Jesse Wegman NYT opinion column:

Yet it would be a mistake to think of what just happened in Nebraska as being in the rearview mirror; rather, as long as we continue to choose our president through the mechanism of the Electoral College, it is a harbinger.

That’s because the country is littered with pivot points like Nebraska. In every election, it takes a shift of only a few hundred or a few thousand votes in one or two states — or, as in the case of Nebraska, a single lawmaker in a single state — to alter the outcome in a country of 330 million people.

Indeed, the election may yet turn on Mr. McDonnell’s decision: If Ms. Harris prevails in the states where she currently leads in many polls, she would have 269 electoral votes, one shy of what she needs to secure the presidency. Adding the elector from Nebraska’s Second Congressional District — where polling also shows her in the lead — would do the job.

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that these pivot points are the whole ballgame. Both parties know it, but Republicans, especially, have been engaged in copious litigation in swing states, from attempted mass voter purges in Arizona and North Carolina to changes in ballot-counting rules in Georgia and Pennsylvania. If they can succeed in reshaping the electorate or altering the method of vote tabulation in any of those states, they have a better chance of hitting a jackpot of electoral votes.

Some of these efforts appear illegal on their face, like the Georgia Election Board’s order to hand-count ballots, while others, like the attempted voter purges, are often frivolous, based on inaccurate or misused data.

Either way, they all end up in the courts. Mr. Trump figured this out in 2020, when he and his allies brought dozens of legal challenges to vote results in key swing states while the American people sat and waited for a resolution. He’s already made clear that he will pursue the same strategy in 2024, and with extremely narrow statewide outcomes, why wouldn’t he? The Trump side lost virtually every case in 2020, but he knows more litigation equals more delay and confusion. He’s also confident in the backstop of a Supreme Court that contains three of his appointees and has ruled repeatedly in his favor.

Even before Trump entered the scene, however, election litigation was accelerating considerably, and “it’s no mystery as to why,” according to Rick Hasen, an election-law scholar at U.C.L.A. who found that the rate of litigation has nearly tripled since 2000.

“People realize that in a close election, the rules of the game matter. That spurs litigation,” Mr. Hasen told me. The most litigation yet was in 2020, due in part to rule changes brought on by the pandemic and in part because Mr. Trump ran to the courts to litigate every allegation of fraud, no matter how weak (and they were all weak, to go by their success rate in court).

Mr. Hasen said the pace of litigation in 2024 remains high, although the quality of the claims so far this year is lower. For instance, he pointed to an argument in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday, challenging the counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day, even if they were postmarked on or before Election Day.

The problem isn’t the litigating itself, Mr. Hasen said, so much as the abuse and partisan nature of it. “On the one hand, litigation is essential to protect the integrity of the voting process and of voting rights,” he said. “Courts need to say you can’t steal an election by ignoring the will of the people. On the other hand, a whole lot of spurious litigation will make people lose confidence in the election process and think there are more problems than there actually are.”…