Republicans have filed five election integrity lawsuits recently in Arizona, attracting the ire of election fraud denier and progressive attorney Marc Elias.
Elias issued a video last week analyzing some of the lawsuits, which he described as “anti-voting lawsuits” that seek to make it “harder to vote and easier to cheat,” part of a “plan Republicans have to undermine elections and suppress voters.”
Elias’ Democracy Docket podcast co-host Paige Moskowitz said the video intended to review the lawsuits to see what “challenges voters may face in November,” echoing Elias’ claim that the litigation sought to make it harder to vote.
Elias (pictured above) said, “Republicans are going after three things: They want to undermine election administration, disenfranchise voters to make voting harder, and they want to subvert elections.”
He said they’re doing it because they don’t have majority support from the electorate, which is “an existential threat to the Republican Party.”
He said, “Republicans no longer try to compete for majorities of the voters,” pointing out that Republicans have lost the popular vote in every presidential election since 2000. He did not address that Republicans campaigned differently than Democrats, focusing their efforts more on the swing states than the Democrats instead of campaigning to win the popular vote.
Elias argued that since Republicans allegedly cannot win majorities as well anymore, “they’re left with using the rules of voting.” He said one of the ways they’ve done this is through gerrymandering congressional districts. However, Democrats pushed back with litigation, and he said after 10 years of fighting it in the courts, they successfully stopped gerrymandering in Wisconsin. He did not address the fact that in many states, Democrats have successfully controlled gerrymandering to favor their party instead.
Elias said Republicans’ recent way of dealing with no longer winning majorities is turning to the courts, bringing lawsuits to “undermine pro-voting rules” and “attacking laws on the books because they’re too pro-voter.” He said this isn’t just “defending voter suppression laws”; it goes “a step further.”
Moscowitz asked him why Republicans don’t just change the laws. Elias responded that “Democrats have done a good job getting Democrats in office,” pointing to their election victories in 2022 in Arizona. Democrat Katie Hobbs was elected governor and Democrat Adrian Fontes was elected secretary of state in 2022, but numerous polls have found that a majority of voters believe there was election fraud in those races. A poll conducted a year ago by Rasmussen Reports found that 55 percent of likely Arizona voters believe it is likely that problems with the 2022 election in Maricopa County affected the outcome. Rasmussen Reports conducted a late exit poll which found that Republican Kari Lake defeated Hobbs by eight points, and Republican Mark Finchem defeated Fontes by one point.
Elias claimed that even when Republicans have majorities in the state legislatures, they are frequently unable to pass election integrity laws. He said they’re having difficulty changing laws originally passed by Republicans.
Elias said almost a dozen similar lawsuits have been filed by Republicans and their allies nationwide. The lawyer is on pace to file 200 lawsuits before the election this year, which is more lawsuits than before the 2022 election. He said former President Donald Trump had Ronna McDaniels removed as Republican National Committee (RNC) chair partly because she wasn’t aggressive enough with litigation.
Elias said Republicans are so focused on Arizona because it has become a swing state and because they are “afraid of Election Procedures Manuals (EPM).” Arizona’s EPM has become the subject of lawsuits due to Democratic secretaries of state making changes to it that conflict with state law. Three of the five lawsuits involve the EPM, which law requires to be revised and updated every two years.
Elias minimized the lawsuits, stating that the EPM is merely a “rulebook” to create “accurate elections,” and “is not normally a controversial document.” He pointed out that draft versions were released for public comment. He said it “simply documents the way election officials conduct elections” but did not address the substance of the lawsuits, which generally assert that the revisions violate the law, which includes trying to make legal after the fact illegal actions taken by election officials.
Elias continued minimizing the lawsuits over the EPM by pointing out that from 1995 to 2019, the EPM’s revisions were drafted by Republican secretaries of state, since Arizona was a Republican state until the recent losses in 2020 and 2022.
He claimed that “Republicans now fear that unless they rewrite the rules,” the state will continue the “slide” to becoming more “Democratic.”
Elias reduced the lawsuit filed by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club in February over the EPM to a description of trying to stop “rules prohibiting harassment. Who does that?” he asked. “Who files lawsuits to be on the pro-side of harassing and intimidating voters? You’d think if there was one thing there might be a bipartisan consensus on it is that we should not have people threatening, harassing, or intimidating or coercing voters.”
The lawsuit said the proposed changes improperly expose protected political speech to criminal prosecution and have an unconstitutional chilling effect. It explained that the new prohibitions don’t merely stop voter harassment but are broad and vague, going beyond what the state legislature defined as criminal harassment.
Elias discussed an isolated instance that occurred at a ballot drop box in 2020.
“They are trying to reinstate the horrendous activities we saw in the past,” he said, “when we saw armed people in body armor, taping our drop boxes with video cameras, intimidating people who were — wait for it, put in, dropping off their ballots, that’s it, that’s all they were doing.” He didn’t mention that no one was prosecuted afterward.
Elias said, “They’re simply trying to create a safe environment. … Is that what the Republican Party and conservative movement has become?” He said that type of activity will be coming from a “right-wing constellation of voter suppression groups” in the next few months.
Moskowitz added, “Voter intimidation is not just illegal on the state level [but] at the federal level as well. Right, Mark?” Elias did not answer the question since it implied that the additional rules were redundant if they were already in law.
Elias said the only thing he agrees with Trump on is that “the RNC is a terrible organization.” He denounced the RNC for “spending their donors’ money to bring litigation to challenge voting, to restrict voting.”
He criticized the RNC for pushing a Get Out to Vote (GOTV) effort, which includes encouraging voters to turn in mail-in ballots while filing lawsuits challenging aspects of mail-in voting. He said the RNC is “a total fraud.”
Next, he criticized a lawsuit that Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould filed related to hand-counting ballots. Gould sued Attorney General Kris Mayes for threatening to prosecute him if he voted to hand count the next county election.
Elias claimed that hand counting “goes against Arizona law,” but he didn’t cite the statutes or explain how. He claimed the lawsuits continue since Republicans don’t want to certify Democrats as the winners. He said there weren’t many efforts to hand count until Trump lost in 2020. He predicted that Gould’s lawsuit wouldn’t be successful, implying that it was because Elias’ firm was involved.
“I have nothing but contempt for the waste of resources that goes into these repeated efforts to undermine this simple process,” Elias said.
A “more alarming” lawsuit to Elias was one from “our friend Stephen Miller.” Miller, a former Trump advisor, heads up America First Legal (AFL), which filed a complaint against Maricopa County alleging various types of election wrongdoing. Elias claimed the lawsuit was withdrawn and filed in Yavapai County instead because AFL realized the Maricopa County judges were biased. He said it was the “same lawsuit,” and AFL was “bootstrapping” the lawsuit through a “venue shopping exercise” into a friendlier rural county.
AFL said it transferred the lawsuit because Maricopa County was filing “frivolous procedural motions” to “sabotage” the case. The Arizona Rules of Civil Procedure allow a plaintiff to change venue in civil lawsuits without providing any affidavit. The new complaint also added allegations against Yavapai County. Elias said that he will be moving to intervene in the case, but an attorney who preferred not to be identified told The Arizona Sun Times that the court will likely deny his entrance due to lack of standing.
Elias talked about his legal wins, relaying how Fox News host Lou Dobbs told Miller during his show that he should hire Elias for $500 million so Republicans can start winning in court. He didn’t address the fact that judges who crack down on election corruption risk having their careers destroyed and being targeted — including their families — by unhinged protesters at their homes and in public. The 65 Project was formed to target conservative election attorneys, destroying their careers and disbarring them.
Elias said he’s tracked 98 lawsuits from the 2020 election. Of those, he said 17 were filed in Arizona, and 15 of the Arizona cases have concluded, with 14 of the 15 as victories for the Left or neutral. He claimed that Trump lost over 60 of the post-election lawsuits. However, statistical PhD John Droz and his team of statistical PhDs found that out of 92 election lawsuits from 2020, only 32 were decided on the merits, and within those 32, Trump and/or the Republican plaintiff prevailed on 24.
Elias said the lawsuits are bad even if the Republicans don’t win them. He said they are bringing them with increasing frequency, and said, “Smart people realize Republicans have three goals with these lawsuits.” The first goal is hoping they win, and the second goal is motivating their base. He said that’s a “tough spot,” since the “operative club knows it’s counterproductive,” which is why they’ve rolled out a massive GOTV effort. He said the establishment Republicans can’t avoid the election integrity issue since “Trump is all in on it, they have to tell their people that elections are rigged since Trump has built his campaign around it.”
The third goal of the lawsuits has been underreported, Elias said, “They are laying the predicate to why they will lose in 2024.”
He said Trump and his team are engaging in “serial lying.”
“The lying litigation creates a grievance mentality based on the big lie,” the attorney said.
He said Lake and Abe Hamadeh lost because they were “bad candidates.” He said the January 6 protest “engaged in insurrection” because Republicans wanted to “justify their cheating.” He didn’t explain how Republicans cheat. He claimed that Republicans “are laying the predicate for the next January 6 … to gin them up to be even angrier.”
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Marc Elias” by Elias Law Group. Background Photo “Courtroom” by Clyde Robinson. CC BY 2.0.
