Republicans have peddled so many lies about voting and elections that it is sometimes hard to keep track of them all. There are the big lies, like that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, that are so deeply ingrained in the party’s DNA that they are memorized and repeated as an article of faith.
Then there are the smaller, more strategic lies Republicans offer to placate their supporters and shape the national narrative. In that second bucket are two Republican talking points that we can now put to rest.
First, Republicans have tried to sell to an eager media the idea that they have learned their lesson regarding mail-in voting and Donald Trump now supports it. As I detailed recently in a piece on Democracy Docket, this is simply untrue. Donald Trump continues to attack mail-in voting and Republicans continue to spend millions on litigation aimed at crippling it.
The second narrative suggests that Democrats and progressive groups are actively using the courts to bring last minute litigation to change the rules of voting. In their telling, Republicans are the “victims” of a surge of cases aimed at upending the settled expectations of voters.
The data proves that the opposite is true. While pro-voting litigation in election years has seen a modest increase, we are witnessing an unprecedented surge of last-minute litigation from the GOP and its right-wing allies aimed at restricting voting rights and making election administration more difficult.
From January 2020 until Sept. 16, 2020, Republicans and their allies had filed 13 voting related lawsuits. During the comparable period in 2022, it grew to 41 cases — a threefold increase. This year that number doubled again to 82.
By contrast, pro-democracy groups during the same period filed 27 cases in 2020, 35 cases in 2022 and 41 pro-voting cases this year.
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