Inside the Republican legal blitz to sow election doubt: ‘The claims are garbage’

Nearly four years after waging an aggressive legal effort to overturn the 2020 elections, Republicans have filed a slew of lawsuits that appear to be aimed at seeding doubt about the outcome of the 2024 race in the event of a Donald Trump loss.

From 2023 until September of this year, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and local affiliates have filed or are involved in at least 72 cases, according to an analysis by Democracy Docket, a left-leaning voting rights news platform founded by the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias. At the same point during the 2022 midterm election, Republicans had filed 41 lawsuits.

There's nothing unusual about an explosion of litigation over election rules ahead of a presidential election. But experts say what stands out this year isn't the volume of the cases but their subject matter.

Many of the lawsuits are based on a theory that states are not adequately maintaining their voter rolls and that there could be scores of ineligible voters, including non-citizens, on them. They make weak legal claims, election experts say, and instead appear to be more of a public relations effort to motivate Republican voters and echo Trump's falsehoods about voting.

"The underlying claims in the suits are based on totally unreliable data, shoddy methodology, and basically the claims are garbage," said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit group Protect Democracy. "They are also, in this case, brought by election deniers, in an attempt to spread a false narrative to mislead the public and undermine confidence in elections."

"If the fraud theme of 2020 was 'Covid is allowing ineligible people to vote or ballots to be manipulated', the 2024 theme seems to be 'illegals are voting', and that fits in very much with the kind of nativist anti-immigrant language coming from the top of the Republican ticket," said Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California Los Angeles.

In Nevada, a swing state, Republicans claimed in a suit filed in September there were nearly 4,000 non-citizens on the rolls who appear to have voted.