Election lawsuits filed in several states could be a way to challenge the presidential election

Even before voters can begin casting their ballots, Democrats and Republicans are already embroiled in a major legal battle over how the 2024 election will be conducted. If the outcome is close, these disputes could even continue beyond Election Day.

Both parties have beefed up their legal teams for the fight. Republicans have filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of the voting process after being repeatedly rebuked by judges in 2020 for filing complaints that the election was not held until after the votes had been counted.

After Donald Trump made “election integrity” a central part of the party platform following his false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020, the Republican National Committee says it has more than 165,000 volunteers ready to monitor the November election.

The Democrats are countering with what they call “voter protection.” They are rushing to court to defend themselves against Republican lawsuits and are putting together their own team for November with more than 100 employees, several hundred lawyers and, they say, thousands of volunteers.

Despite the large number of court cases, most of them were relatively small cases that are unlikely to have much impact on most voters.

“When you can spend so much money on litigation, you end up litigating fewer and fewer things that don't matter,” says Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame.

The stakes would rise dramatically if Trump lost the election and then tried to overturn the result. That's exactly what he tried to do in 2020, but the courts rejected him across the board. Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits trying to overturn President Joe Biden's victory.

Whether they could succeed this year depends on the election results, experts said. A gap of around 10,000 votes – about the same as that which separated Biden and Trump in Arizona and Georgia four years ago – is unlikely to be closed by court proceedings. A narrower gap of a few hundred votes, such as the 547-vote gap between George W. Bush and Al Gore in Florida in 2000, depends much more on court rulings about which ballots are legitimate.

“If he loses, he'll say he won. That goes without saying,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said of Trump. “If it looks like it did last time … then I expect we'll see the same thing.”

Trump has done nothing to dispel that expectation as he tries to return to the White House. He has said he would only accept the election results if they were “free and fair,” raising the possibility that they will not be, which he continues to falsely claim and did in 2020. He also continued to insist that he could only lose because of voter fraud.

“The only way they can beat us is by cheating,” Trump said at a rally in Las Vegas in June.

To be clear, there was no widespread voter fraud in 2020 or any election since. Audits, recounts and audits in the swing states where Trump contested his defeat four years ago all confirmed that Biden won, and Trump's own attorney general said there was no evidence that voter fraud influenced the election.

Trump appointed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, which then appointed attorney Christina Bobb to head its election integrity division. Bobb is a former reporter for the conservative One America News Network and was indicted by the Arizona attorney general for her role in efforts to promote a slate of Trump electors in the state, even though Biden won.

The RNC echoed the words of its presidential candidate and said it was trying to counteract the Democrats' mischief.

“President Trump's election integrity efforts are aimed at protecting every legal vote, mitigating threats to the electoral process and securing the election,” RNC spokeswoman Claire Zunk said in a statement. “As Democrats continue their election tampering against President Trump and the American people, our operation is standing up to their plans and preparing for November.”

This time, Democrats say they are prepared for anything Trump and the RNC might do.

“For four years, Donald Trump and his MAGA allies have been plotting to sow distrust in our elections and undermine our democracy so that they can cry foul if they lose,” said Jen O'Malley Dillon, campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris, in a statement. “But Democrats have also been preparing for this moment for four years, and we are prepared for anything.”

The most spectacular legal battle to date took place in Georgia. It was about new rules by a Republican-appointed majority on the Georgia State Board of Elections that are reminiscent of the former president's conspiracy theories about 2020. The rules could allow members of local election committees to refuse to certify elections. Trump supporters have already tried unsuccessfully to use this to reverse their defeats in 2020 and 2022.