Members-Only: Four Lawsuits & One Angry Billionaire

Paid Subscribers Edition vol. 1

Welcome to the first edition of A Critical Mass of Voters exclusively for paid subscribers. Thank you for your support!

My goal with these newsletters is to highlight democracy or election-related stories that particularly caught my attention during the week. Whether good news or bad, these are the things I want to be sure you don’t miss.

This week I was taken aback by the volume and brazenness of voting-related lawsuits filed by Trump, the Republican party, and right-aligned groups. The lawsuits—four of them just last week—aim to (i) limit who can vote, (ii) make it harder to vote, and/or (iii) make it harder for election officials to do their jobs.

The Republicans don’t believe there’s any real threat to election integrity that forced these lawsuits; if they did, they could have filed the cases months ago. Instead, filing less than two months before the election has two purposes:

1. To undermine the public’s faith on the eve of the election. The simple fact of filing a lawsuit—no matter how unfounded the claims—has the effect of legitimizing those claims to the public because a lawsuit forces a judge sitting in a court of law to consider the facts and render a reasoned opinion about them.