One story I’m keeping tabs on today is that of lawsuits being filed over voting procedures in key states. To be clear, it is extremely normal for there to be litigation on Election Day. So I’m watching for anything that could be especially significant -- both in terms of the outcome and previewing what we could see in the courts after today.
A lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania by Republicans falls into the latter category. The lawsuit alleges that Montgomery County has been reaching out to voters who submitted their ballots by mail and giving them the opportunity to fix mistakes they made on the ballots. That’s not what all counties are doing, so the Republicans are claiming that this procedure is a violation of the equal protection clause. And they’re asking both for the county to stop contacting voters to fix their ballots and for the ballots that were already fixed to be thrown out.
Legal scholars like election law expert Rick Hasen seem skeptical of these claims. But as he notes, this lawsuit could also be a harbinger of Republicans’ strategy if the margin is close in a state like Pennsylvania, since at that point the fight could shift to a focus on which individual ballots should be counted.