GOP prepared for pivotal court battles that could decide 2024 election
The Republican Party is determined not to be outmanned in the courts regarding the 2024 elections, with GOP leaders leaning heavily on a new, litigation-focused "election integrity" effort launched earlier this year in a bid to avoid many of the same pitfalls as 2020.
The two-pronged effort seeks to improve the GOP ground game across the country, both by recruiting and training poll observers and by adding more transparency to the voting process, senior Republican Party officials told Fox News Digital in an interview.
To date, they have recruited some 230,000 volunteers across the country, RNC officials said, including 5,000 lawyers concentrated primarily in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
On the eve of Election Day, it is the lawyers whose talents could be especially useful in the days and weeks to come.
SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS PENNSYLVANIA PROVISIONAL BALLOT RULING, IN A MAJOR LOSS FOR GOP
That is because the second half of the election integrity push focuses on litigation. Some of the lawsuits are aimed at ensuring "poll worker parity" and access for Republican observers at many election sites across the country, senior party officials told Fox News Digital.
However, they have also filed dozens of lawsuits aimed at cracking down on voter identification laws, tightening citizenship verification standards and adding new requirements for mail-in ballots and provisional ballots accepted by various states.
The Republican Party has been especially aggressive in filing these pre-election lawsuits, which officials describe as helping "set the rules of the road in key swing states."
As of this writing, party officials said they have filed more than 130 lawsuits—the vast majority of the roughly 200 election-related lawsuits in the 2024 election.
While the flurry of GOP-led lawsuits have dominated headlines in the final race to Election Day—primarily in the seven swing states considered to hold outsize importance in determining the next president— Republican Party officials pointed to courtroom victories won as early as this summer as some of their biggest achievements.
One example was the RNC's successful lawsuit against the city of Detroit in August.
The RNC had sued to add more Republican election inspectors to the city’s 300-plus voting precincts, citing a "7.5-to-one" ratio of Democrat inspectors to Republican inspectors. Republicans successfully argued that the disparity ran afoul of state law, which requires "an equal number, as nearly as possible" of election officials from both major political parties. More Republican observers were added as a result.
A more recent win occurred last week in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where a judge sided with the GOP's request to extend early voting deadlines from Tuesday, Nov. 5, to Friday, Nov. 8.
BEHIND-THE-SCENES BATTLES: LEGAL CHALLENGES THAT COULD IMPACT THE VOTE BEFORE ELECTION DAY BEGINS
Republican officials have touted success in achieving more transparency in state elections.
"We really view this as making America's elections run in a transparent and trustworthy way. And that's a net positive for everyone in this country, regardless of Republican or Democrat [party affiliation]," a senior RNC official told Fox News Digital in an interview.
Still, on the eve of Election Day, it remains to be seen whether these efforts will have accomplished their stated goal of establishing more trust in U.S. elections.
That is because the concept of "election security" not only requires certain safeguards to be placed around the voter registration and ballot-casting process, but also that the voters themselves then trust the results of the vote as legitimate.
A fresh AP-NORC poll found that Democrats are far more likely than their Republican counterparts to express confidence in the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
The poll found that while 71% of registered Democratic voters said they have "a great deal" of confidence in the national election outcome, just one-third of their Republican counterparts, or 24%, reported the same.
SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS PENNSYLVANIA PROVISIONAL BALLOT RULING, IN A MAJOR LOSS FOR GOP
While some of these lawsuits could be used by the RNC as a pretext to challenge the outcome of certain states after Election Day, legal experts said it is unclear what impact any of these legal challenges could have in contesting the results — even if the outcome in certain states is just as close as expected in a neck-and-neck election.
Courts are highly disinclined to take up cases after Election Day, Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, told Fox News in an interview.
"We want to have the game be fair, in the sense that there's bright lines way before you ever get to Election Day," McCarthy said. "So everybody has their eyes open about what the rules are."
"It's really hard to get a court to involve itself after an election has taken place and where they're in a position of potentially changing the outcome of the election," he added.
That is especially true of the nation's top court, Trey Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor and member of Congress, told Fox News Digital in an interview.
"I think the Supreme Court is very wary of being drawn into overtly political fights," he said.