WASHINGTON
LaKeisha Chestnut's grandmother told her again and again that her vote was her voice. But as a Black woman in Mobile, Alabama, where she has lived since she was a baby, Chestnut often felt that both her voice and her vote were being ignored.
In a state where more than one in four residents are Black, Alabama's congressional map had one Black-majority district out of seven. Chestnut, 48, joined a group of Black voters who sued, saying the map violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the influence of Black voters.
Last year, they won a big victory at the Supreme Court to boost Black voting power and raise the chance that Alabama will send two Black representatives to Washington for the first time.
“It’s time for us to have a voice, you know?” Chestnut said.
Chestnut's case was unusual in that it went all the way to the Supreme Court, but election-related lawsuits are not rare. Judges have been involved in elections more than most Americans may realize — going back decades and continuing today.
Already, dozens of lawsuits have been filed over the 2024 elections, an unusually high number this far before Election Day. Some have especially high stakes.
Months before the November election, the Supreme Court has been immersed in two cases involving former President Donald Trump that could affect outcome of the vote. In March, the justices ruled that states can’t kick Trump off the ballot because of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The other major case stems directly from the aftermath of the last election – whether Trump can be prosecuted for trying to overturn his loss four years ago. It’s among the unprecedented legal challenges facing Republicans’ presumptive 2024 presidential nominee. In May, a jury in New York convicted Trump in his hush money trial, the first time a former president has been tried and convicted on criminal charges.
Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 defeat also points up a stark shift in American politics that has the potential to undermine faith in democratic institutions, including the courts in a period when trust in them already has been diminished. Until the aftermath of the 2020 election, political parties and candidates had generally accepted final decisions by courts. But Trump and his allies didn’t, even after they lost almost every one of the dozens of lawsuits they filed to contest the results.
In the U.S., the judicial branch is independent of the country’s legislative and executive branches, the two other branches of government, and American courts have no formal role to play in elections. But the U.S. Constitution empowers federal courts to intervene when all manner of rights, including the right to vote, are at stake. (States make their own laws about the powers of their courts.)
Courts generally step into election-related cases for three reasons:
• to level the playing field when people claim they are unfairly deprived of the right to vote or be represented
• to make clear the rules under which elections are held, including how ballots may be cast, and
• to settle disputes over election results, typically when they are very close.
While courts are intended to operate separately and independently from other parts of government, there is an inevitable political influence. In the case of the Supreme Court, justices are nominated by the president and must be approved by the Senate, a process that over the years has shaped the court and its political bent.
In a time of great political polarization, lawsuits over voting can have a distinctly partisan tint, and both major political parties have shown no reluctance to take their complaints to court.
A court’s decision even to take on a case can be controversial, as it was in the groundbreaking Bush v. Gore case that effectively settled the 2000 president election, with George W. Bush declared the winner over then-Vice President Al Gore. The nation's highest court had never stepped into a presidential election before, and critics of the justices said Florida state courts should have been the ones to resolve any disputes.
More recently, the Supreme Court was drawn into the Black voters' lawsuit over Alabama's congressional map, where the court determined there was a need to level the playing field. Chestnut was among the people who sued.
In April, Democrats chose Shomari Figures, a Black man who formerly worked in the Justice Department, as their nominee in the newly configured district that is considered favorable to Democrats.
If Figures wins, it would be the first time in history that Alabama would have two Black representatives in its congressional delegation.
While the Supreme Court sided with Black voters in Alabama, the court’s conservative majority – entrenched by three justices appointed by Trump – has more often come out on the other side of voting rights cases in recent years.
In May, the court upheld a congressional redistricting plan in South Carolina after a lower court found substantial evidence that lawmakers discriminated against Black voters in an effort to shore up a district for a Republican incumbent.
And in the most far-reaching example, the court in 2013 used another case from Alabama to gut a provision of the federal Voting Rights Act that had been credited with finally overcoming Jim Crow laws that had prevented Black Americans from exercising the right to vote.
Abha Khanna, one of Chestnut’s lawyers, said the Alabama case shows that voters have to be aware of what lawmakers are doing long before an election is held.
“We cannot wait until November of an election year to decide that we need to start paying attention to the voting laws and the rules of the road," Khanna said.
Judges may be asked to sort out the parameters for voting by mail, the need to have photo identification or the use of drop boxes to collect ballots.
In some instances, months or even years of campaigning end in virtual dead heats and neither of the top two candidates is willing to concede.
The legal disputes stretch back over a century. Among them:
1876: Rutherford B. Hayes
Five Supreme Court justices ended up on a commission Congress created to determine the winner of the 1876 presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. The court’s three Republican-appointed justices voted in Hayes’ favor, while the two justices appointed by Democrats voted for Tilden. With the other 14 members splitting evenly along party lines, Hayes became president.
1965: Julian Bond
Rarely, a candidate unquestionably wins an election yet still needs a court’s help to take office. That’s what happened to civil rights leader Julian Bond after he won election to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965. Lawmakers refused to seat him over his opposition to the Vietnam war. The next year, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered that Bond be seated.
2009: Coleman v. Franken
Democrat Al Franken didn’t take his seat in the U.S. Senate for six months after the 2008 race with Republican Norm Coleman. Franken was seated only after Minnesota’s Supreme Court rejected a challenge from Coleman. Nearly 3 million people voted in an election Franken won by 312 votes.
2020: Trump
Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — swing states won by Joe Biden. Some of these cases reached the Supreme Court, which declined to get involved and allowed Biden's victories to stand.
2024: Bridgeport, Connecticut mayor
A Connecticut judge threw out the results of the Democratic mayoral primary in Bridgeport, the state's most-populous city, citing surveillance videos showing people stuffing multiple absentee ballots into outdoor collection boxes. Mayor Joe Ganim won a do-over election a few weeks later.
In recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats and Republicans have wrangled over the rules for voting, and many of those fights wound up in the courts, including the Supreme Court. Easing rules on voting by mail, installing safeguards for in-person voting and relaxing deadlines for counting ballots all led to lawsuits four years ago.
The most famous election case in U.S. history occurred in the presidential race of 2000 between Bush and Gore.
The outcome hinged on the state of Florida, where nearly 6 million people voted in the presidential election. With 537 votes separating the candidates, disputes over ballots and recounts led to nearly two dozen lawsuits filed after Election Day. Some voters protested the confusing design of the presidential ballot. Others objected to tight deadlines for counting the votes of U.S. service members.
For five weeks, the nation waited to learn who would be the next U.S. president.
In the end, the Supreme Court stopped a recount that had been ordered by another set of judges, Florida’s Supreme Court. Bush became the country’s 43rd president.
The case may have added to political divisions and more disagreements about going to court. Election-related lawsuits have nearly tripled since 2000, according to Richard Hasen, an expert on elections at UCLA’s law school.
One lesson from the 2000 election is that the rules for holding elections really matter in very close races. Not surprisingly, swing states where both major parties see a real chance to win see the most legal fights, Hasen said.
In most instances throughout history, election-related cases have one thing in common: Despite disagreement with the courts’ decisions, the losing side accepted them.
Gore set an example for bitterly disappointed Democrats when he spoke a day after the Supreme Court's decision. With a smile on his face and kind words for Bush, Gore addressed the nation from his ceremonial office in the White House complex. His family, vice presidential running mate Joe Lieberman and Lieberman's family stood nearby.
Gore won the popular vote nationally, but not the decisive electoral vote count. After his concession, he still had one more official duty to perform: On Jan. 6, 2001, Gore presided over the joint session of Congress to officially count the electoral votes, where he ruled out of order objections to the Florida votes for Bush and ended by declaring that Bush had received enough votes to become “our new president.”
Finished with electoral politics, Gore became a prominent activist for combating climate change and shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was a dissenter from the court's decision in favor of Bush. But over the years, he marveled at the willingness of Americans to accept that courts have the final word.
When Breyer announced his retirement from the court in 2022, he spoke at the White House about his time on the bench. Seeing cases about people from different races, religions and viewpoints, he said, it is “kind of a miracle” they all decided to solve their differences under law.
He also warned what might happen if they didn’t.
“I say, ‘Go look at what happens in countries that don’t do that.’”
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