Mother Jones reports:

Elections are supposed to be decided at the ballot box. But this year, Donald Trump’s campaign appears to be trying to win on a different field of battle. With dozens of lawsuits already filed across the country, the Republicans are using state and federal courts as a key pillar of their strategy to retake the White House.

The lawsuits have been flooding in for months from the Republican National Committee—now part of the family firm under the co-chairmanship of Trump’s daughter-in-law—and allied groups. The list includes lawsuits to purge voting rolls, disqualify significant numbers of absentee and mail ballots, and to make it easier for local officials to refuse to certify elections.

On the other side, a coalition of nonpartisan national voting rights groups—including the Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Brennan Center for Civil Rights, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the Fair Elections Center, and the Southern Poverty Law Center—have been coordinating and preparing for two years to protect people’s right to vote and to have their vote counted.

For decades, the amount of litigation around elections has been increasing. After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, it ushered in a new wave of suits centered around access to the ballot—including voter roll purges and changes to election procedures. But in 2020, Trump’s legal challenges changed from efforts to tinker at the margins to efforts to overturn the election. The GOP never repudiated Trump for that effort—and the tactic has since officially become part of his 2024 campaign playbook. [Continue reading…]