How Courts Are Impacting 2024 Election: Philadelphia Must Count Undated Mail-In Ballots, Court Says

Topline

A Pennsylvania state court ruled Wednesday that not counting undated mail-in ballots violates the battleground state's Constitution—though the ruling right now only applies in Philadelphia—as courts across the country are issuing a flurry of last-minute rulings on ballots and how elections are run as parties seek to expand or limit voter access.

What To Watch For

There are many outstanding cases that still have to be decided by Election Day, with Marc Elias, a voting rights attorney aligned with the Democratic Party, reporting Sunday that 199 cases are pending in 40 states. The RNC has filed numerous lawsuits taking aim at voting practices, including alleging Fulton County, Georgia, did not hire enough Republican poll workers, and Virginia has appealed the ruling on its voter rolls to the Supreme Court . More lawsuits are also likely to be filed and rapidly decided in the week before Election Day.

What We Don't Know

What will happen after Election Day. Close election results in any battleground state could prompt a slew of lawsuits over how ballots are counted and the election results, as happened in 2020 when the Trump campaign launched a wide-ranging legal campaign challenging the vote count. Battleground states are already preparing for an anticipated onslaught of post-election lawsuits, Reuters reports , with Arizona's court system ordering judges to prioritize election lawsuits so that certification doesn't get delayed. Republican and Democratic campaigns are also gearing up for a busy legal landscape: An RNC official told ABC News the party has 5,000 volunteer attorneys ready to be deployed on Election Day, and ABC cited an internal memo from Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign that claims it is "the most prepared campaign in history for what we face" in terms of litigation.

Chief Critic

Democrats have heavily criticized Republicans for the rash of lawsuits they've brought ahead of Election Day and are likely to continue filing, arguing the GOP is trying to sow doubt in the election results even before they've come in. "We're seeing a record number of lawsuits filed before the election—nearly every day—in a seemingly coordinated push to use the legitimacy of the courts to lay the groundwork for discrediting an unfavorable result," Wendy Weiser, director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Democracy Program, told ABC News. "The lawsuits are not about getting legal relief, but about spreading conspiracy theories." Many of the GOP lawsuits that have been brought are based on concerns about election irregularities or fraud, such as noncitizen voting or mail-in ballots , even though evidence has shown election fraud is exceedingly rare and there is no evidence of any widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Key Background

Republicans have ramped up legal challenges and tightened voting rules since the 2020 election. Trump and his allies filed at least 60 lawsuits challenging the vote count in 2020 as the then-president made baseless allegations of fraud, and Republicans have used Trump's fraud allegations as an underpinning for their litigation challenging voting rules. GOP-led states have also pointed to Trump's baseless claims to justify enacting their own tighter restrictions on voting ahead of the 2024 election, which Democrats have then challenged in court. The RNC announced in April it intended to make its litigation efforts a key part of its strategy in the general election, launching an extensive "election integrity" effort with 100,000 staffers and volunteers. Chief Counsel Charlie Spies said in a statement the "RNC legal team will be working tirelessly to ensure that elections officials follow the rules" and "will aggressively take them to court if they don't."

How Courts Are Impacting 2024 Election: Philadelphia Must Count Undated Mail-In Ballots, Court Says

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