David Becker:

I think we’ve seen a lot of lawsuits before the election. It’s very likely that this will be the biggest run-up to the election we’ve ever seen.

And we need to put this in context. In 2020, there were many pre-election lawsuits attempting to clarify the rules, especially changes to adjustments made due to COVID. And it should be noted that Republicans won about 85 percent of primaries in 2020.

In the 2024 election, we’re seeing a number of cases like this, we’re trying to clarify the rules, but we’re seeing the Republicans making a lot more last-minute changes, and we’re seeing them losing the majority of the time. We see things like things coming up about the electoral rolls that they’ve known about for days, weeks, months, years and that they could have brought at any time.

We see challenges to mail-in voting laws, which in some cases have existed for decades in states like Nevada. And then we see challenges to even military and foreign voting procedures that have been in place in some cases for forty years.

So these types of cases have been dismissed by courts, even by judges appointed by former President Trump himself. And then we move on to the post-election period. We’ll have to see what happens, of course.

In very close elections, legitimate lawsuits can be filed. Think of Florida 2000, when it’s so close, hundreds of votes. But when we see elections decided by margins, as we saw in 2020, it is very, very unlikely that any post-election lawsuits will succeed.

And that’s largely because the trailing candidate still has to provide evidence that he or she can somehow make up the margin. And once you have more than a few hundred votes, that’s almost impossible.