A barrage of lawsuits and court rulings is starting to shape how the country will vote in the November elections against the backdrop of the coronavirus, Michael Wines reports.
The upcoming election is already one of the most divisive in recent history, and it is on track to become the most litigious, as courts weigh policies for voting during a pandemic, voting rights and even who is responsible for paying the return postage used on absentee ballots.
Voting by mail is the prime battleground, with 34 states and the District of Columbia allowing excuse-free absentee voting, most likely ensuring that November’s election in those places will be conducted largely by mail if the pandemic persists.
Many of the remaining states loosened mail-balloting rules for primaries, and some have moved to do so for November as well. But Republicans — led vocally by President Trump — have insisted, without evidence, that loosening absentee ballot rules invites widespread fraud.
Justin Levitt, an election scholar and associate dean at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, is tracking nearly 130 pandemic-related election lawsuits. The firm of Marc Elias, a lawyer who frequently represents the Democratic Party, is pursuing more than 35 voting rights cases, a number he calls an order of magnitude greater than in the past. And the Republican National Committee, which pledged this spring to spend at least $20 million fighting attempts to loosen voting rules, boasts of filing or intervening in 19 suits to date.
