Securing the Vote (with Marc Elias)
07:51 Share

Hey folks, Joyce Vance here. This election season has seen a record-breaking number of voting and election-related cases filed in courts across the country.

and it's just getting started. That's why I'm thrilled that Mark Elias is joining me on today's episode of the Cafe Insider Podcast while Preet is out. Mark is one of the nation's foremost election attorneys. He's served as election counsel on multiple presidential campaigns, including the Kamala Harris campaign, where he's focusing on potential recounts, post-election litigation, and challenging voter suppression laws across the country. Today, Mark joins me to unpack the election lawsuits that may shape this year's election.

If you're a member of Cafe Insider, head over to the Insider feed or click the link in the show notes of this podcast to listen to the full analysis. Stay tuned, listeners. Remain here for an excerpt from our conversation. To become a member of Cafe Insider, head to cafe.com slash insider. You can try the membership for just $1 for one month. That's cafe.com slash insider. Now onto the show.

Interesting. You point out that most of these cases being brought pre-election are by the Republican Party or associated interests. Do you think that holds up in the post-election? Who do you think will be filing cases then? Well, look, I mean, certainly after 2020, we saw Donald Trump and his allies file more than 60 lawsuits, and they lost all but one of them. So history suggests that, you know, Donald Trump, when he was a businessman, he idolized Trump.

lawyers who brought large numbers of frivolous lawsuits and use the court system as a way to bludgeon his business opponents. And he has certainly replicated that as a candidate where he views, you know, you may remember in 2016, he brought defamation claims to try to intimidate people. And he has used election litigation in the same way. So if you if you ask me, what do I think the post-election looks like? I suspect we will see, again, a large number of largely frivolous lawsuits

that won't go anywhere, but which will cloud things by the Republicans and by Donald Trump. So you've seen that playbook before, especially in 2020, when Trump and his party tried to steal the election.

You know, among the reasons that they failed were a lot of the lawsuits, frankly, that you brought and successfully litigated, losing only one if memory serves. What did you learn from 2020 that's informing how you're approaching this election? Yeah, so I think a couple of things. The first is that we need to expect, not just the lawyers, but every listener, we need to expect that

that we won't know on election night who won, right? The ballots won't all be counted. But we also need to expect that Donald Trump will lie almost immediately, as he does in seemingly every interview and every debate, that he will lie almost immediately about the outcome of the election. Yeah. Do you have like a betting line on how early you think he'll call it? Will it be 9.30, 10 o'clock, 10.15? Oh, I think it'll be in the 9 o'clock hour, you know, sometime between 9 and 10. Yeah.

So that's one thing we learned, right, is that is that he will use the litigation process as a way to not try to bring forward truth, but rather obfuscate the truth. The second is something that, Joyce, you've talked a lot about and which, you know, I think we need to keep in the back of our mind, which is that there's there's really no limit to how far Donald Trump will go. I mean, in 2020, he brought these lawsuits. They failed. Then he ultimately instigated a violent insurrection in the nation's capital.

He is more desperate now than he was then. So I don't expect that he will be any more successful. I don't think that his lawyers will be more successful, but he may be more desperate. He may be willing to do even more outrageous things than he was willing to do four years ago. Yeah. Can we underscore a point that you're making here that I think is really important and that we don't talk about enough recently?

which is that it's not just up to the lawyers to understand what the Trump playbook looks like. It's really important for Americans across the country to understand what they're seeing. You know, otherwise people go up and down with every small drama, and it really has the prospect of eroding voter confidence in the election. Do you worry about that at all? And what do you think we should all be doing to guard against that?

Look, I think in some ways, I worry about it, but I think in some ways that ship has sailed. I mean, Donald Trump has spent the last four years bad-mouthing elections. He has spent the last four years building an entire movement around him of people who have denied the outcome of the 2020 election and who traffic in wild conspiracies about the 2024 election even before it takes place. So, you know, that is what the other side is going to bring to the table. What we all need to bring to the table is truth and fact

and good information. And, you know, that is why, you know, the work you do in this podcast is so important and that Preet does, because we have to make sure people get the facts. And while they understand what the challenges will be, they also understand that we are prepared for those challenges and that

Ultimately, you can file a lawsuit for whatever the cost of the filing fee, but it doesn't mean you're going to win the case. That is what Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee seem to be learning over and over again. Well, let's do some of that work right now and help people get to the truth on these issues, because there are a lot of cases going on pre-election in multiple states. Let's talk about some of our favorites, starting with Mississippi. That's the case that's now at the Fifth Circuit, and it's been sitting there a couple of weeks since oral arguments.

where the RNC is challenging a provision in Mississippi law that permits counting of mail-in ballots so long as they are postmarked by Election Day and received within five days of the election. Why does the RNC have so much beef with mail-in voting? You know, this is probably one of the places where I think the mainstream media has missed this.

what's actually going on. The fact is that the Republican National Committee prior to the 2020 election loved mail-in voting. In fact, Susie Wiles, who's one of the campaign managers for Donald Trump, built the Republican Party of Florida around mail-in voting. What happened, unfortunately, was in 2020, Donald Trump got it in his head one night, I guess, at a rally, that he hated mail-in voting and he didn't want it. And so rather than the Republican Party standing up to him

they started mouthing his lies and his disinformation. And so every time you see Republican operatives and professionals try to say a good word about mail-in voting or, for that matter, early voting in person, Donald Trump can be on script for about a day.

before he reverts back to trashing it and lying about it. So there is no genuine beef with mail-in voting. There is Donald Trump's deranged brain about mail-in voting and a Republican Party that feels unable to contradict him. So they have to repeat the same lies that he tells.

I hope you found our discussion informative. To listen to the full episode, head over to cafe.com slash insider to become a member. You'll be supporting our work and getting exclusive access to full weekly podcast episodes of Insider and bonus material from Stay Tuned.

Thank you.

It's time to cut through the noise and make a real impact. So tune into the future of marketing, a special series from the PropG podcast sponsored by Canva. You can find it on the PropG feed wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back with Canva presents Secret Sounds, Work Edition. Caller, guess this sound.

click. So close. That's actually publishing a website with Canva docs. Next caller. Definitely a mouse click. Nice try. It was sorting a hundred sticky notes with a Canva whiteboard. We also would have accepted resizing a Canva video into 10 different sizes. What? No way. Yes way. One click can go a long way. Love your work at Canva.com.