Following Donald Trump's defeat in 2020, we witnessed an explosion of voting and election-related litigation. Sparked by a wave of voter suppression laws and Republican efforts to justify the "Big Lie," nearly 600 lawsuits were filed over the next four years — reaching almost every state in the country.
Leading up to the 2024 election, we anxiously followed the twists and turns as laws, rules, regulations and interpretations were litigated in court. Barely a day passed without a significant court decision about who could vote, how votes would be counted, and whether they would be accurately certified.
The impression was that both sides were leaving no stone unturned — pro-democracy organizations fighting tooth and nail to enfranchise every eligible voter, while the GOP and its allies worked equally hard to disqualify voters and discard ballots wherever they could.
Yet beneath the headlines and lawsuit tallies lies a more uneven picture of democracy in the courts. While voting rules in battleground states were aggressively litigated, far fewer lawsuits were filed in the vast majority of the country.
Pennsylvania alone was the subject of 88 voting-related lawsuits — more than the bottom 29 states combined. In fact, the top nine battleground states accounted for nearly two-thirds of all voting litigation nationwide. While each of those nine states saw more than 20 lawsuits, seven states saw only one case, and three saw none at all during the same period.
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