Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias’ history of legal failures as 2024 litigation continues

Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias has had a history of legal misses as he has pushed for changing election laws on behalf of left-wing groups and candidates over the years and continues litigation during the 2024 presidential election cycle.

While Elias has secured many legal victories for Democratic candidates and left-wing organizations through election lawsuits, he has also suffered legal setbacks that have significantly impacted elections.

Elias started Elias Law Group in 2021 after leaving the Democratic law firm Perkins Coie amid the probe by special counsel John Durham into the Steele dossier. He continued representing the Democratic Party and many of its candidates and PACs at his new law firm.

Last year, the Democratic National Committee ended its professional arrangement with Elias over various strategic disagreements. A few months later, President Joe Biden’s campaign split with Elias.

Elias is anything if not relentless. This year Elias will be aiding Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign with post-election lawsuits and recounts, and has provided services for other Democratic groups, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the 2024 Democratic National Convention Committee, the Senate Majority PAC, and House Majority PAC.

On Saturday, Elias posted on X, “My firm is currently litigating 69 voting and election cases in 21 states. We are not done fighting and we are not done winning.”

Election litigation played a significant role in the 2020 presidential election amid irregularities and recounts, and most famously, Democrats insisted that Al Gore was the "real" victor in 2000, taking the case to the Supreme Court. Failed candidate Hillary Clinton and other Democrats would later call Republicans "election deniers," but she herself implied that the 2016 race was "stolen" from her. 

In 2020, there were as many as 400 lawsuits brought by both Republicans and Democrats regarding election procedures and laws as election administration was quickly changed during the COVID-19 lockdowns leading up to the presidential election. Democratic and left-leaning plaintiffs filed election lawsuits, 180 in all. However, only 18% of the Democrats' cases were won, with 40% lost on the merits and 42% lost on procedural grounds.

Elias posted on X on Monday, “With only 22 days until Election Day, there are still 192 voting and election cases pending in 38 states.”

He added that the top five states with election cases are Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

The Honest Elections Project (HEP), an election integrity group, released a report in January with 14 election reforms that it says states should implement. One recommended reform of “Ensur[ing] that elected lawmakers write election laws” explains that "Lawmakers, not courts and bureaucrats, make the laws that govern elections. But partisan special interests, spearheaded by left-wing lawyer Marc Elias and allied left-wing groups, use frivolous lawsuits and collusive settlements to weaken and rewrite election laws for political gain.”

HEP Executive Director Jason Snead previously told Just the News, “One of the biggest threats that we’re gonna face between now and November is gonna be just a torrent of left-wing litigation.”

He explained, “We saw the chaos, we saw the confusion, we saw the rules changes that [Marc] Elias and his operation were able to impose on states through the litigation process of 2020. And they’re already starting that up again this year.”

Elias was successful in ensuring many election changes were made during the COVID-19 lockdowns, such as rules expanding mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes. However, in recent years, he and his law firm have encountered significant setbacks or losses in court. In May, a Wisconsin federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Elias' law firm that sought to toss out the witness requirement for absentee voting. U.S. District Judge James Peterson ruled against their attempt to cancel the witness requirement for voters who cast absentee ballots.

Elias Law Group argued that the witness requirement violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1964. According to the court's opinion, “the most obvious problem” with the attorneys' argument “is that it simply does not make any sense.”

The judge said that the plaintiffs' interpretation of the laws would mean that "every witness would have to determine the voter’s age, residence, citizenship, criminal history, whether the voter is unable or unwilling to vote in person, whether the voter has voted at another location or is planning to do so, whether the voter is capable of understanding the objective of the voting process, whether the voter is under a guardianship, and, if so, whether a court has determined that the voter is competent."

In a lawsuit that began in 2022 in Arizona, Elias’ law firm unsuccessfully argued that the cancellation of multiple voter registrations for a single voter across different counties could result in voter suppression of populations that frequently move. 

Arizona Senate Bill 1260, according to Democracy Docket, "requires county recorders to cancel a voter's registration if they receive confirmation that the voter is registered to vote in another Arizona county, creates a process to remove voters from the state's permanent vote-by-mail list if the voter is registered in another county and makes it a felony to forward a mail-in ballot to a voter who may be registered in another state."

The lawsuit warns that the bill's provision for the cancellation of a person's voter registration does "not require county recorders to notify the voter or ask for their consent before canceling their voter registration," nor require "recorders to make any inquiry at all of the voter, including to find out where the voter currently resides and intends to vote."

In the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in the case last month, the panel ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing. The appellate court vacated the district court’s preliminary injunction, and remanded the case back to the lower court. Earlier this month, the plaintiffs appealed for an en banc decision by the appeals court.

In response to a request for comment, Elias Law Group on Tuesday sent Just the News a press release from September 2022 after the district court granted the preliminary injunction.

In 2022, Elias Law Group filed a lawsuit on behalf of a coalition of left-wing activist groups against the Georgia State Election Board for requiring that absentee ballot applications be signed by hand, claiming it is "voter suppression" and unfair to minority voters.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Georgia over Senate Bill 202, argues that voters "who rely on absentee ballots and lack access to printers, scanners, or fax machines" may be disenfranchised as a result of the state’s "arcane rules and administrative traps." The case is ongoing as the plaintiffs and defendants have filed for summary judgment.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) told Just the News regarding this case in 2022, "Like for all of Marc Elias', Stacey Abrams' and their allies' previous fairy-tale lawsuits, this frivolous suit will lose in court. ... It never ceases to amaze me the extent liberal groups will bend and twist to undo common sense election security measures. They tried to get rid of signature requirements before and failed, and they'll fail again here."

In a lawsuit filed in 2016 by Elias on behalf of the DNC and DSCC against then-Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R), he argued that Arizona’s laws on ballot harvesting and casting ballots in the wrong precinct violated the Voting Rights Act. However, in 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Arizona, keeping the laws intact.

While Elias has repeatedly pushed for increasing mail-in voting, he claimed mailboxes are not secure enough to ensure ballot drop boxes were implemented in Wisconsin. Last year, in a lawsuit over Wisconsin’s ballot drop boxes, Elias Law Group argued that drop boxes are more secure than mailboxes.

“By restricting Wisconsin voters’ options for returning their absentee ballots and having those ballots properly counted, the Drop Box Prohibition severely burdens the right to vote,” the filing states. “Without the opportunity to drop off their absentee ballots at drop boxes, voters must instead rely on the U.S. Postal Service – and its unsecured mailboxes – to deliver their absentee ballot and simply hope that the ballot arrives by election day.”

In 2020, Elias advocated for states to switch to mail-in voting because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It will not be enough for states to simply allow more citizens to vote by mail [original emphasis]. Each state must also provide adequate resources for the printing and distribution of millions of extra ballots and to support with extra funds the officials who are tasked with processing and counting the flood of mailed ballots,” Elias wrote in a March 2020 op-ed for The Washington Post.

“Most important, for this system to work, states must be prepared to process and count the avalanche of ballots that will be postmarked by Election Day but arrive at election offices in the days afterward,” he also wrote.