The midterm elections are less than 70 days away, but a handful of outstanding legal cases in federal courts and at the Supreme Court could directly affect the elections on everything from mail-in voting and how much party committees will be forced to spend on television ads.
The GOP and Democratic Party are both beefing up their legal teams to deal with potential election interference claims. President Donald Trump has repeatedly challenged the results of the 2020 election, most recently on Thursday, saying that the “election was rigged.” He has also continued to claim he wants to ensure elections are safe from noncitizens illegally voting.
Meanwhile, the high court is facing multiple challenges from both parties over changes to mail-in voting and campaign coordination with committees. Multiple state courts are also dealing with redistricting questions that will affect the congressional maps voters use in 2028.
Despite the legal battles, election experts claim the voting process remains secure.
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, assured voters that if they “can put the noise aside, what they’ll find is their voting process looks a lot like their voting process in 2024.”
“That it’s just as safe, that it’s just as convenient, that their options are there: early voting, mail voting, in-person voting,” Becker added.
Here are the top issues that are still pending before the Nov. 3 election.
Trump’s mail-in voting executive order sparks legal battle
The Supreme Court handed Trump a victory on Monday when it paved a path for his executive order limiting mail-in voting to be implemented. Trump signed the order in March.
Two days later, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston handed Trump another victory by lifting an order that blocked the U.S. Postal Service from implementing the executive order in time for the midterm elections.
But Democratic state officials have already filed a challenge against the ruling, meaning the high court could issue a ruling before the November elections.
North Carolina is set to begin sending out ballots Sept. 4 overseas and to military voters, ratcheting up the stakes of the legal battle even as Trump insists his executive order is necessary.
“North Carolina is great … it’s a great place,” Trump told reporters on Thursday about how states can implement the order in time for the elections.
“I won it all three times,” Trump continued. “They do some mail-in ballots, but basically they ruled on the legitimacy and the way we want to make them legitimate. And it was a great ruling for the Republicans.”
Becker, the election expert, said he expects the legal drama to be resolved soon by the Boston court.
“I think it’s very unlikely that, despite the temporary win for the president on a purely procedural grounds, I think it’s very likely that the order is blocked for 2026 completely,” Becker added.
Democrats counter the GOP’s election integrity efforts
Nearly two dozen Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Postal Service’s rules on mail-in voting.
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, is co-led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the attorneys general of Nevada, Washington state, and Massachusetts.
The Democratic National Committee, along with its sister committees, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Democratic Governors Association, also filed a preliminary injunction against Trump’s executive order this week.
“We will not stand by while Trump and Republicans try to unnecessarily inject chaos and confusion into our elections, just weeks before voting begins,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), DNC Chairman Ken Martin, DCCC Chairwoman Suzan DelBene (D-WA), DSCC Chairwoman Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and DGA Chairman Andy Beshear (D-KY) in a joint statement.
In March, the DNC sued the Trump administration to determine whether armed personnel such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers or Border Patrol agents would appear at polling locations and ballot drop boxes. The DNC alleged that 11 Freedom of Information Act requests filed to the Department of Justice were not met with adequate responses.
Last week, the DNC again sued the Trump administration over potential plans to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election materials before the midterm elections.
A DNC official said the committee requested the records to defend the integrity of our elections from attempts to seize lawfully cast ballots and to fight for the First Amendment right of eligible voters to have their voices heard. The DNC cited the seizure of archived ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, in its lawsuit against the DOJ.
Redistricting cases still battling it out in states
The Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision earlier this year enabled southern states to eliminate several majority-minority districts through new congressional maps.
But several states are still battling over maps even with the midterm elections fast approaching.
Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD) and allies faced defeat this week when Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Robert J. Thompson struck down a November ballot question for a state constitutional redistricting amendment.
The amendment would have allowed voters to decide whether or not to allow the Democratic-led General Assembly to redraw the state’s map, which likely would have eliminated the state’s only Republican congressman, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), ahead of the 2028 elections.
The Missouri Supreme Court is also set to resolve a case about whether voters can challenge a congressional map via statewide petition. A lower state court judge recently ruled that referendums do not apply to congressional maps. The Missouri Supreme Court must act quickly; state law bars any addition to ballots after Sept. 8.
This week, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent a lawsuit over Georgia’s 2021 political maps back to a lower court to reexamine in light of the Callais decision.
The 2021 maps were accused of diluting black Georgians’ voting power, but in 2023 U.S. District Judge Steve C. Jones ordered the maps to be redrawn after he ruled that they violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has since been scaled back after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais.
“The appropriate response to such a significant change of law is to vacate and remand, so the district court may reconsider, in the first instance, whether Georgia’s redistricting plans violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act under the updated Callais framework,” the three-judge panel wrote.
Questions remain over committee and candidate coordination
The GOP faced a setback this week when the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that coordinated ad buys between political parties and joint fundraising committees are not entitled to cheaper candidate rates.
The ruling partly reversed a June Supreme Court ruling that allowed unlimited coordinated spending between political parties and candidates.
“This was an incorrect ruling that ignores decades of precedent. We plan on appealing, and this is the first word not the last,” Joanna Rodriguez, the National Republican Senatorial Committee communications director, told the Washington Examiner in a statement.
Stephen Richer, a legal fellow at the Cato Institute, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that “each time one of these things happens, the comparative power of the political parties either grows or lessens.”
“And so when the Supreme Court ruled that the political parties could spend unlimited amounts in consultation with campaigns, that makes the parties more powerful versus just outside interest groups,” Richer added. “This ruling makes them maybe a little less powerful.”
DHS and DOJ face challenges
The legal battle over the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program that allows states to mass upload their voter registration lists and get citizenship data back is still working itself out in court.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened top election officials with criminal charges last month if they did not comply with the program. Mullin also claimed that the program had identified 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. But DHS has not explicitly stated how it has come to those figures.
“There’s significant tension right now between a lot of states and the administration in terms of what’s true and what’s not true,” said Richer. “And you know the administration has alleged a lot of things, especially relating to noncitizens, and of course the states have largely denied that.”
The League of Women Voters led a coalition of organizations in suing DHS in September, claiming the database violated privacy laws. In June, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with the groups ruling the database violated the Social Security Act, Privacy Act, and Administrative Procedure Act and ordered the system dismantled.
A separate Florida lawsuit against DHS was resolved through “a settlement agreement requiring DHS to maintain the new SAVE capabilities that the plaintiffs in the League of Women Voters case were already litigating in the District of Columbia, including Social Security number searches and bulk upload functionality,” according to Democracy Forward.
Judge T. Kent Wetherell II of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida ordered DHS to restore the SAVE program for Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana.
“When the Trump administration came in, they were friendly to these states, states like Florida, and they agreed to a consent decree,” said Becker. “And that the consent decree said that the federal government had to provide whatever citizenship information it had through things like their SAVE system to help states keep their voter lists up to date.”
TWENTY-FOUR STATES SUE TO BLOCK USPS MAIL-IN BALLOT RULE AHEAD OF NOVEMBER ELECTIONS
Becker noted that no voter list maintenance can be done over a 90-day quiet period. “If states are comparing their lists to the SAVE system, which isn’t inherently illegal, if they are doing that, they can’t change any voter records at this point because they’re too close to an election,” he added. “They have to wait till after the election.”
The DOJ has also lost 20 consecutive lawsuits seeking unredacted voter rolls from states, but is still seeking voter rolls from Washington state in a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.