Trump has signaled that if he loses the Nov. 5 election, he will not accept the results, telling a September rally in Michigan, "That's the only way we're gonna lose, because they cheat." At this point, Republicans are involved in more than 125 lawsuits they say are meant to ensure votes are counted properly and that people don't vote illegally.
The Republican candidate and his allies have focused much of their pre-election messaging this year on unsupported claims that Democrats are encouraging noncitizens to illegally cast votes. Republicans say that even one illegally cast ballot effectively disenfranchises a citizen voting legally. But it is already illegal for people who are not U.S. citizens to vote, and independent and government reviews have shown it happens only very rarely.
Nonetheless, claims have fueled a wave of state-level actions driven by Republican officials aimed at challenging voter registrations of suspected noncitizens. Just this week Texas sued the federal government, saying it needed help in verifying the citizenship of 450,000 of its 17.9 million registered voters.
Trump allies have also challenged rules around voting and vote counting, most prominently when a Republican-dominated Georgia election board sought to mandate the counting of ballots by hand in the state. The change was challenged by voting rights advocates, who said it would have added undue chaos to the process, and a decision by the state's highest court this week effectively blocked the rule from taking effect this year.
Democrats, meanwhile, have not launched their own preemptive legal strikes aimed at supporting Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign, instead saying that they mean to rely on existing legal systems to ensure votes are counted properly, and to be ready to play a lot of defense to respond to new lawsuits that pop up in November and December.
States are also acting preemptively to try to dissuade lower-level election officials who might try to delay certification of results or take other actions to change the vote's outcome. States this year have investigated, indicted and even jailed officials who tried to interfere with the vote or delay certification.
A series of critical post-election deadlines could become the subjects of legal battles. They include Dec. 11, when states are required to certify the electors who will cast ballots formally recognizing the election outcome on Dec. 17; Jan. 6, when Congress meets to certify the election outcome – the date of the 2020 U.S. Capitol assault by Trump supporters – and Jan. 20, when the new president is inaugurated.
With opinion polls showing a very close race both nationally and in the seven swing states expected to determine the election's outcome, and polling showing about 72% of Republicans believing that voter fraud is a widespread problem, a fresh wave of post-election legal battles could set the stage for another winter of election discontent.
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