Virginia has around 5,800,000 active registered voters. In Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, about 1600 voter registrations are in dispute–about 0.02% of the total registered voters. (And of course, while not all registered voters vote, many of these disputed voter registrations might never be used.)

About 215,000 voters turned out in Nevada’s presidential preference primary in 2024. The RNC identified 24 ballots that arrived in the 3 days after the election without a postmark. That’s about 0.01% of ballots cast. If comparable numbers occur in 2024, it’s around 150 to 200 ballots. (It’s entirely possible changes to the postal service move this in an order of magnitude in one direction or another; or a general election sees disproportionately more late-arriving ballots than a primary.)

And in Republican National Committee v. Genser, a narrow batch of potential provisional ballots are at issue. Rick Pildes helpfully suggests the number of ballots is likely to be between 1000 and 3000 ballots–between 0.01% and 0.03% of expected ballots cast.**

**UPDATE: A caveat here is that the RNC argues that the case could be precedent beyond those ballots at dispute in this case–ballots lacking a secrecy sleeve–to other provisional ballots cast when the absentee ballot is lacking other things, too. That universe could be much larger, but there remains some dispute and some more ambiguity about what that looks like. Rick Pildes has more thoughts here.

With any disputed batch of ballots or voters, an additional factor is which way they cut for a candidate or another. They would almost assuredly not end up as 100% for one candidate or another. Even a 2/3-1/3 split can be unlikely, but, perhaps with absentee ballot trends and how the parties have shifted voting preference in recent years, that kind of split is somewhat more likely.

We are far afield from the disputed ballots in Bush v. Gore in 2000, around 60,000 “undervotes” and 110,000 “overvotes” statewide, about 3% of the total votes cast.

And we’re even far afield from Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar in 2020, where 9428 ballots were ultimately in dispute among 6.9 million cast, about 0.13% of the total.

Of course, we want to follow the law in these disputes. And of course, we want to ensure that eligible voters have a meaningful opportunity to cast a ballot and have it counted. Those are important issues in every election law dispute.

But if we are looking at concerns about consequences in the 2024 election, these legal disputes are really, as I’ve described to some outlets, “picking at the edges” of election litigation. In the long term, they could set up much more seismic disputes about, say, the interpretation of the Legislature Thereof Clauses, or the National Voter Registration Act, in years to come. But in terms of their concrete impact on the 2024 presidential election (or any other election), their influence is likely to be quite muted, whichever way these decisions are ultimately resolved. That said, if any state is decided by just a few hundred votes like Florida in 2000, all bets are off, and these disputes, while suddenly important, would only be the start of any litigation in such a state.