RNC officials say they’ve filed over a hundred lawsuits regarding the presidential election across 26 states in recent months—a daunting amount that has in turn required an “unprecedented” number of lawyers being called into action to argue both sides.
The vast majority of lawsuits filed by the RNC legal team have sought to change vote-counting rules, limit ballot access, or allege voter fraud—potentially providing Donald Trump a roadmap to contest the election’s outcome should he lose next week.
Democrats have countered in court and filed lawsuits of their own—though far fewer than their political opponents—to expand voter access and to prevent last-second changes in how states count their ballots.
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Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told ABC News that new lawsuits are being filed nearly everyday. She described the GOP’s effort as a “coordinated push to use the legitimacy of the courts to lay the groundwork for discrediting an unfavorable result.”
“The lawsuits are not about getting legal relief, but about spreading conspiracy theories,” she alleged.
While the lawsuits may cast doubt on the integrity of the election, the RNC’s legal team is yet to have score a serious breakthrough in court, says Leah Tulin, an election law expert at New York University’s law school.
“If we measure success in terms of favorable results or winning lawsuits, the effort has been basically a total failure,” she told CNN.
What the lawsuits have been successful at, however, is grabbing headlines in the states where they were filed. That publicity may be weaponized by Trump if he tries to allege election fraud in the event he loses. Danielle Lang, the senior director of the voting rights unit at the Campaign Legal Center, called that hypothetical “really troubling.”
“A lot of this litigation is, quite frankly, not designed to succeed,” Lang told NBC News of Republican efforts in court. “It’s just designed to create confusion and chaos.”
Among the failed RNC-backed lawsuits was one that was shot down by a Pennsylvania judge on Wednesday. That ruling determined Philadelphia cannot refuse to count mail-in ballots that do not have a handwritten date on the envelope.
A U.S. district judge also ruled in Pennsylvania this week—in another defeat for Republicans—that overseas voters will be permitted to cast ballots with the same verification requirements as previous elections. The RNC had demanded that additional verification measures be required, but a judge said their request came too late in the electoral process.
The Nevada Supreme Court also handed down an unfavorable decision for the RNC this week, ruling Tuesday that the state will be permitted to count mail-in ballots without a postmark that arrive up to three days beyond Election Day.
In Virginia, a federal judge ruled Friday the commonwealth must restore more than 1,600 voters to its rolls after some had been wrongly removed for allegedly being non-citizens. The decision came after the Justice Department sued Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, for purging voter rolls too close to Election Day.
In Michigan, a federal judge threw out an RNC-led lawsuit that claimed the number of registered voters in the state was “impossibly high.” The lawsuit alleged Michigan wasn’t removing voters from their rolls as required, but a judge ruled there was not enough evidence for the lawsuit to stand.
Democrats have also filed lawsuits of their own. Those lawsuits, according to a NBC News review, have “focused mostly on expanding voting access by trying to extend registration deadlines or appealing for broader interpretations of laws about absentee ballots and voter identification.” A pair of those lawsuits, filed in Georgia, were to challenge election rule changes such as requiring Election Day ballots be counted by hand, both of which were ultimately blocked by judges.
The influx of lawsuits shouldn’t come as a surprise. The RNC and Trump’s campaign announced earlier this year they were launching an “election integrity” program that’d deploy 100,000 volunteers and attorneys to battleground states to implement a “proactive litigation effort.”
It’s unclear if the RNC has hit its lawyer and volunteer goals, but it said in a statement to ABC News that its operation is “unprecedented” and “is committed to defending the law and protecting every legal vote.”
On the other side, Harris’ legal team includes a group of six lawyers who have been dispatched to handle the growing number lawsuits related to the election. An internal memo sent within campaign—obtained by ABC News—said this election is “already the most litigated in American history.”
Maury Riggan, the general counsel for Harris’ campaign, told ABC News that they’ve been preparing for this sort of lawsuit influx since 2023.
“We’ve brainstormed the worst scenarios and are ready to go if we see them,” she said.
