Amid threats of certification battles and mass voter challenges, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has assembled an expansive senior legal team that will oversee hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers in a sprawling operation designed to be a bulwark against what Democrats expect to be an aggressive Republican effort to challenge voters, rules and, possibly, the results of the 2024 election.
The legal apparatus within the Harris campaign will oversee multiple aspects of the election program, including voter protection, recounts and general election litigation, and it is adding Marc Elias, one of the party’s top election lawyers, to focus on potential recounts.
The legal group is headed by Bob Bauer, who served as lead counsel to President Biden for years, and Dana Remus, the general counsel to the 2020 Biden campaign, and also includes Maury Riggan, the general counsel for the Harris campaign. Josh Hsu, formerly from the vice president’s office, will join the team, and Vanita Gupta, a former director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and a top Biden Justice Department official, is an informal adviser.
The campaign will also lean on the top lawyers at three prominent law firms — Seth Waxman, Donald Verrilli and John Devaney — to handle litigation, and deploy local counsel to eight battleground states and four other states of interest.
Mr. Elias, who has had tensions with Mr. Bauer and other Democratic lawyers in the past, will also bring lawyers from his growing firm, Elias Law Group. He has also previously worked for Ms. Harris, serving as general counsel for her primary campaign in 2020.
Ms. Remus said in a statement that the legal team had been working “uninterrupted over the last four years, building strategic plans in key states, adding more talent and capacity, and preparing for all possible scenarios.”
“This year, like in 2020, we have the nation’s finest lawyers at the table, ready to work together tirelessly to ensure our election will be free, fair and secure — and to ensure that all eligible voters will be able to cast their ballots, knowing their votes will be counted,” Ms. Remus said.
The origins of the effort date back to July 2020, when Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general, called top officials on Mr. Biden’s legal team saying they needed to create “something we’ve never created before,” because the Trump campaign and its allies were beginning to bring cases and lay the groundwork for litigation.
With the lessons of 2020 still fresh in Democrats’ minds, Harris advisers claim that the legal team is about 10 times the size of the 2020 operation.
The expansive new Democratic legal team, and the opposing group at the Republican National Committee, is a reflection of the legal arms race that is the new reality of American elections since Mr. Trump’s election victory in 2016. The battle over whose votes count — not just how many votes are counted — has become central to modern presidential campaigns.
For months, the Trump campaign and the R.N.C. have signaled a first-of-its-kind approach to what it calls “election integrity,” announcing a plan in April to dispatch more than 100,000 volunteers and lawyers to monitor and potentially challenge the electoral process in each of the battleground states. Already, the pre-election period has been the most litigious in modern history, with dozens of lawsuits filed by Republicans and their allies alone in 25 states.
A spokeswoman for the R.N.C. did not respond to requests for comment.
Democrats have been highlighting recent wins in many of the court battles as part of their effort to get ahead of voting issues. In Nevada, a judge dismissed a lawsuit in July filed by Republicans challenging a state law that allows ballots arriving up to four days after Election Day to be counted. In Mississippi, a judge rejected a similar challenge from Republicans that ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive five days later should not be counted.
And in June, a federal judge rejected an argument from Republicans that voter rolls in Nevada had significant inconsistencies, finding that the R.N.C. and the voter who filed the lawsuit did not have legal standing.
Core to the Democratic legal effort is the party’s voter protection program, which operates as both a traditional assistance program to voters as well as the eyes and ears of the legal team to help counter any false claims of fraud or malfeasance.
Helmed by Meredith Horton, the program is focused on eight battleground states (Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and New Hampshire) as well as four states of interest (Florida, Virginia, Minnesota and Maine). The program has more than 100 staff members across those 12 states, they said, buttressed by hundreds more volunteers and thousands of poll monitors recruited by the party.
“This program is one that we are building to meet this moment,” Ms. Horton said in an interview, calling it the largest of its kind in Democratic presidential campaign history.
For now, the voter program is focused on both education and protection. In Georgia, that translates to heavy involvement in pushing back on mass challenges to voter eligibility from right-wing groups. The team looks at lists of challenged voters and helps them assemble the necessary documents to prove eligibility, and works with the local officials making decisions on the challenges to understand the law.
In Arizona, the group is investing heavily in voter education about the two-page ballot that will appear this cycle, making sure that voters are aware of all the races and do not miss the second page.
And in Wisconsin, Ms. Horton’s team is looking to leverage a recent state supreme court decision to allow drop boxes in the upcoming election, working to let voters know about the change and encouraging to local officials to deploy them in populous areas.
After Election Day, the task changes. Staff members and volunteers will work on absentee ballot chase-and-cure programs, assisting voters whose ballots were rejected but could still be fixed in time to count. They will also look out for evidence to help rebut any claims that seek to challenge certification in a state.
“We are more prepared as a campaign than we’ve ever been in the past cycles,” Ms. Horton said.
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