Summary: Both parties are using a large set of lawyers to protect their interests this election.
What has the voting apparatus become? With Election Day on Tuesday, the nation has been vamping up its interest on political issues. The parties, meanwhile, have been herding their lawyers in preparation to make the entire voting apparatus run as smoothly (in their party’s favor) as possible. The NAACP and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, as well as other liberal organizations working with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, say they’ve got from 1,000 to 2,000 volunteer attorneys and others working in 18 states to address election problems. The Republican National Lawyers Association meanwhile has prepared 1,000 lawyers to address Election Day problems.
The problems in question are myriad. With so many elections running close, recalls and charges of voter fraud are sure to abound. All the controversy over voter fraud, voter suppression, voter ID’s and so forth are likely to distract us from the issues at hand: more and more energy is being funneled into the voting apparatus itself, and not into what the apparatus was designed to do, to let the nation decide on who it wants to lead them and why.
“With six of the GOP’s top-targeted races down to margins of less than a point, both parties say any state is ripe for a post-election legal battle,” reported The Hill. “Mark Elias, national Democrat’s go-to election lawyer, said he’s gearing for issues everywhere.”
“Rumors of planned voting fraud abound in the week leading up to it – Trading hamburgers for votes in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race; poll watchers challenging the eligibility of every voter in Louisiana to cause huge lines; party operatives filling out and turning in mail ballots for dead voters in Colorado; misinformation intended to steer people to the wrong polling places in North Carolina and elsewhere.”
The entire game sounds variegated, as if there were the level of straightforward politics, the ideas and programs a given politician or party is supposedly standing for, and then there is the tricky level of voter manipulation by which the necessary votes are culled like some natural resource that can be lawfully or unlawfully exploited.
That Election Day gambits have become such a meaningful consideration for voting outcomes necessitates the swarms of lawyers, either paid or volunteer, who ostensibly want to see justice done, especially if it is in favor of their favored party.