The legal wars over election rules are raging even as voters around the country cast ballots. And several recent efforts by groups aligned with former President Donald J. Trump to challenge voting rules have been coming up short in federal and state courts.
Judges in a number of political battlegrounds and other states have rejected legal challenges this month to voter rolls and procedures by Republicans and their allies.
The Nebraska State Supreme Court ruled that election officials cannot bar people with felony convictions from voting after their sentences are served.
A Michigan state judge rejected a Republican attempt to prevent certain citizens living abroad, including military members, from being eligible to cast an absentee ballot in that swing state.
And a federal judge in Arizona rejected a last-minute push by a conservative group to run citizenship checks on tens of thousands of voters.
“They are hitting quite a losing streak,’’ said David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who advises both Democrat and Republican election officials on rules and procedures and has been tracking election-related litigation.
Heading into the 2024 election, there have been a dizzying array of lawsuits and appeals filed nationwide in state and federal courts.
At the crux of many of these cases is the argument by Republicans for the need to safeguard elections from fraud and assertions by the Democrats that their opponents are seeking to exclude legitimate voters from casing their ballot.
Republicans say they are far from losing their broader battle, notching dozens of legal victories over the past year, including a win on Friday when a federal appeals court threw into question a Mississippi law requiring officials to count absentee ballots received by mail up to five days after Election Day.
In other cases, Republican groups have successfully sued over what they contended were efforts to bolster the process for scrutinizing potentially questionable mail ballots in Michigan. They were also successful in an attempt to disallow the use of digital student IDs as a valid form of voter identification in North Carolina.
Mr. Becker said what stands out about the Republicans’ most recent lawsuits is that they were filed within a few months of the election, when judges are wary of allowing states to alter voter rolls.
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 establishes a so-called quiet period, 90 days before a federal election, when states are not allowed to systematically remove voters from the rolls.
On Friday, a federal judge in Virginia ordered the reinstatement of more than 1,500 people to the state’s voter registration rolls, a blow to Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, who had issued an order in August to conduct “daily updates” of the voter lists. As part of that review, the state had removed noncitizens from the voter rolls, a process that the governor said had been in place for many years.
In a statement on Friday, Mr. Youngkin said, “Let’s be clear about what just happened: Only 11 days before a Presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals — who self-identified themselves as noncitizens — back onto the voter rolls.” He said the state will “immediately” appeal the ruling.
A federal judge in Alabama blocked a similar “purge” by the state’s secretary of state this month, citing the 90-day quiet period. Both judges noted in their rulings that state officials can still disqualify individual voters, but just not in a “systematic” fashion.
The judge in the Virginia case had been named to the bench by President Biden; the judge in the Alabama case had been nominated by President Trump.
The legal wrangling by both parties over voting procedures has an element of political theater, and each side has been boasting of legal victories in the name of election integrity.
Republicans have focused some of their efforts on making sure noncitizens are not able to vote, amplifying the anti-immigrant messages of Mr. Trump.
In a statement, Claire Zunk, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee’s election legal efforts, said “We have stopped Democrat schemes to dismantle election safeguards and will continue to fight for a fair and transparent election for all Americans.”
Democrats accuse the Trump campaign of seeking to disenfranchise voters in swing states.
“Trump Republicans believe they have a better chance of winning when fewer people vote and fewer votes are counted,’’ said a joint memo by Dana Remus, a top lawyer for Kamala Harris’s campaign, and Monica Guardiola, a top official at the Democratic National Committee, obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Becker, of the nonpartisan election research center, said Republicans’ recent lawsuits have come so late in the process that they “seemed destined to lose,” which suggests the efforts are part of a broader post-election strategy.
He envisions Mr. Trump, if he loses the election, using these defeats in court as fodder for casting the 2024 election as being rife with fraud and the court system stacked against him, just as he did without evidence when he lost in 2020.
“This is not 50-50,’’ he said of the legal maneuvering by the parties. “We are seeing more frivolous litigation by Republicans.”
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