GOP attorneys general charge into battle over state election rules

By Zachary Roth,
Stateline
MARCH 21, 2024

If the 2024 election is contested, Republican AGs look well-placed to push conservative legal arguments that could directly influence court decisions and infiltrate the broader public debate, experts say.

This story is republished from Stateline. Read the original article.

With less than six months before voting begins, the legal jousting over the rules for the 2024 election is already underway. And former President Donald Trump’s campaign is getting support from allies who have stayed mostly under the national radar: red-state attorneys general. ... In court filings made in recent months, these chief state legal officers have advanced a string of arguments — some strikingly far-reaching — that appear designed to lay the groundwork for Republican legal victories in the event of a contested presidential vote, or to otherwise boost Trump and the GOP.

Often led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a loose coalition of Republican-led states has submitted briefs urging judges to:

• Throw out certain mail ballots.
• Weaken long-standing protections against racial discrimination in voting.
• Greenlight gerrymandered district maps.
• Empower partisan state legislatures, rather than courts, to set election rules.

“These are all setting up an argument, potentially, to say that the 2024 election was flawed because of all these state practices that are questionable,” said Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee who has written in depth on the role of state AGs. “The AGs just have been critical in pushing these arguments.”

Marshall’s office did not respond to a request to comment for this story. But last month Marshall also led a coalition of red states in submitting an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to pause Trump’s election subversion trial tied to the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — a stance that aligned the group perfectly with the interests of the Trump campaign. ... And in 2020, many of these same state AGs, including Marshall, sought to have the courts overturn Trump’s election loss.

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