The Republican Party filed a record number of lawsuits aimed at curtailing voting in 2022, with many aimed at restricting voting ahead of the midterms, according to a new report.
On Monday, the progressive outfit Democracy Docket released a study finding that out of 175 democracy-related lawsuits filed last year, 93 of them were “anti-voting” — and most of them came from GOP operatives.
According to the report, the anti-voting suits sought to suppress voting in a handful of ways – by “tightening the rules around voter registration, adding more obstacles to mail-in or in-person voting processes” and more.
It’s important to note that Democracy Docket was founded by Marc Elias, a voting rights attorney and Democratic operative who previously served as Hillary Clinton’s legal counsel on her 2016 campaign. But the numbers don’t lie: 23 of the anti-voting lawsuits were filed by the Republican Party—more specifically the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee or regional Republican parties.
“Evidently, the GOP establishment is becoming more litigious than ever and is turning to courts to achieve its anti-voting and anti-democracy ends,” the report says.
Democracy Docket also found that the lawsuits were paraded mostly out of Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three battleground states that doubled as petri dishes for the Big Lie.
Arizona Republicans like attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for example, filed several trumped up, attention-grabbing lawsuits against the results of their midterm elections. Many of the suits filed by Republicans this year were aimed at restricting voting ahead of the election. (And after a less-than-stellar performance in the midterms, Republicans have already begun changing their tunes on certain types of voting the party has previously demonized, like mail-in ballots.)
“Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Berks, Fayette and Lancaster counties were sued for refusing to count certain mail-in ballots in their 2022 primary election totals,” the report says.
Republicans also filed litigation trying to block drop boxes from being used in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as disqualifying mail-in ballots for errors like missing information or incorrect dates.
Ultimately, the group found that most of the anti-voting lawsuits fizzled, while orders passed from democracy-litigation mostly benefited voters.
“After a year in which the Republican Party filed a staggering amount of lawsuits in an attempt to dismantle mail-in voting, upend election administration and otherwise undermine the democratic process, courts (and voters) largely rejected this strategy,” the report says.
“In 2022, democracy won in the courtroom,” they concluded.
