The Democratic Party, increasingly alarmed by the potential for third-party candidates to swing the election to former President Donald J. Trump, has put together a new team of lawyers aimed at tracking the threat, especially in key battleground states.
The effort comes as challengers — including the independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West plus groups like No Labels as well as the Green Party — have ramped up their push to qualify for states’ ballots ahead of critical deadlines in the spring and summer.
The legal offensive, led by Dana Remus, who until 2022 served as President Biden’s White House counsel, and Robert Lenhard, an outside lawyer for the party, will be aided by a communications team dedicated to countering candidates who Democrats fear could play spoiler to Mr. Biden. It amounts to a kind of legal Whac-a-Mole, a state-by-state counterinsurgency plan ahead of an election that could hinge on just a few thousand votes in swing states.
The aim “is to ensure all the candidates are playing by the rules, and to seek to hold them accountable when they are not,” Mr. Lenhard said….
State rules limiting ballot access “ensure that the people who are on the ballot have legitimate bases of support, and it’s not simply a vanity project,” Mr. Lenhard said.
Independent candidates and third-party leadership see restrictive ballot laws, and efforts to monitor and enforce them, as anti-democratic, exemplifying the kind of two-party political machinations they say they are trying to combat.
“What are ballot access barriers? They are barriers against free speech,” said Mr. Nader, who has made four third-party runs for president. He described state ballot laws in the United States as “the worst in the Western world, by orders of magnitude.”