Some readers of this blog may have seen some data that I posted regarding a rise in the number of election cases since the 2000 election. I posted preliminary data, just from state cases, in an SSRN draft version of my forthcoming Washington and Lee Law Review, “Beyond the Margin of Litigation: Reforming U.S. Election Administration to Avoid Electoral Meltdown.” Figure 3 in that draft showed an increase in the number of cases filed in state court in which the word “election” appeared close to the word “challenge” (culling out cases obviously not about election law). The state court only version of the chart showed 60 cases in 1996 compared to 252 in 2002.
I have now expanded the chart to include state and federal cases and to include data through 2004. You can see the results in this chart. There were 108 such cases in 1996 and 361 cases in 2004. The average number of cases from 1996-1999 was 96 per year. That number increased to an average of 254 cases per year from 2001-2004. Of course, some of the increase has to do with the fact that cases in the earlier part of the decade are redistricting cases. But even excluding the redistricting cases there is a huge increase. There were 6 redistricting cases in the database in 2001, 19 in 2002, 8 cases in 2003, and 27 cases in 2004. Removing those from the count in the 2001-2004 period still yields an average of 240 cases per year. An Excel spreadsheet containing the case names, citations, and brief descriptions of each case is here.