A leading company oriented to virtual transformation.
WASHINGTON (AP) – They fought in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania over the deadline for mail counting, and in North Carolina over witness requirements. Ohio is dealing with polling places while Texas faces a legal challenge during early voting days.
Measuring anxiety over the November election is like counting the large number of voting-related lawsuits filed across the country in recent months. The instances relate to the basics of the U. S. voting process, adding how ballots are issued and counted in an exclusive election through the coronavirus pandemic and through a president who refuses to devote himself to accepting the results.
The demands are all the more because President Donald Trump has raised the option of the election ending up in a Supreme Court with a decidedly Republican lean if his last candidate is confirmed.
“This is a president who has expressed his opposition to access to ballots by mail and who has also seemed almost foreshadowing the inevitability of this election being through the courts,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the National Committee of Lawyers for Civil Rights. . .
That opposition was expressed Tuesday in the first presidential debate when Trump introduced an extensive argument opposed to the vote by mail.
“This is going to be a fraud the likes of which has never been noticed before,” the president said of the big shift to voting by mail caused by the pandemic.
Prosecutions are a precursor to what will come next. Republicans say they have large law firms on a mandate, as well as thousands of volunteer lawyers ready. Democrats have announced a democratic heavyweight legal war room, adding a couple of former attorney generals and a former prosecutor. General.
The race is already the highest controversy in American history, largely due to the large expansion of mail and mail voting. Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, has documented some 260 coronavirus-like trials. is concerned in more than 40 cases, and an online page through a Chief Democratic Attorney lists active cases to monitor in about 15 states.
Democrats are focusing their efforts on 4 main areas: making sure mailings are loose, reforming signature matching laws, allowing third-party ballots, such as network organizations, to collect ballots, and making sure ballots carrying election day postmarks can count. they warn that the same demands open the door to voter fraud and confusion and oppose efforts to loosen regulations on how the electorate votes in November.
“We seek chaos in the process,” RNC leader Justin Riemer said in an interview. “Nothing creates more chaos than rewriting a lot of regulations at the last minute. “
But there were no general examples of voter fraud in the last presidential election, in 2016, when Trump said the contest would be manipulated and the Russians sought to meddle in the outcome.
Some of the disputes take place in states that are historically not electoral battlefields, such as Montana, where there is a very competitive contest by the United States Senate on the ballot.
But most of the most viewed instances are in states that are perceived as winners in 2020 and probably in the race.
On the North Carolina battlefield, where the electorate is already dealing with regulations requiring witnesses to point to postcards, the RNC and Trump’s crusade committee have filed lawsuits for new election rules that will correct ballots containing incomplete witness data without the electorate having to complete a new one. blank ballot.
In Iowa, the Trump crusade and Republican teams have won a series of radical legal victories in their attempts to restrict absentee voting, with making lawsuits that reject tens of thousands of mail-order calls in 3 counties. ratified a new Republican-backed law that will make it difficult for counties to process voting requests by mail.
Republican lawmakers on Monday asked the U. S. Supreme Court to suspend a ruling through the state’s highest court that extends the deadline for receiving and counting surveys by mail. The same ruling also rejected demands to allow the non-disabled electorate to mail their survey to another person for delivery, and to require counties to allow the electorate to resolve. Disqualification issues with your surveys.
Meanwhile, in federal court, Republicans are suing, among other things, deposit boxes or sites used to collect ballots by mail.
The Supreme Court itself has already been invited to worry in several cases, as it did in April, when conservative magistrates blocked Democrats’ efforts to make the number one absentee voter elections bigger.
Of course, there is a precedent for an election that ends in court: in 2000, the Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida and handed over the election to Republican George W. Bush.
Barry Richard, a Florida lawyer who rebuked Bush in the battle for the recount, said there was no guarantee that the Supreme Court would have to worry again, or that any trial in the election would present a compelling challenge that the court would have to resolve.
A significant difference between and today, he said, is that none of the applicants raised the possibility of not accepting the results.
“There was never a discussion in 2000 about the essential integrity of the system. None of the candidates challenged him,” Richard said, no one even said whether or not the missing candidate would settle for the effects of the election. . “