As Republicans prepare to contest election, Democrats play defense

By Luc Cohen

(Reuters) - Republicans and their allies are preparing to contest the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election, filing lawsuits state-by-state to challenge potential losses and forcing Democrats into a defensive posture for fear of post-vote chaos.

"The 2020 election was free, fair, and secure, and Democrats are making sure that 2024 is the same," the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said in a statement on Tuesday.

Republicans are involved in 130 lawsuits they say aim to make sure votes are counted properly and that people don't vote illegally, after then-President Donald Trump in 2020 falsely claimed his defeat to President Joe Biden was marred by fraud.

Vice President Harris and Trump, the Republican former president are locked in a tight race, particularly in the seven swing states controlling 94 of the 270 Electoral College votes a candidate needs to win.

Democrats and their allies say their opponents' lawsuits aim to sow doubts about the legitimacy of the election after some 60 or so lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies following the 2020 vote failed to overturn his loss. 

Rather than counter with a similarly proactive legal campaign, Democrats are largely relying on existing systems to ensure a fair election while seeking to thwart perceived threats to voting access or certification procedures.

Democrats' comfort with the status quo stems in part from statewide officials responsible for elections in the battleground states having dismissed Trump's false fraud claims. These include governors, attorneys general and secretaries of state from both parties.

Unlike Republicans, Democrats broadly assert that election administration was fair in 2020 and likely will be so again. They have also been bolstered by expansions to mail-in and early voting in battleground states that will decide the election.

"Democrats, and groups favoring or aligned with Democrats, are mostly playing defense at the moment," said Justin Levitt, a former adviser to the Biden administration on voting access and a law professor at Loyola Marymount University. 

Democrats' strategy was on display on Monday when a state judge in Georgia said local officials have a duty to certify elections - a blow to a Republican county election administrator who had argued she had discretion if she had concerns with the process.

The Democratic National Committee had intervened, saying the case sought to convert the routine process of certification into a hunt for election irregularities.

"We have protected our elections from far-right Republicans trying to disrupt them," the Harris campaign said in a Tuesday statement on the Georgia decision.

In another case in Georgia, a judge on Tuesday temporarily halted a new rule passed by the state's conservative election board requiring poll workers to hand-count ballots. Democrats had argued the change would sow chaos and delay results.

And in Arizona, a judge on Oct. 11 rejected a conservative group's bid to force the state's largest county to do more extensive checks to make sure non-citizens were not on voter rolls. Democrats had sought to intervene in the case, calling the lawsuit "little more than political theater." 

Non-citizens already are barred from voting in the U.S. 

Claire Zunk, a Republican National Committee spokesperson, accused Democrats on Tuesday of scheming to dismantle election safeguards and said Republicans were committed to protecting every legal vote. 

In a statement Zunk said Republicans had secured important wins in voting-related cases, such as a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in August reviving proof of citizenship requirements for Arizona elections and a Georgia ruling last week denying a push by voting rights groups to extend the registration deadline due to hurricanes.  

CERTIFICATION BATTLES

Since the 2020 election, more than 30 local officials have refused to certify valid election results or threatened to do so, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning public policy institute.

But none of those efforts succeeded because state officials and courts intervened. 

In the 2022 midterm elections, for example, an Arizona state judge declared that the board of supervisors of conservative, rural Cochise County did not have the right to block certification, after Republican board members resisted due to concerns about voting machines, which the state disputed. 

In battleground states, judges may issue orders compelling reluctant local officials to certify election results, and those who refuse to do so can face civil or criminal penalties, according to the Brennan Center. 

"These state administrators are by and large nonpartisan, professional and competent," said Jennifer Victor, a political science professor at George Mason University in Virginia. "Democrats are depending on that."

(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Additional reporting by Jack Queen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Howard Goller)