The Texas case is one of at least eight major election disputes around the country in which Federal District Court judges sided with civil rights groups and Democrats in voting cases only to be stayed by the federal appeals courts, whose ranks Mr. Trump has done more to populate than any president in more than 40 years.
The rulings highlight how Mr. Trump’s drive to fill empty judgeships is yielding benefits to his re-election campaign even before any major dispute about the outcome may make it to the Supreme Court. He made clear the political advantages he derives from his power to appoint judges when he explained last month that he was moving fast to name a successor to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so the Supreme Court would have a full contingent to handle any election challenges, which he has indicated he might bring in the event of a loss.
In appointing dozens of reliable conservatives to the appellate bench, Mr. Trump has made it more likely that appeals come before judges with legal philosophies sympathetic to Republicans on issues including voting rights. The trend has left Democrats and civil rights lawyers increasingly concerned that they face another major impediment to their efforts to assure that as many people as possible can vote in the middle of a pandemic — and in the face of a campaign by Republicans to limit voting.
“There has been a very significant number of federal voting rights victories across the country and those have in the last week or two — many if not most — been stayed by appellate courts,” said Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which has been involved in several voting rights lawsuits this year. “We’re seeing the brakes being put on the voting rights expansion at the appellate level in these jurisdictions, in many cases in ways that won’t be remediable before the election.”
In potentially pivotal states like Wisconsin and Ohio, the outcomes appear to be serving the president’s effort to limit voting while in some cases creating widespread confusion about the rules only three weeks before Election Day….
The higher the level of confusion, Mr. Persily said, the more likely that final results could wind up before judges.
“The most important thing is that we have clear rules right now about how this election is going to be conducted,” he said. “While there are good rules and bad rules, it’s better to have a rule than no rule at all. The more uncertainty that the courts are injecting into the process right now, the greater the likelihood there will be postelection litigation.”