“Election lawsuits set record pace amid COVID-19 pandemic as results decide who votes and how Nov. 3”

Bart Jansen deep dive for USA Today:

Requiring an excuse for absentee voting. Paying for postage for mail-in ballots. Purging names from voter registration lists. Placing the names on ballots to provide an advantage in so-called “donkey votes.”

These are among the disputes that have generated a record number of lawsuits over the Nov. 3 election. Decisions in the cases will determine who will vote and how. And the political ground is shifting even during the ongoing primaries, as rulings change in the weeks before votes are cast. 

“The ease of our ability to cast a vote that will be fairly counted depends in part on where you live,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at University of California, Irvine and expert on election law. “I think there’s a lot of concern about voting rules, especially given the fact that we’re trying to conduct voting in the midst of a pandemic when the pandemic itself is a major campaign issue and where there is great uncertainty about the future generally.”…

Candidates, voters, party groups and advocacy groups have filed at least 151 lawsuits related to coronavirus and the election in 41 states through July 15, according to a count by Justin Levitt at Hasen’s electionlawblog.org. The pace is set to eclipse the record number of election lawsuits in 2018, after the number of lawsuits per election cycle tripled in the past 20 years, according to Hasen’s book Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy.

The legal challenges come amid growing skepticism about elections. About one in four voters called voter fraud the biggest threat to the election, in an NPR/PBS Marist poll from January. But NPR noted the poll signaled how voters lived in different media bubbles: Voter fraud topped the list of concerns for Republicans and voter suppression was the greatest concern for Democrats.

“Election litigation is going up, regardless of the coronavirus,” Hasen said. “Part of it is this culture of disagreement over voting rules and hyperpolarization of society and unclear voting standards and decentralization.”

Part of the confusion about election rules stems from state and local governance of how elections are conducted. There are about 10,500 jurisdictions nationwide that administer elections, according to the Government Accountability Office.

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