Kaelan Deese of the Washington Examiner reports on the potential impact of election-related lawsuits in key states.
The 2024 presidential election will likely be decided by a handful of swing states, where judicial activists on both sides of the political aisle have been busy in court trying to alter the rules for a key method of casting ballots: mail-in voting.
In 2020, states across the partisan spectrum altered their voting policies to provide more options at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many states relaxed the rules for voting by mail, and some sent absentee ballot or ballot applications to all registered voters. Ballot drop boxes were installed in nearly 40 states, others established curbside voting options, and some counted ballots received after Election Day so long as they were postmarked by the date.
Former President Donald Trump, who is heading into a rematch against President Joe Biden, blamed much of his failure to win a second term on the sweeping changes to voting procedures across the country. He accused mail-in voting of contributing to election fraud, which conditioned his supporters to distrust those methods.
Yet Trump and other ranking Republican officials this cycle have encouraged his supporters more than ever to take full advantage of any and all alternatives to voting in-person, including early voting and casting ballots by mail.
“If we swamp them with votes they can’t cheat,” the campaign said in a press release in early June. “You need to make a plan, register, and vote any way possible. We have got to get your vote.”
With nearly every possible voting method now endorsed by the Trump campaign, lawsuits backed by conservative voter integrity groups are still underway in key swing states. But rather than filing lawsuits to block alternative voting methods, these suits take aim at what these groups consider dubious rules, such as relaxed instructions for verifying ballot signatures and outdoor ballot drop boxes.
