Democrats worry Republicans are planting seeds with legal suits to overturn a Trump defeat

WASHINGTON — Republicans are setting off a slew of legal fights in the battleground states ahead of the November election, raising suspicions among Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies that the underlying goal is to gin up doubts about the result if Donald Trump loses.

Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Election Board is trying to give local officials the power to decide on their own whether something untoward happened during the balloting, which could slow the process of identifying the winner.

In Michigan, Republicans are suing over whether the city of Detroit hired enough GOP poll workers, and in North Carolina, they’re alleging that the state’s voter rolls could allow noncitizens to vote.

All those claims look different on the surface. But the Harris campaign says there’s a pattern tying them together: Trump and his Republican allies want to sow confusion about the outcome should he lose. Democrats have submitted legal filings in at least one case that convey their misgivings about what they contend is the true purpose of the GOP litigation.

A defeated Trump could invoke the cases to revive his unfounded claim that election procedures are tainted in ways that should nullify the result, Harris campaign officials say. Trump and his allies filed dozens of unsuccessful cases after the 2020 election in a drumbeat of false claims of election fraud that culminated in a mob’s attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory.

“We believe that every case they’ve filed is a brick in the foundation of an argument that they will make in November to say that the election is rigged,” a Harris campaign official said on condition of anonymity. “That is fundamentally our view of what their litigation is about. That is why we are prepared, we are winning in court, and we will ensure this election is free and fair.”

The Trump campaign referred questions to the Republican National Committee.

A spokesperson for the RNC, Claire Zunk, said in a statement: “President Trump’s election integrity effort is dedicated to protecting every legal vote, mitigating threats to the voting process, and securing the election. While Democrats continue their election interference against President Trump and the American people, our operation is confronting their schemes and preparing for November.”

With rare exceptions, the two-month interregnum between the election and Inauguration Day tends to be quiet. That wasn’t the case in 2020, when Trump worked to overturn the result and remain in office.

He still faces federal criminal charges stemming from that quixotic effort. He has been indicted by special counsel Jack Smith on charges of trying to defraud the American public and disenfranchise voters across several states, but the trial has been delayed, and it is unlikely to take place before the election. Trump has denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty.

Both sides are girding for a contested postelection period. Chris LaCivita, a Trump co-campaign manager, suggested at a Politico event over the summer that Democrats could try to overturn the results if Trump wins: “It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath. It’s not over until then. It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day, because I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.”

Democrats began preparations years ago, with lawyers drafting briefs in anticipation that Republican officeholders might, for example, refuse to certify election results, a second Harris campaign official said.

“This is the most prepared that any Democratic campaign has been at this point, because we knew this was coming," the official said. "It’s critical to have these people in the states who know the law and the players and have lived through 2020, saw what happened there and learned from it.”

Among other legal challenges, Republicans have opposed Arizona’s election procedures manual and Nevada’s law allowing mail ballots to be counted after Election Day as long as they were postmarked beforehand.

Ground zero might be Georgia, a state that Biden narrowly won in 2020 and that Harris is aggressively working to hold. Trump faces criminal charges in Georgia over his efforts to overturn his defeat in the state four years ago. He has pleaded not guilty.

At issue this year is whether county election boards in Georgia are free to use their own discretion in certifying election results. The Republican-controlled State Election Board voted 3-2 last month to expand the powers of local officials, enabling them to certify results after having conducted a “reasonable inquiry” into their accuracy. There was no definition of what a "reasonable inquiry" entails.

Trump has praised the three Republicans who voted for the rules as “pit bulls” for honesty.

But Democrats caution that the new rules could disrupt the hard-and-fast timetable to certify elections in Georgia. Furthermore, local election boards have never had that kind of authority, and they are supposed to perform merely the straightforward task of adding up the vote totals, Democrats argue. If anyone alleges fraud occurred in an election, the proper place to test the claim is the courts, they add.

“If someone thinks that there’s a reason to throw out ballots, that’s a decision that’s made by the courts,” Sara Tindall Ghazal, the lone Democrat on the State Election Board, said in an interview. “That is not a decision made by a partisan body of civilians on election boards, many of whom have no background in any of this other than their partisan relationships."

Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former Biden White House official specializing in democracy and voting rights, said the role of a county election board is tantamount to simple addition.

"It's a process of saying 1 + 1 equals 2. It's not to say, '1 + 1 equals I don't know whether there are bamboo fibers in the ballots.' That's not what they [local election boards] are there for," he said, referring to a conspiracy theory that circulated in 2020 about fraudulent ballots from Asia.

The Democratic National Committee sued the board last week to block the new procedures from taking effect.

In its filing, the committee argued that the new rule would “introduce substantial uncertainty in the post-election process” and “invite chaos by establishing new processes at odds with existing statutory duties."

Both the Harris and the Trump campaigns are deploying ample legal muscle for the election and its aftermath. An RNC memo released in February said the committee was involved in 78 lawsuits in 23 states.

“Should the Democrats choose to continue their attacks on election safeguards through Election Day, we will be prepared to litigate and ensure the election is fair, transparent, legal, and accurate,” said Zunk, the RNC spokesperson.

The Harris campaign says it has retained hundreds of attorneys spread throughout the country to protect her legal interests. Heading the team’s legal election protection efforts is Dana Remus, Biden’s former White House counsel.

The campaign is getting some outside help, as well. Jim Messina, who managed Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, has started a political action committee that can raise unlimited sums of money and will also assist in courtroom efforts. Norm Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for Trump's first impeachment trial, is outside counsel to the group.

One casualty of contested election results is public confidence in the system, election experts warn. Voters come to feel democracy is broken and may react by either refusing to participate or lashing out in anger.

Trump has fed doubts about the trustworthiness of U.S. elections in both victory and defeat.

When he won in 2016, he claimed without basis that he had lost the popular vote only because millions of people voted illegally for his opponent, Hillary Clinton. And when he lost in 2020, he argued the election was “rigged” in Biden’s favor.

Though he lost California by more than 5 million votes that year, Trump said recently that he would win the state if Jesus Christ or, alternatively, an honest mortal were counting the votes.

“Trump said if it wasn’t for rigging, he would have won California. That’s like me saying if it wasn’t for rigging, I’d be a supermodel,” Messina said.

In the years since Trump has advanced erroneous claims of voter fraud, the partisan divide over election integrity has deepened. A poll conducted last year found that only 22% of Republicans were highly confident that the votes in the 2024 presidential election would be counted accurately, compared with 71% of Democrats.

“We already have members of the public who are 100% convinced that there’s no way possible to have free and fair elections in Georgia,” said Ghazal, the Georgia election board member.

Many of Trump’s supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 did so in the mistaken belief that he was robbed of victory in 2020. The first rioter to breach the building, Michael Sparks, told the judge at a hearing last week that he believes “to this day” that the election was stolen from Trump. Sparks was sentenced to more than four years in prison.

Some election experts fear that Trump’s voters are apt to resort to violence again if he loses in November.

“I’m worried about the potential for chaos,” Levitt said. “For people who are told the election is stolen, taking to the streets is very natural when you believe you have no power to affect the outcome peaceably.”