USA Today reports. The article begins: “The Republican National Committee and its lawyers are going state to state seeking to influence what laws and procedures will govern the November election.” I think it’s only fair to point out, which the article doesn’t do, that this is something that Democrats did in prior election cycles. To be sure, Republicans ask the courts for different election rules than Democrats do, but it’s still going to court to get more favorable laws than what existing procedures provide.

This article is also misleading in other ways. For example, it states: “If the [RNC’s] cases are successful, fewer people will be allowed to vote in November, and fewer absentee ballots will be counted.” This sentence strongly implies that the RNC seeks, and may persuade courts to mandate, wrongful disenfranchisement of eligible voters. But farther down in the piece, the litigation that is described seeks only the enforcement of the NVRA’s list maintenance requirements. The RNC’s NVRA claims may–or may not–have merit. Both Nevada and Michigan vigorously contest the validity of its NVRA claims in their respective states. But if they do have merit, enforcement of the NVRA won’t constitute wrongful disenfranchisement but instead proper enforcement of existing election law. The idea that a successful lawsuit could cause the wrongful denial of the right to vote is inaccurate–and presents the danger of breeding just the kind of distrust in the rule of law that the article says would damage democracy.

Also, although the article and its headline highlight the cases where the RNC is a plaintiff, many of the cases the article discusses are those in which the RNC is or seeks to be a defendant-intervenor. It’s hard to say that those cases qualify as ones in which “[t]he Republican National Committee and its lawyers are going state to state seeking to influence what laws and procedures will govern the November election,” to quote the opening sentence again.

All in all, this piece in my judgment is a very sloppy job of reporting and, rather than educating the public on election law and litigation, does a disservice to readers attempting to understand how the electoral system operates and the prospects that this year’s election will be conducted in a way that voters can be confident that the candidates who are declared the winners are the ones for whom the participating and eligible voters actually cast their ballots for.