Before voters even begin casting ballots, Democrats and Republicans are engaged in a sprawling legal fight over how the 2024 election will be run, a series of court disputes that could even run past Election Day if the outcome is close.
Both parties have bulked up their legal teams for the fight. Republicans have filed more than 100 lawsuits challenging various aspects of vote-casting after being chastised repeatedly by judges in 2020 for bringing complaints about how the election was run only after votes were tallied.
After Donald Trump has made " election integrity " a key part of his party’s platform following his false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020, the Republican National Committee says it has more than 165,000 volunteers ready to watch the polls in November.
Democrats are countering with what they are calling “voter protection,” rushing to court to fight back against the GOP cases and building their own team with over 100 staffers, several hundred lawyers and what they say are thousands of volunteers for November.
Despite the flurry of litigation, the cases have tended to be fairly small-bore, with few likely impacts for most voters.
“When you have all this money to spend on litigation, you end up litigating less and less important stuff,” said Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame University.
The stakes would increase dramatically should Trump lose the election and then try to overturn the result. That’s what he attempted in 2020, but the court system rejected him across the board. Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits trying to reverse President Joe Biden’s win.
Whether they could be successful this year depends on the result of the election, experts said. A gap of about 10,000 votes — roughly the number that separated Biden and Trump in Arizona and Georgia four years ago — is almost impossible to reverse through litigation. A closer one of a few hundred votes, like the 547-vote margin that separated George W. Bush and Al Gore in Florida in 2000, is much more likely to hinge on court rulings about which ballots are legitimate.
“If he loses, he’s going to claim that he won. That goes without saying,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said of Trump. “If it looks like what we had last time … I expect we’ll see the same kind of thing.”
Trump has done nothing to discourage that expectation as he seeks his return to the White House. He has said he would accept the results of the election only if it’s “free and fair,” which raises the possibility it would not be, something he continues to falsely contend was the case in 2020. He also continued to insist that he could only lose due to fraud.
“The only way they can beat us is to cheat,” Trump said at a Las Vegas rally in June.
To be clear, there was no widespread fraud in 2020 or any election since then. Reviews, recounts and audits in the battleground states where Trump disputed his loss four years ago all affirmed that Biden won, and Trump’s own attorney general said there was no evidence that fraud tipped the election.
Trump installed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, which then named attorney Christina Bobb as the head of its election integrity division. Bobb is a former reporter for the conservative One America News Network who has been indicted by Arizona’s attorney general for being part of an effort to promote a slate of Trump electors in the state, even though Biden won it.
Echoing its presidential candidate, the RNC said it's trying to counter Democratic mischief.
“President Trump’s election integrity effort is dedicated to protecting every legal vote, mitigating threats to the voting process and securing the election,” RNC spokeswoman Claire Zunk said in a statement. "While Democrats continue their election interference against President Trump and the American people, our operation is confronting their schemes and preparing for November.”
This time around, Democrats say they’re prepared for whatever Trump and the RNC might do.
“For four years, Donald Trump and his MAGA allies have been scheming to sow distrust in our elections and undermine our democracy so they can cry foul when they lose,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign manager, said in a statement. “But also for four years, Democrats have been preparing for this moment, and we are ready for anything.”
The highest-profile litigation so far has been in Georgia, over new rules from a Republican-appointed majority on the Georgia State Board of Elections that has echoed the former president’s conspiracy theories about 2020. The rules could allow members of local election boards to try to refuse to certify elections, a gambit Trump supporters have tried, unsuccessfully, to reverse losses in 2020 and 2022.
A Trump-aligned group has sued to have courts declare that election board members have that power while Democrats have sued to overturn the new rules. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has questioned the wisdom of the board changing procedures so close to the election. Legal experts say the state board's rules conflict with longstanding Georgia law that certification is not optional.
Whether local boards delay or refuse to certify the results from this year's presidential election has been a growing concern, especially after a handful of local officials took that step during this year's primaries. But election experts say the fears of a certification crisis this fall are overblown, in large part because most state laws are clear that state or local boards must certify the official results brought to them by election offices. The courtroom remains the most important venue for candidates who want to challenge election results.
The litigation to date has often been about relatively esoteric matters, but some cases could have implications after November if Trump loses the election. The RNC has filed lawsuits in Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina alleging the states need to remove inactive or ineligible voters from their rolls. Late last month, Republicans sued North Carolina over a favorite issue — the risk of noncitizens voting, which is rare. They contend the state wasn't doing enough to safeguard against it.
So far none of the claims have succeeded. But if Trump loses the election in those states by a narrow margin, that sort of pre-election litigation could pave the way for him to claim in court that the vote was invalid.
The other area that could have ramifications in November and beyond is whether mail ballots arriving after Election Day can be counted. Nineteen states allow that as long as the ballots are sent before polls close. The RNC sued to overturn this provision in Nevada and Mississippi, but both cases were dismissed by judges.
The RNC has appealed those cases, and the first is scheduled to be heard by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later this month. It’s the sort of issue that could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Some Trump allies in 2020 hoped the court would declare him the winner, but the late-arriving mail ballot litigation at the time showed the limits of that tactic.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the state had to count mail ballots that arrived up to four days after Election Day. Republicans then appealed that ruling to the nation’s highest court, and late-arriving mail was counted separately in November 2020 while everyone waited for the Supreme Court to weigh in.
In the end, the Supreme Court didn’t take up the case. Trump lost Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes, so the 10,000 late-arriving mail ballots wouldn’t have even made a difference.
FILE - State Election Board member Rick Jeffares asks the crowd to settle down during a hastily planned State Election Board meeting at the Capitol in Atlanta, July 12, 2024. (Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)/
BERLIN (AP) — Like many other young women living in communist East Germany, Solveig Leo thought nothing about juggling work and motherhood. The mother of two was able to preside over a large state-owned farm in the northeastern village of Banzkow because childcare was widely available.
Contrast that with Claudia Huth, a mother of five, who grew up in capitalist West Germany. Huth quit her job as a bank clerk when she was pregnant with her first child and led a life as a traditional housewife in the village of Egelsbach in Hesse, raising the kids and tending to her husband, who worked as a chemist.
Both Leo and Huth fulfilled roles that in many ways were typical for women in the vastly different political systems that governed Germany during its decades of division following the country’s defeat in World War II in 1945.
As Germany celebrates the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 — and the country’s reunification less than a year later on Oct. 3, 1990 — many in Germany are reflecting on how women’s lives that have diverged so starkly under communism and capitalism have become much more similar again — though some differences remain even today.
“In West Germany, women — not all, but many — had to fight for their right to have a career,” said Clara Marz, the curator of an exhibition about women in divided Germany for the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany.
Women in East Germany, meanwhile, often had jobs — though that was something that “they had been ordered from above to do,” she added.
Built in 1961, the Wall stood for 28 years at the front line of the Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets. It was built by the communist regime to cut off East Germans from the supposed ideological contamination of the West and to stem the tide of people fleeing East Germany.
Today only a few stretches of the 156.4-kilometer (97.2-mile) barrier around the capitalist exclave of West Berlin remain, mostly as a tourist attraction.
“All the heavy industry was in the west, there was nothing here,” Leo, who is now 81 years old, said during a recent interview looking back at her life as a woman under communism. “East Germany had to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union. Women needed to work our own way out of that misery.”
By contrast, Leo said, women in the West didn't need to work because they were “spoiled by the Marshall Plan” — the United States’ generous reconstruction plan that poured billions of dollars into West Germany and other European countries after the war.
In capitalist West Germany, the economy recovered so quickly after the total devastation of WWII that people soon started talking of a Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” that brought them affluence and stability less than 10 years after the war.
That economic success, however, indirectly hampered women’s quest for equal rights. Most West German women stayed at home and were expected to take care of their household while their husbands worked. Religion, too, played a much bigger role than in atheist East Germany, confining women to traditional roles as caregivers of the family.
Mothers who tried to break out of these conventions and took on jobs were infamously decried as Rabenmütter, or uncaring moms who put work over family.
Not all West German women perceived their traditional roles as restrictive.
“I always had this idea to be with my children, because I loved being with them," said Huth, now 69. “It never really occurred to me to go to work.”
More than three decades after Germany’s unification, a new generation of women is barely aware of the different lives their mothers and grandmothers led depending on which part of the country they lived in. For most, combining work and motherhood has also become the normal way of life.
Hannah Fiedler, an 18-year-old high school graduate from Berlin, said the fact that her family lived in East Germany during the decades of the country's division has no impact on her life today.
“East or West — it's not even a topic in our family anymore,” she said, as she sat on a bench near a thin, cobble-stoned path in the capital's Mitte neighborhood, which marks the former course of the Berlin Wall in the then-divided city.
She also said that growing up, she had not experienced any disadvantages because she's female.
“I'm white and privileged — for good or worse — I don't expect any problems when I enter the working world in the future,” she said.
Some small differences between the formerly divided parts of Germany linger on. In the former East, 74% of women are working, compared to 71.5% in the West, according to a 2023 study by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung foundation.
Childcare is also still more available in the former East than in the West.
In 2018, 57% of children under the age of 3 were looked after in a childcare facility in the eastern state of Saxony. That compares with 27% in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and 44% in Hamburg and Bremen, according to Germany's Federal Statistical Office.
Germany as a whole trails behind some other European countries when it comes to gender equality.
Only 31.4% lawmakers in Germany's national parliament are female, compared to 41% in Belgium's parliament, 43.6% in Denmark, 45% in Norway and 45.6% in Sweden.
Nonetheless, Leo, the 81-year-old farmer from former East Germany, is optimistic that eventually women all over the country will have the same opportunities.
“I can’t imagine that there are any women who don’t like to be independent,” she said.
Jan M. Olsen contributed from Copenhagen.
Seamstresses work th the VEB clothing factory "Fortschritt",1987 in Berlin. (Zentralbild/DPA via AP)
Women work in the former East German Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG) an 'Agricultural Production Cooperative' in Golzow on April 13, 1981. (Heinrich Sanden/DPA via AP)
Mealtime at the kindergarten on Wieckerstrasse in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen, in November 1987. (Zentralbid/DPA via AP)
Clara Marz an Organizer of an exhibition about women works on the photos in her office in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Clara Marz an Organizer of an exhibition about women attends an interview with the Associated Press in her office in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm shows an old photo of herself from her youth during her interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm attends an interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm feeds her horse after the interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm looks at her old photos album during her interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Claudia Huth walks in front of her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth shows old photos of her children and herself in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
A repro of a photo pictured in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024 shows Claudia Huth and her children. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth shows an old photo of her family and herself in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Repro of a photo pictured in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024 shows Claudia Huth and her children. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)