DNC asks judges to dismiss RNC lawsuits in Michigan and Nevada, arguing they aim to sow distrust in 2024 election

CNN
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The Democratic National Committee is asking judges in Michigan and Nevada to dismiss “dangerous” and “flawed” lawsuits related to voter rolls and mail-in ballots that were launched by the Republican National Committee earlier this year. year. The DNC warns that the lawsuits represent former President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the American public’s confidence in the upcoming November elections.

The DNC on Monday filed three amicus briefs on behalf of Biden’s reelection campaign in the two swing states. The summaries, seen by CNN, attack the RNC’s lawsuits as being without merit and nothing less than political theater. They offer an early look at how the Biden campaign plans to try to resist what Democrats expect to be an onslaught of challenges to Republican election integrity this year.

Two RNC lawsuits — one in Michigan and one in Nevada — claim that the number of active voters in those states’ key counties is “suspiciously high” and seek to get election officials to cancel voter registrations. The DNC is also asking the court to dismiss a Republican challenge to guidance Michigan’s secretary of state gave local election officials to verify signatures on ballots.

“Donald Trump and the Republicans know they cannot win this election fairly and honestly, so they are reinforcing their 2020 losing playbook and targeting our voting rights and democracy. They will fail again,” Biden campaign spokesman Charles Lutvak said in a statement to CNN. “Our team is prepared and continues the fight for democracy, we are defending the right to free and fair elections against the Republicans’ trash lawsuits, and we will defeat Donald Trump once and for all in November.”

In Michigan, the DNC’s amicus brief in response to the election lawsuit states that after losing the 2020 presidential election, Republicans filed dozens of lawsuits seeking to invalidate the election results — including several in the Wolverine State — and lost.

“This case fits into that dangerous pattern of unsubstantiated election-related allegations that only serve to undermine public confidence in the electoral process,” the document on the RNC lawsuit says. “In reality, the greatest threat to public confidence in the integrity of our elections is not fraud or the maintenance of voter rolls, but rather baseless attacks on the elections themselves.”

Similarly, in Nevada, the DNC document says the Republican process there is “designed less to resolve any real (much less substantial) problems with Nevada’s voter registration lists than to sow public distrust in the security and integrity of our electoral systems.”

“This lawsuit is not intended to protect the integrity of the upcoming election, but rather to provide the RNC with ammunition to undermine the results of the general election,” the document says. “In fact, former President Trump is already asserting interference in the 2024 general election, months before a single vote is cast or counted.”

Biden’s re-election campaign has been building a legal team and infrastructure over the past year to counter Republican efforts to question election integrity.

Biden campaign officials told CNN they see Republicans this year as trying to reuse a 2020 playbook of casting doubt and sowing distrust about the election results — and doing so well before the first votes are even cast. And this time, the campaign argues, Republicans are acting even earlier in the election cycle and with more force.

The RNC has also pursued an aggressive legal strategy and officials say it has become involved in more than 80 election-related lawsuits, including litigation in Nevada and Michigan seeking to cancel voter registrations ahead of the November elections.

Top election officials in Nevada and Michigan — both Democrats — have argued that these lawsuits are baseless.

Critics say Republicans are relying on a flawed formula to arrive at their claim that states’ voter rolls are bloated. Their court cases compare current voter roll numbers with population estimates from an ongoing survey conducted by the Census Bureau – a survey looking at a five-year period that began several years ago. In a letter to RNC lawyers last year, an official from the Nevada Attorney General’s office defended the state’s maintenance of voter records and called the party’s methodology akin to “comparing apples to orangutans.”

In Michigan, a lawsuit filed by the RNC and other Republican groups accuses Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson of “quietly” issuing guidance that instructed election officials to apply a “presumption of validity” when verifying voters’ signatures on absentee ballots. returned with signatures on file with local election offices.

In its Monday order, the DNC argues that Benson’s guidance is consistent with Michigan law and makes clear that officials must review all signatures.

Some of the RNC’s recent litigation has particularly targeted mail-in voting and voting by mail — which Trump has baselessly argued corrupts elections.

In addition to Michigan’s signature verification challenge, for example, a separate lawsuit filed last week by the RNC and the Trump campaign targets Nevada’s mail-in voting law and seeks to block the counting of any votes received after the day of the election.

This process focuses on the state’s vote-by-mail law, enacted in 2021. Nevada allows the counting of ballots received up to four days after the election if they are postmarked by Election Day, or received up to three days later if the date of postmark cannot be determined.

The Republican lawsuit claims that counting these ballots “dilutes” what it says are “honest votes” and “disproportionately harms” GOP candidates and voters because Democrats are more likely than Republicans in the state to vote by mail.

The RNC also sued to overturn a Mississippi law that allows votes received after the election to be counted. In total, 19 states allow the counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Trump, as his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, engineered a takeover of the RNC in March, installing a new chairman, Michael Whatley, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as party co-chair. Over the weekend, another recent hire, Charlie Spies, resigned as the RNC’s top lawyer — just two months after taking the role.

Spies and the RNC cited potential time conflicts with Spies’ commitments to his law firm clients as the reason for his departure.

Sources told CNN that Trump became unhappy with Spies, a veteran GOP election lawyer, after Trump allies pointed to clips of Spies criticizing false claims of a stolen 2020 election.

In a Sunday interview with Fox News, Lara Trump called the recent Nevada litigation over mail-in ballots “one of the many processes that we have going on in this country to make sure that… we have free, fair and transparent elections.”