DNC requests judges throw out RNC lawsuits in Michigan and Nevada, arguing they are aimed at sowing distrust in 2024 election

By MJ Lee and Fredreka Schouten, CNN

(CNN) — The Democratic National Committee is requesting that judges in Michigan and Nevada throw out “dangerous” and “flawed” lawsuits, related to voter rolls and to mail-in ballots, that were launched by the Republican National Committee earlier this year. The DNC is warning that the lawsuits represent former President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the American public’s confidence in the upcoming November elections.

The DNC on Monday filed three amicus briefs on behalf of the Biden reelection campaign in the two battleground states. The briefs, viewed by CNN, attack the RNC’s lawsuits as meritless and nothing short of political theater. They offer an early window into how the Biden campaign plans to try to push back on what Democrats expect to be an onslaught of Republican election integrity challenges this year.

Two RNC lawsuits — one each in Michigan and Nevada — contend that the numbers of active voters in key counties in those states are “suspiciously high” and seek to have election officials cancel voter registrations. The DNC is also asking the court to dismiss a challenge from Republicans to the guidance that Michigan’s secretary of state has given to local election clerks to verify signatures on ballots.

“Donald Trump and Republicans know they can’t win this election fair and square, so they’re doubling down on their losing 2020 playbook and taking aim at our voting rights and democracy. They will fail again,” Biden campaign spokesman Charles Lutvak said in a statement to CNN. “Our team is prepared and continuing the fight for democracy, we are defending the right to free and fair elections against Republicans’ junk lawsuits, and we will defeat Donald Trump once and for all in November.”

In Michigan, the DNC’s amicus brief responding to the voter roll lawsuit states that after losing the 2020 presidential election, Republicans filed dozens of lawsuits seeking to invalidate election results — including several in the Wolverine State — and lost.

“This case fits that dangerous pattern of unsubstantiated election-related claims, which serve only to undermine public confidence in the electoral process,” the brief says of the RNC’s lawsuit. “In reality, the greatest threat to public confidence in the integrity of our elections is not fraud or voter-roll maintenance, but unfounded attacks on our elections themselves.”

Similarly in Nevada, the DNC’s brief says that the Republican lawsuit there is “designed less to address any real (much less substantial) issue with Nevada’s voter registration lists, than to sow public distrust in the security and integrity of our electoral systems.”

“This lawsuit is not meant to protect the integrity of upcoming elections, but instead to provide the RNC with ammunition to undermine the general election’s results,” the brief says. “Indeed, former President Trump is already asserting interference with the 2024 general election, months before a single vote has been cast or counted.”

The Biden reelection campaign has since last year been building out a legal team and infrastructure aimed at taking on Republican efforts to question election integrity.

Biden campaign officials told CNN that they see Republicans this year as trying to re-use a playbook from 2020 of casting doubt on and sowing distrust about election results — and doing so well before the first ballots have even been cast. And this time, the campaign argues, Republicans are acting even earlier in the election cycle and with more force.

The RNC, too, has pursued an aggressive legal strategy, and officials say they have engaged in more 80 election-related lawsuits, including the litigation in Nevada and Michigan that seek to cancel voter registrations ahead of November’s elections.

The top election officials in Nevada and Michigan – both Democrats – have argued that those lawsuits are groundless.

Critics say that Republicans are relying on a faulty formula to arrive at the claim that the states’ voter rolls are bloated. Their lawsuits compare current day voter roll numbers to population estimates from a rolling survey conducted by the Census — a survey that looks at a five-year period that started several years ago. In a letter to the RNC’s lawyers last year, an official in the Nevada Attorney General’s office defended the state’s maintenance of its voter registration records and called the party’s methodology akin to “comparing apples to orangutans.”

In Michigan, a lawsuit brought by the RNC and other Republican groups accuses Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson of issuing guidance “covertly” that instructed election clerks to apply a “presumption of validity” when checking voters’ signatures on returned absentee ballots against the signatures on file with local election offices.

In its Monday filing, the DNC argues that Benson’s guidance is consistent with Michigan law and makes clear that clerks must review all signatures.

Some of the RNC’s recent litigation has taken particular aim at mail-in and absentee voting – which Trump has baselessly argued corrupts elections.

In addition to the Michigan signature verification challenge, for instance, a separate lawsuit brought last week by the RNC and the Trump campaign targets Nevada’s mail-in voting law and aims to block the counting of any ballots received after Election Day.

That lawsuit focuses on the state’s mail voting law, enacted in 2021. Nevada permits the tallying of ballots received up to four days after the election if they are postmarked by Election Day or received up to three days later if the postmarked date cannot be determined.

The Republican lawsuit claims that counting those ballots “dilutes” what it says are “honest votes” and “disproportionately harms” GOP candidates and voters because Democrats are more likely than Republicans in the state to vote by mail.

The RNC also has sued to overturn a Mississippi law that permits tallying ballots received after the election. In all, 19 states permit counting mailed ballots received after Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Trump, as his party’ presumptive presidential nominee, engineered a takeover of the RNC in March, installing a new chairman, Michael Whatley, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as the party’s co-chair. Over the weekend, another recent hire, Charlie Spies, resigned as the RNC’s top lawyer — just two months after taking the position.

Spies and the RNC cited potential time conflicts with Spies’ commitments to his law firm clients as the reason he left.

Sources told CNN that Trump grew displeased with Spies, a veteran GOP election lawyer, after Trump’s allies pointed to clips of Spies criticizing false claims of a stolen 2020 election.

In an interview Sunday on Fox News, Lara Trump cast the recent litigation in Nevada over mail-in ballots as “one of the many lawsuits we have out across this country to ensure that … we have a free, fair and transparent election.”

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