‘The litigation election’: Trump and Harris teams head to court in flurry of pre-election lawsuits

(WASHINGTON) — In the tumultuous weeks following the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump and his allies scrambled to challenge his election loss with a flurry of lawsuits.

Their efforts failed, with judges across the country condemning their scattershot claims. But as Election Day 2024 approaches, Trump and the Republican National Committee have adopted what they say is a more aggressive pre-election legal strategy.

“Trump learned his lesson from 2020, and he has a really good legal team at the campaign and the RNC,” said Mike Davis, a lawyer and Trump ally who has been floated for a potential appointment in a Trump administration. “We are so much better prepared.”

Earlier this year, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign announced what they described as an “historic” “election integrity” program with the mission of deploying 100,000 volunteers and attorneys in battleground states, and implementing what they called a “proactive litigation effort.”

According to a Republican National Committee official, in recent months the program has engaged in over 130 election lawsuits across 26 states, and recruited approximately 5,000 volunteer attorneys who are ready to be activated on Election Day.

Democrats, too, have taken on an offensive posture. They have aggressively pushed back in the courts, intervening in “dozens of baseless Republican lawsuits to debunk their lies and defeat them in court,” according to an internal memo prepared by Vice President Kamala Harris’ chief attorney, Dana Remus.

“We know how to defeat Trump’s tactics,” said the memo, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News.

Some election experts have also expressed concern about the GOP-led legal strategy, accusing some Republicans of peddling lies and seeking to create confusion about voting laws in order to sow chaos should Trump lose the election.

Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, told ABC News that the 2024 election has become “both the disinformation and the litigation election.”

“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,” Weiser said. “The lawsuits are not about getting legal relief, but about spreading conspiracy theories.”

Following the 2020 election, Trump and his allies filed over 60 lawsuits challenging the election’s outcome based on allegations of fraud, despite no evidence of widespread fraud that could have impacted the result. Nearly every single lawsuit was rejected, thrown out, or withdrawn— including two denials from the Supreme Court. In some cases, judges dismissed the lawsuits while expressing frustration over the lack of evidence, and some attorneys who publicly represented the president have since been disbarred, faced defamation claims, or been criminally charged.

Allies of the former president say that this time, they’re determined to be more aggressive in the lead-up to Election Day.

“If you wait till after the election to take legal action, you’re not going to get a judge to side with you,” Davis said. “You need to get injunctions ahead of time on signature verification and other issues, because if you wait till after the election, good luck.”

Some issues have already begun bubbling up in one of the most hotly contested states: Arizona. The Arizona Republican Party recently announced that it had brought in attorney and Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon to take over its election integrity operation.

Dhillon’s name was announced following the resignation of Kory Langhofer, who had served as chief legal counsel for the Arizona operation until the first week of October.

Sources familiar with the situation tell ABC News that Langhofer had long planned to hand over the reins. The move, however, reflects what sources said is a broader concern among some Republican lawyers in Arizona who have grown weary about the party’s legal strategies in the state, with some involved already having to halt others from bringing frivolous legal complaints.

Republicans in Arizona have set up a team tasked with receiving and sorting through reported election issues from around the state, which one source familiar with the operation described as a “daily turn of frivolous problems.”

On election night, the RNC is planning to have volunteer attorneys help staff a hotline where poll watchers and others on the ground can report issues, the RNC official said. In some states, there will be lawyers on the ground as well. Already, staff is on the ground in 18 states to handle the “election integrity” effort, the RNC official said.

Responding to critics, the RNC’s Election Integrity communications director Claire Zunk said their “unprecedented election integrity operation is committed to defending the law and protecting every legal vote” and that they will “continue to fight for a fair and transparent election for all Americans.”

Republicans’ efforts this year come after the RNC in 2018 was released from its decadeslong consent decree that had blocked it engaging in “ballot security” measures since the early 1980s.

The Harris campaign, meantime, has marshaled a centralized legal team of over half a dozen lawyers to handle election claims.

“The 2024 presidential election is already the most litigated in American history,” according to the internal Harris campaign memo, “but we are also the most prepared campaign in history for what we face.”

The group is led by Dana Remus, who provides overall strategic direction and leads the campaign’s legal election protection programs. Lawyers including Seth Waxman of Wilmer Hale, Don Verrilli of Munger, Tolles & Olson, and John Devaney of Perkins Coie are litigating cases and working with local counsel in battleground states. Lawyers including Bob Bauer and Marc Elias are also advising the team.

It’s part of an effort that lawyers from the Harris campaign told ABC News they’ve been building up for years, since President Joe Biden took office in 2021 and they immediately began planning for the next cycle. One of the first things that was done when Biden launched his reelection effort in 2023, the lawyers said, was to call a meeting to start putting together the post-election plan.

“We’ve brainstormed the worst scenarios, and are ready to go if we see them,” said Maury Riggan, the general counsel for the campaign, in an interview with ABC News.

“The veteran lawyers who fought and won in 2020 have been preparing for dozens of scenarios, drafting thousands of pages of legal briefs, and working directly with hundreds of lawyers and experts on the ground in battleground states so we are ready for whatever the other side throws our way,” the Harris campaign’s internal memo said.

Together, the Democratic National Committee, with support from the Harris campaign, is involved in 35 lawsuits around the country, lawyers with the Harris campaign told ABC News.

Earlier this month, for example, the DNC, filed a lawsuit in Georgia after the state’s pro-Trump State Election Board passed a series of controversial voting rules over the objection of some of the highest Republican elections officials in the state.

The Democrats won the suit last week after a judge struck down a controversial “hand count” rule that would have required election workers to hand count the ballots on election night — a process they said would invite “chaos” on election night and beyond. Six other rules were struck down as well.

“From the beginning, this rule was an effort to delay election results to sow doubt in the outcome, and our democracy is stronger thanks to this decision to block it,” said a joint statement from the Harris campaign, the DNC, and Georgia Democrats. “We will continue fighting to ensure that voters can cast their ballot knowing it will count.”

The RNC has appealed the decision, with RNC Chairman Michael Whatley saying the judge “exemplified the very worst of judicial activism.”

The Democrats’ aggressive legal posture has trickled down to the individual states. In the battleground state of Nevada, the Democrat secretary of state said his office has started pre-drafting legal filings with his attorney general to try to anticipate any issues that may come up — a process he likened to a game of “Mad Libs.”

“You know the county, you fill in the county name, you fill in the date, you fill in the facts,” said Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar in an interview with ABC News’ Terry Moran. “And you file that thing as soon as you can before the Nevada Supreme Court.”

According to Marc Elias, a prominent election litigation lawyer brought on by the Harris campaign this cycle, there have been almost 180 election lawsuits filed around the country this year — a number he said is “a record for the most new cases ever filed in a single year.”

Active litigation is pending in 39 states, Elias said in a recent post on X, with prominent battleground states seeing the most activity. Georgia leads the way with 23 lawsuits, followed by Pennsylvania with 16.