A Look At The Legal Issues Surrounding The 2024 Election

Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The run-up to the 2024 election has seen a number of consequential court cases and rulings related to how voters cast their ballots and how governments process the election results.

Some of the cases remain ongoing, and if 2024 is anything like 2020, the nation could see a flurry of lawsuits after Election Day with candidates also challenging the outcomes.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Shutterstock

It is, however, unclear how far any legal case will go, with experts doubting that a Supreme Court case will result from the ongoing slate of legal challenges.

“Judges throughout the country … are loath to be perceived as disenfranchising individuals,” Landmark Legal Vice President of Legal Affairs Mike O’Neill told The Epoch Times.

“If they have an exit ramp to either dismiss a case or a procedural exit ramp to dismiss a case, they’re going to take [it]—even despite the fact that there might be evidence of either some sort of failure to follow proper procedures or failure to follow necessary registration procedures.”

Here are some legal issues to watch heading into November.

Mail-In or Absentee Ballots

Perhaps the most contentious election issue in 2020 was the widespread use of mail-in ballots, brought on by the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A survey from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal body established by Congress, showed that the number of mail-in ballots increased by 20 percent between 2016 and 2020.

“Because we’re no longer in the COVID situation, we’re not going to see the same level of court-driven outcomes in our elections,” Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams told The Epoch Times. “I think that’s the big difference between now and 2020.”

A recent lawsuit in Pennsylvania, one of the more hotly contested states in 2020, dealt with how to process mail-in ballots that lack proper dates and other information. A practice known as ballot curing allows voters to correct deficiencies in their ballots after submitting them.

“Ballots come in, they take quite a bit more processing, making sure that it’s the person who voted to send him in all those things, and so it’s just a slower process,” Honest Elections Project Vice President Chad Ennis told The Epoch Times.

Earlier this month, the state supreme court declined to hear Republicans’ challenge to the state notifying voters of deficiencies in their ballots.

In Nevada and Mississippi, similar challenges surround ballots received after Election Day.

Voters make their selections at voting booths inside an early voting site in Hendersonville, N.C., on Oct. 17, 2024. Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images

The issue reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which heard arguments in September over the Republican National Committee’s (RNC’s) claim that Mississippi should not count those ballots—even if properly postmarked.

Texas passed an omnibus election security package in 2021 with provisions that were halted by a district court judge this month.

More specifically, Judge Xavier Rodriguez blocked Texas from preventing compensation for assisting voters with their mail-in ballots.

He also enjoined a restriction on compensation for vote harvesting services, which the law defined as “in-person interaction with one or more voters, in the physical presence of an official ballot or a ballot voted by mail, intended to deliver votes for a specific candidate or measure.”

Both provisions violated the Voting Rights Act, according to Rodriguez.

In Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, Republicans have also filed lawsuits challenging ballots submitted from individuals who are overseas.

A law known as the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act requires states to allow ballots from Americans who live overseas, but Republicans have argued that state officials in North Carolina and Pennsylvania are illegally exempting overseas Americans from verification requirements.

They similarly argued that Michigan officials have registered people who don’t reside in the state.

Certification

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney heard arguments on Oct. 1 over Democrats’ challenge to Georgia state election board policies surrounding certification.

One of the rules requires officials to make a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying the results while another allows officials to review documentation “created during the conduct of elections.”

Georgia’s State Election Board members discuss proposals on election rule changes at the state capitol in Atlanta on Sept. 20, 2024. Mike Stewart/AP Photo

McBurney seemed inclined to uphold the rules but with clarification of the reasonable inquiry rule, which he said was “vague.”

On Oct. 15, he issued a ruling stating that election superintendents couldn’t refuse to certify election results or abstain from doing so, even under Georgia’s new rule.

He added that delays in election officials receiving information related to the election was “not a basis for refusing to certify the election results or abstaining from doing so.”

Another ruling by McBurney, on Oct. 15, held that the Georgia election board had acted too closely to an election when it tried to impose a rule requiring ballots be counted by hand.

The following day, Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox issued a ruling invalidating that rule and six others from the state election board—including the one requiring election officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry.” The RNC quickly appealed the decision.

Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney in Atlanta on May 2, 2022. Ben Gray/AP Photo

Voter Rolls

The Department of Justice has sued both Alabama and Virginia over their attempts to clean up their state’s voter rolls prior to the election.

On Oct. 16, a federal judge in Alabama halted the state’s program with a preliminary injunction.

Both lawsuits cite something known as the “Quiet Period Provision” of the National Voter Registration Act, which says: “A state shall complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.”

Multiple disputes over election rolls have emerged in Arizona, where election officials found that nearly 100,000 voters were able to vote despite not providing proof of citizenship.

The U.S. Supreme Court intervened in August by halting the effects of a lower court decision that blocked Arizona’s law requiring officials to reject state voter registration forms that lacked proof of citizenship.

More recently, a federal judge ruled against an Arizona group’s legal effort to force county officials to investigate ahead of the upcoming general election whether more than 40,000 registered voters are U.S. citizens.

The RNC has raised other allegations about noncitizen voting in Maine as well as Nevada, where the RNC and the Trump campaign sued the secretary of state.

Hearings in the Fifth Circuit and Georgia have also raised questions about the Purcell principle, which comes from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Purcell v. Gonzalez.

It generally cautions against election policy changes just before voters head to the polls.

The court’s opinion didn’t set out a specific timetable for allowable changes to election procedures. Instead, it reversed an appeals court decision striking down Arizona’s voter ID law.

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