The Republican Party is determined not to be outdone in the courts regarding the 2024 election, with Republican leaders leaning heavily on a new lawsuit-focused “election integrity” effort launched earlier this year in an effort to avoid the same pitfalls as 2020. .
The bipartisan effort aims to improve the GOP ground game across the country, both through recruitment and training poll observers and adding more transparency to the voting process, senior Republican Party officials told Fox News Digital in an interview.
So far, they have recruited about 230,000 volunteers across the country, RNC officials said, including 5,000 attorneys concentrated mainly 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 particularly useful in the coming days and weeks.
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Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, speaks during a campaign rally at Santander Arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, on November 4, 2024. (REUTERS/Andrew Kelly)
That’s because the second half of election integrity focuses on lawsuits. Some of the lawsuits are targeted in ensuring “parity among poll watchers” 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 attacking voter identification laws, tightening citizenship verification standards and adding new requirements for mail-in ballots and provisional ballots sent by different states are accepted.
The Republican Party has been particularly aggressive in filing these lawsuits ahead of the election, which officials describe as helping “determine 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 during the 2024 election.
While the flurry of GOP-led lawsuits have dominated headlines in the final race to Election Day — especially in the seven swing states considered key in determining the next president — Republican Party officials pointed to courtroom victories they already won this summer had achieved as some of their greatest achievements.
An 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 more than 300 polling places, citing a 7.5-to-one ratio of Democratic inspectors to Republican inspectors. Republicans successfully argued that the disparity violated state law, which requires “an equal number, as many as possible” of election officials from both major political parties. As a result, more Republican observers joined.
A more recent victory occurred last week in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where a judge sided with the Republican Party to extend early voting deadlines from Tuesday, November 5 to Friday, November 8.
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Journalists work outside the US Supreme Court building in Washington, DC (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Republican officials have touted success in achieving greater transparency in state elections.
“We really see this as a way to conduct the American elections in a transparent and trustworthy manner. And that is 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 achieved their stated goal of building greater confidence in U.S. elections.
That’s because the concept of “election security” requires not only that certain safeguards be placed around voter registration and the voting process, but also that voters themselves trust the outcome of the vote as legitimate.
A fresh one AP-NORC poll found that Democrats are much 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 had “a lot” of confidence in the national election outcome, only a third of their Republican counterparts, or 24%, reported the same.
SUPREME COURT AFFIRMES PENNSYLVANIA’S PRELIMINARY VOTING DECISION, WITH A BIG LOSS FOR GOP
A person walks past the Montgomery County voters’ car on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024, in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Looking ahead
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 these legal challenges could have in challenging the results — even as the outcome in certain states is as close as expected in neck-and-neck elections.
Courts are very reluctant 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 the game to be fair in the sense that there are bright lines long before Election Day arrives,” McCarthy said. “So everyone has their eyes open about what the rules are.”
“It’s really difficult to get a court to get involved after an election has taken place and they’re in a position to potentially change the outcome of the election,” he added.
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That’s especially true of the nation’s highest court, Trey Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor and member of Congress, told Fox News Digital in an interview.
“I think the The Supreme Court is very wary from getting involved in openly political fights,” he said.
Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more on our Fox News Digital election hub.
Breanne Deppisch is a political reporter for Fox News Digital, covering the 2024 election and other national news.