Democrat Party operative Marc Elias boasted recently on social media that his law firm is “now litigating 55 voting and election cases in 21 states.”
In the middle of the 2024 election season, the Elias Law Group is waging a full-on assault on election laws by pushing “fringe legal theories” in key battleground states, the Washington Examiner cited an election law expert as saying in a March 15 analysis.
Just this week, Elias’s litigation against Republican-drawn maps was successful as the Wisconsin Supreme Court, with its new Democrat majority, agreed to reconsider the court’s 2022 holding in Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, which disallowed the use of ballot drop boxes in the state, according to Honest Elections Project Director Jason Snead.
“I don’t think that there is any election integrity law that is considered safe in the Wisconsin Supreme Court at this point,” said Snead, referencing the 2023 election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz, a left-wing jurist who flipped the previous Republican majority on the state’s high court.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to take up the drop box dispute for oral arguments on May 13. Republican Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote in a dissent that there’s no reason to revisit the decision, arguing the 4-3 left-leaning majority was signaling its “shameless effort to readjust the balance of political power in Wisconsin.”
Snead said it was “quite shocking to see a justice write a dissent so strident to say that the outcome of this case is predetermined” but noted it wasn’t that surprising because Protasiewicz signaled to voters how she would rule from the bench before she was elected.
Elias Law Group filed its lawsuit against the ballot drop box ban in July on behalf of two left-leaning organizations and a Dane County man. The lawsuit also seeks to undo a September 2022 decision by a Waukesha County judge that barred election clerks from filing missing address information on absentee ballots, though the seven justices are expected to weigh in only on the ballot box question.
“He’s been pushing a few other, you know, fairly aggressive, I’d call them fringe legal theories to try to justify his cases,” Snead said of Elias.
In 2024, Elias no longer has Covid to rely on to force courts to change election procedures.
In 2020, “he dressed it all up as litigation specifically targeted to deal with the problems of Covid voting,” Snead said, adding that Elias “keeps pushing the same agenda, even though the justification for that agenda is always changing.”
“Elias has averted his focus from election laws passed by Michigan’s Democratic-controlled legislature, though he has voiced opposition to Republican efforts to gain access to state voter roll maintenance records,” Kaelan Deese wrote for the Examiner.
After Republicans failed to gain access to Michigan’s voter roll records, the RNC filed a lawsuit seeking to purge “ineligible” registrants, as the complaint states that at least 53 counties across the state have more active registered voters than adults over the age of 18.
In Pennsylvania, the Elias-founded election blog Democracy Docket is working to hit back at a lawsuit filed on March 14 that takes aim at dop boxes in Allegheny County, which covers Pittsburgh, the area where Biden reportedly defeated Trump by his widest margin in 2020.
“But ultimately, this lawsuit is not really about transparency, it is about continuing Republicans’ relentless attacks on all efforts that make it easier for voters to cast their ballots,” Democracy Docket said of the Pennsylvania lawsuit, which is backed by the conservative group Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections.
My firm is now litigating 55 voting and election cases in 21 states. I anticipate at least one more this week.
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) February 25, 2024
