Does pre-election legal flurry mean post-election chaos in U.S.?

Does pre-election legal flurry mean post-election chaos in U.S.?

In a U.S. election where the possibilities range from a razor-thin margin between the two major candidates to one where either Donald Trump and Kamala Harris sweeps seven swing states, there seems at least one certainty — that Republicans in particular will be ready with legal papers should the presidential race appear to slip from their grasp.

Republicans have already filed the lion’s share of at least 130 election-related lawsuits, according to a Reuters report on Thursday, with Bloomberg Law putting the number of cases even higher. The challenges fall into the broad categories of disputes over voting technologies, voting methods and voting eligibility.

“Republicans and their allies are flooding the system with litigation,” Democratic Party elections lawyer Marc Elias said on X this week. “We have already seen more voting cases in 2024 than in any year, ever.” 

Unsurprisingly, notes Bloomberg Law, the lawsuits are concentrated mostly in the seven perceived swing states that are crucial in the presidential race.

Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent with Mother Jones, told CBC’s Front Burner this week that the spectre of 2020 post-election chaos is looming large over this year’s vote.

“There have been debates in the U.S. over how voting laws should look in terms of casting a ballot, but I think what Republicans have done is they have now added this whole dimension of fighting over election results — trying to throw out results altogether — or change how elections are run and certified,” said Berman.

Federal act strengthened after 2020

Trump, then the incumbent, infamously claimed four years ago that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate, never fully explaining how Republican wins in the House and Senate weren’t also corrupted. Other Republican activists balked at the expansion of mail-in voting, absentee voting and drop boxes in the pre-vaccine months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Millions of registered Republicans, numerous polls suggest, still believe the election was not “won fair and square.”

Trump this week insisted there was a “peaceful transfer of power” in 2021. That’s contradicted by more than 900 convictions, many for violent offences, of those present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, infuriated about the election results. Loaded guns were among the weapons recovered, while the man famously photographed in then-speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office was carrying a 950,000-volt stun gun.

One expects Washington, D.C., will be heavily policed in this election cycle and its aftermath, and there are other reasons to believe there won’t be an exact repeat.

Trump is now a private citizen without access to levers of power and officials within the government sympathetic to his claims of fraud.

The federal Electoral Count Reform Act was updated in 2022 to indicate that the vice-president’s role in overseeing the disposition of state results is “ministerial” and does not include “power to solely determine, accept, reject or otherwise adjudicate disputes over electors.” It was clearly a response to the pressure campaign Trump directed at his vice-president, Mike Pence.

In at least five of the seven battleground states, Reuters reports, officials have been investigated, indicted and even jailed for trying to interfere with the vote or delay certifying results in the past four years, potentially a deterrent.

There have also been denials of plans that election experts said would have only muddied waters.

Georgia, for example, was ground zero for Trump’s attempts to seize victory from the 2020 defeat, leading to a racketeering indictment involving several individuals, including the former president.

This year, a Republican-tilted board in Georgia has tried to impose an across-the-board hand count requirement while enabling county officials in some cases to object to certifying results. Those plans appear to have been quashed this week, with one judge questioning the late timing of the proposals and their possibility to add “uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process.”

And at least one survey, from Monmouth University, suggests Americans are a bit more confident than four years ago that the election “will be conducted fairly and accurately.”

Overseas voting process questioned

In April, the Republican Party promised to aggressively challenge, if necessary, state laws in the areas of voting machine testing, early voting, mail ballot processing and post-election audits and recounts.

Trump has even made what one official described as unprecedented and false claims about overseas voting, which is dominated by U.S. military families, and in Pennsylvania, where more baseless claims about Toronto-founded Dominion Voting Systems — which won a massive defamation settlement from Fox News — were recently rejected.

Claire Zunk, a Republican National Committee spokesperson, said in a statement to Reuters that Republicans had secured important wins in 2024 voting-related cases, such as a U.S. Supreme Court ruling reviving proof of citizenship requirements in Arizona and a Georgia ruling denying a push by voting rights groups to extend voter registration deadlines due to Hurricane Helene.

Democrats, meanwhile, have stepped in to protest some attempts to purge voter rolls, most notably in Alabama.

Just Security, a U.S. national security law and policy resource out of New York University, has been regularly tracking what it considers to be the top 10 most important cases.

Election workers face threats

The potential for violence is still top of mind. Peter Montgomery, who monitors militant groups at the People For the American Way, a liberal think-tank, cited the capitals of battleground states as places to watch in the Reuters report. Threats to election workers are also no longer an unheard-of phenomenon. 

The Department of Homeland Security has even considered the possibility that drop boxes could be bombed, Wired reported on Thursday.

Finally, a survey out of Johns Hopkins University suggested that registered Republicans who believe Trump lost unfairly in 2020 are more inclined to believe there will again be election problems, including political violence, than other types of voters.

“Expecting chaos can fuel more chaos,” warned Lilliana Mason, an associate political science professor at the school.

What would Speaker, SCOTUS do?

In the political realm, some Harris supporters are eyeing Speaker Mike Johnson warily, should the Republicans retain control of the House. Johnson said he’ll certify the presidential result regardless of who the victor is, “if the election is free and fair and legal.” But his former Republican colleague Liz Cheney said she doubted Johnson would “fulfil his constitutional obligations.”

Berman characterized Trumpworld legal challenges that were dismissed or not even fully pursued in 2020 as “seat-of-the-pants” affairs. The Supreme Court did not have to intervene in an especially meaningful way.

But Berman has an overriding question in 2024, in light of Trump having appointed three of the justices on a top court that now has a 6-3 conservative majority.

“What if it’s a closer election and there’s a more legitimate dispute about the votes, more like the 2000 election in Florida?”

Published at Fri, 18 Oct 2024 12:37:30 +0000

Death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar offers exits from the war, but will Israel take them?

In the end, Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, who masterminded the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and then spent more than a year evading one of the largest and most destructive manhunts in history, may finally have met his demise almost by fluke.

As part of a regular military patrol — rather than acting on specific intelligence — it appears a group of Israeli soldiers and tank crew members opened fire on three suspected militants in a building in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Wednesday.

It was only after they removed the rubble that they discovered the body of what appeared to be the world’s most wanted man, dead among the debris.

“A year ago he was victorious. Now he is eliminated. Where will you be in a year?” Amir Ohana, the Speaker of Israel’s Knesset, wrote on X as the news broke Thursday afternoon.   

He urged Sinwar’s followers in Gaza to lay down their weapons, suggesting it’s pointless for the group to continue with the armed struggle against Israel now that its leader is dead.

Sinwar, the Hamas military chief who spent 22 years in jail for killing two Israeli soldiers, meticulously planned and launched the Oct. 7 attacks that killed more than 1,200 in Israel and captured 251 hostages.  

Many — likely most — Israelis saw Sinwar as evil incarnate.

Inflection point

His long-sought death represents an inflection point not just for Hamas and Israel’s war in Gaza but possibly also for the broader Palestinian struggle for self-determination. 

Less clear is whether his demise will hasten the end of Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon or de-escalate the dangerous situation with Iran — or if the moment will pass with little noticeable difference.

Israeli analysts say the most immediate impact of Sinwar’s killing is that it will close an open wound which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will get credit for.

“It is very momentous news,” said Miri Eisin, a retired colonel with the Israel Defence Forces and intelligence specialist. “It’s something that had to happen.”

For Netanyahu to be able to say Sinwar caused Oct. 7 attacks and is now dead, “for him, is a win,” she told CBC News.

Netanyahu’s first comments after Sinwar’s death appeared to suggest that, at least in Gaza, there will be no immediate change in tactics.

More than 42,000 people in the Palestinian territory have been killed by Israeli attacks over the past year — with a further 76,000 injured, more than a million and a half people displaced and most of the buildings and other structures razed to the ground. 

“Evil suffered a heavy blow today,” said Netanyahu. “But our task is not complete. We will continue full force until all your loved ones, our loved ones, are home.”

Hamas is believed to still be holding 101 Israelis captive in Gaza, although many are no longer believed to be alive.

For months, talks mediated by Qatar tried and failed to find an elusive formula to stop the fighting, free the hostages and release thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.    

While publicly, the United States blamed Sinwar and Hamas for blocking a deal, many Israelis, and especially the families of hostages, have said they believe Netanyahu is also to blame for adding extra conditions at the last minute.

Even before the DNA results had come back with incontrovertible proof that the corpse in the debris was Sinwar’s, the families of hostages in Gaza were urging Netanyahu to “leverage” his death into a deal to secure their release.

“The elimination of Sinwar is an important milestone on the way to the real victory, which will only be achieved with the return of the 101 abductees,” a statement from a group of those families said.

But whether freeing the remaining hostages or exchanging them for Palestinian prisoners has been made any easier by killing Sinwar is debatable. 

“I’m pessimistic,” said Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer in security studies at Kings College London.

“Who are you going to negotiate with if there is no central command within [the Hamas] network to negotiate?” he told BBC News.

Beyond the fate of the hostages in Gaza, Netanyahu’s statement Wednesday also touched on the other wars raging on and around Israel’s borders.

“In Gaza, Beirut and the Middle East, light is prevailing over darkness,” he said.

In recent weeks, Israel has assassinated most of Hezbollah’s top leadership, critically weakening the organization in Lebanon. A potential aerial strike against Iran could also land a harsh blow against Israel’s most powerful nemesis.

But despite Netanyahu’s vision for a re-imagined Middle East, Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, says he doubts Sinwar’s death will enable Netanyahu to make it happen. 

“The key question still remains whether Netanyahu is ready and willing to bring this to a close not only in Gaza, but also in Lebanon and against Iran,” he told BBC News.

Other Middle East experts caution about attaching too much significance to the death of a single leader, however great their importance.

Hassan Barari, a professor of international relations at Qatar University, also says he believes it’s extremely unlikely Hamas will just give up or turn over the remaining hostages because its leader has been killed.

“The conflict is… deeper than one person. It’s about people’s struggle for self-determination,” he said. 

In just a few weeks, Israel has succeeded in eliminating almost every senior member of Hezbollah, and yet the group continues to put up intense resistance to Israel’s ground incursions into southern Lebanon and fires hundreds of rockets daily at Israeli communities.

Even as the news of Sinwar’s death was breaking, Israel’s military announced the death of five of its soldiers from the Golani Brigade, which is spearheading the combat operations in southern Lebanon. 

In Gaza, a videographer working for CBC News found few people who felt Sinwar’s death would slow Israel’s attacks or lead to an improvement in their lives in any way.

“This is not the first [death] in the Palestinian revolution and resistance,” said Thabet Al-Amur, a writer and political analyst in Khan Younis.

“Big and small leaders were killed in Palestine’s journey for revolution.” 

While Hamas has ruled Gaza with an iron fist since 2005, there have been increasing indications of dissent and eroding support over the past year.

Still, as word of Sinwar’s death spread Thursday, the only condemnation was for Israel. 

Gaza “is in shambles, it’s not suitable for living or being in or anything,” said Mohammed Qaasim, 33.   

He said the Israelis “will not stop — not for a head or two, or if the whole Palestinian population dies.” 

Published at Tue, 17 Sep 2024 18:38:40 +0000