misinterpreted by the State Board of Elections so as [to] permit the registration of non-residents” to vote unconstitutionally. But in denying relief, the court noted that the statute at issue was enacted with bipartisan support more than a decade ago — and said the parties offered “no substantial evidence of any instance where the harm that plaintiffs seek to prevent has ever ‘fraudulently’ occurred.”
- And last week in Nevada, a federal court dismissed a lawsuit by the RNC and the state Republican Party alleging that Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar and multiple county clerks had failed to make reasonable efforts to conduct voter roll maintenance as required by federal law. Specifically, the RNC and the state party claimed that inadequately culled Nevada voter rolls have forced them to “divert resources away from ... voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts” and instead chase mail ballots of eligible voters; monitor Nevada elections “for fraud and abuse”; and educate the public about “election-integrity issues,” among other activities. But the court found that those “vague allegations of shifting resources” were not enough to demonstrate that the parties had suffered actual, nonspeculative injuries, especially now that the supervising appeals court has held that organizations “can no longer spend their way into standing” to maintain lawsuits.
To be fair, these decisions are not necessarily the final results. Republicans have already appealed the North Carolina ruling — and the Nevada court has allowed the RNC and the Nevada GOP to take another shot at establishing standing by filing a further amended complaint.
But to date, no court has sanctioned these Republican Party efforts to force voter purges. And that’s a spot of good legal news as the so-called litigation election nears.