• The 2024 election is already the most hotly contested election in American history.
• Republicans and Democrats have been involved in a slew of lawsuits leading up to the election.
• Trump’s allies are waging most of the legal battles, and experts expect more to follow after the election.

With the 2024 US presidential election just a day away, the high-stakes race is already the most hotly contested in modern US history.

Republican allies of former President Donald Trump and Democratic allies of Vice President Kamala Harris have been involved in a barrage of lawsuits before the election for months, with Republicans mounting the bulk of the legal challenges in key battleground states. And while pre-election lawsuits may not feel like a fundamental part of the US Democratic presidential campaign, the 2024 cycle has shown that this is an important political strategy.

“Probably the most disheartening 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 law firm Sandler Reiff Lamb in Washington, DC. Rosenstein and Birkenstock.

“It’s gamesmanship,” said Young, who said litigation has “become part of the political strategy.”

“It is in some ways a prelude to post-election challenges, where the political message has been garbled along with the lawsuits,” he added.

Legal experts told Business Insider that some of the lawsuits filed by Republicans could set the stage for potential lawsuits after the Nov. 5 election.

But it all really depends on how close the election is between Trump and Harris, the experts said. National polls suggest the race for the White House will be tight.

The Republican National Committee said the party’s “election integrity” operation, announced earlier this year during the Trump campaign, has been involved in 130 lawsuits in 26 states this election cycle.

Many of the lawsuits concern the handling of mail-in votes, foreign ballots and voter rolls. The Democrats have intervened in a whole series of these.

When the RNC announced its “election integrity” program in April, it said it would deploy more than 100,000 volunteers and advocates across all battleground states.

“This gives voters confidence that their ballot will be counted correctly, and in turn boosts turnout,” Claire Zunk, a spokesperson for the RNC, said in a statement to BI. “While Democrats continue to meddle in our elections and dismantle election guarantees, we are protecting the vote for all Americans.”

The Trump campaign declined to comment for this story and referred BI to Zunk’s statement. Harris’ campaign referred BI to an earlier interview with a campaign spokesperson in which the litigation strategy was discussed.

According to Harris campaign memo, the Republican lawsuits are intended to ‘sow doubt’

Harris campaign officials said in a recent memo to “interested parties” that Republicans’ lawsuits are “part of an effort to sow doubt” about the results of the 2024 election.

“Trump Republicans believe they have a better chance of winning if fewer people vote and fewer votes are counted. That is why they are spreading disinformation and filing dozens of baseless lawsuits in an obvious attempt to suppress voter turnout,” said the Oct. 11 memo obtained by Business. says insider.

The memo was written by Dana Remus, President Joe Biden’s former counsel who now heads the Harris campaign’s legal team, and Monica Guardiola, acting co-executive director of the Democratic National Committee.

It says Democrats “are prepared and enter this final stretch with a playbook to protect the integrity of our elections – before and after November 5.”

Democrats, they say, have already intervened in “dozens of baseless Republican lawsuits to debunk their lies and defeat them in court.”

The DNC and the Harris campaign have won 15 legal victories in the past three weeks, largely after intervening in lawsuits brought by Republicans, the campaign told BI.

The memo states that the upcoming election is already the “most contested election in American history,” but that the campaign is the best prepared.

The 2020 general election was previously the most litigious election in modern history.

In the two-month period between November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021, plaintiffs filed 82 lawsuits in 10 states and the District of Columbia, according to an analysis of post-election disputes by the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.

The American Bar Association said fewer than 40 pre-election lawsuits were filed before Election Day 2020.

As of Nov. 1, a record 203 voting and election cases are pending in 40 states, with 25 lawsuits filed in the state of Georgia alone, said Democratic election attorney Marc Elias, who is also part of the Harris campaign’s legal team . X.

And more are expected.

The Republican legal strategy is better organized than in 2020

In recent weeks, Republicans have suffered a series of legislative losses, but have also achieved some successes.

A federal judge in the swing state of Pennsylvania last month dismissed a lawsuit filed by a group of Republican members of Congress seeking new verification requirements related to overseas and military ballots. Judges in the swing states of Michigan and North Carolina also recently dismissed RNC challenges to overseas voting.

The RNC pointed BI to nine recent legal victories, including a ruling by a panel of Trump-appointed judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found Mississippi’s law on counting properly postmarked mail-in ballots received after Election Day violated federal law.

Young, an election law expert, called the wave of lawsuits “part of the political message.”

“The Republican litigation strategy does not appear to follow any specific rules, but is really an attempt to throw everything at the wall and see if anything sticks,” he said.

However, Republicans’ 2024 litigation strategy appears much more organized than in 2020, when Trump and his allies filed more than 60 voter fraud lawsuits after Election Day in failed attempts to challenge the results, said Sophia Lin Lakin, a voting rights attorney at the Republican party. American Union for Civil Liberties. The ACLU is involved in dozens of election-related lawsuits.

“In 2020, it felt sloppy and very reactive and improvisational,” Lakin said, adding that Republicans’ efforts now seem more strategic and focused on building a “narrative foundation.”

Jason Torchinsky, a partner at law firm Holtzman Vogel and Republican election attorney, told BI that filing lawsuits before the election is an effective strategy.

“Pre-election litigation to establish ground rules is often much more successful than post-election litigation,” Torchinsky said. “The courts are very reluctant to give the impression that they determine the outcome of the election.”

During a Zoom panel discussion last week, Elias warned that there could be a “period of uncertainty” after Election Day.

‘But to be honest, there have been periods of uncertainty for years after the elections. People are just getting more concerned about it now,” he said.

“So I think when people vote, they should have confidence that the process will almost certainly go well,” he said.