In the days after the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, there was widespread hope across Beltway media that the violence of that day would cool the Donald Trump-fueled Republican hostility towards democracy. Not only had the insurrection itself failed but so had all the other efforts Trump had made to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump and his allies had made over 200 overtures to state officials to throw out the results of the election, according to the final report of the House-appointed January 6 committee. Trump filed 62 lawsuits in an effort to have the results evacuated, only to see the effort totally fail. A strong majority of Americans are repulsed by Trump’s attacks on democracy. It was reasonable to expect the GOP to back down from these unpopular anti-democratic activities.
However, the opposite happened in 2022. A new report from Democracy Docket chronicling the election litigation in 2022 shows the trend moving forward, with Republicans continuing to file large numbers of lawsuits geared toward making it harder for Americans to vote or for those votes to be counted. In 2022, there were 93 anti-voting lawsuits filed across the country — fairly steady from 2020, when there were 95 lawsuits aimed at making it harder to vote or attempting to throw out votes. And in one aspect, things are getting worse: In 2022, the flood of lawsuits spread throughout state and federal races, instead of being driven by Trump’s single-minded obsession with suing his way to victory in the 2020 presidential race.
There’s only one explanation, he argues, for this deluge: “Republicans found themselves unable to persuade a majority of the electorate to support their candidates. This sparked a conviction among many on the right that their best hope to win elections rested on restricting who can vote and shaping the electorate.”