Republicans and Trump only have one closing strategy—chaos

As Election Day dawns, the GOP continues to pursue lawsuits focused on keeping people from voting or, if they manage to vote, making sure those votes aren’t counted. It’s the only strategy they have available as their candidate melts down when his microphone makes him sad, threatens former Rep. Liz Cheney with violent imagery, and declares he should never have left the White House in 2021. So the GOP is going to keep doing what it has been doing since Trump’s 2020 loss: using the legal system to make voting harder and more chaotic.

In Pennsylvania, a right-wing group calling itself Citizen_AG waited until Oct. 29 to sue the state over supposed concerns about the state’s voter rolls. This lawsuit allows the right to inject into the discourse a big scary-sounding number, alleging that over 277,000 registrants on the voter rolls didn’t respond to confirmation notices ahead of the 2020 election and didn’t vote in 2020 or 2022, and that, therefore, they may not be eligible to vote in the state. 

The group’s preferred solution? Unsurprisingly, it asked the state to be ordered to bar any of those allegedly inactive voters from voting unless they follow a procedure in federal law.  

Citizen_AG, which Democracy Docket’s Matt Cohen notes had never filed any voting-related lawsuits before last week, filed a similar lawsuit in Arizona. However, in the Grand Canyon State, the big scary number is supposedly 1.2 million potentially ineligible voters still on the rolls. 

On Friday, a federal district judge in Arizona denied the request that those voters be stopped from voting, but granted Citizen_AG’s request that the state provide its voter rolls. Mercifully, the state has until Dec. 2 to do so. Of course, the GOP can also still appeal that decision.

And it doesn’t end there.