The Biden team has legions of lawyers
Right? Assure me here.
Here's an article. Most of it focuses on FL
In recent weeks the Democratic nominee and his party have been training outsize financial and legal resources on Florida to either avert or prepare for a recount, which would automatically be triggered if the final margin between Biden and Donald Trump is half a percentage point or less. Biden’s team has 4,000 lawyers on standby or working already in Florida. On the ground, Democratic attorneys have examined the ballot designs in each of Florida’s 67 counties to make sure they know about potential problem areas for voters in advance. (Remember 2000’s “butterfly ballots” in Palm Beach County?) And in every county they’ve also been closely monitoring the daily work of the canvassing boards, the local officials who’ve been counting the state’s early votes for three weeks now. The goal: to make sure as many votes count as possible, which they hope would provide Biden a clear margin of victory, ideally next Tuesday night.
Biden has been lawyering up nationwide, too. In recent months he brought his informal adviser Bob Bauer, a former Obama White House general counsel, officially onto the campaign team to work with general counsel Dana Remus, another former Obama White House lawyer. At the same time, Biden tapped former Attorney General Eric Holder to coordinate legal strategies and messages between Democratic groups and officials and tasked former solicitors general Donald Verrilli and Walter Dellinger with preparing to combat Trump’s efforts to sow doubt on the results or to stop votes from being counted. Biden’s campaign has also dispatched a team led by the party’s leading election lawyer, Marc Elias, to get ready for Election Day litigation over GOP voter suppression, a continuation of his preelection lawsuits across the country.
Florida is hardly the only state that’s likely to be close or potentially messy. But this show of local and national legal force is, in part, a preemptive strike against the kind of legal chaos that went on for more than a month in Florida after Election Day 2000, between George W. Bush and Al Gore, that ended with the Supreme Court stopping the recount and handing the state and the presidency to Bush. It’s also intended as a bulwark against whatever Trump — who’s been warning, baselessly, of voter fraud for years, who’s encouraged some people to vote twice, and who’s resisted the legitimacy of votes counted after November 3 — does next. “We do not underestimate what Donald Trump might be thinking of trying to do, but we are also very confident in our legal response to whatever that would be,” Biden deputy general counsel Patrick Moore told me.
Any responsible campaign would look at Trump’s threats and at Florida, the perennial toss-up, where Biden leads by around two points in the FiveThirtyEight polling average, and conclude that preparing like this is reasonable. The Trump team, too, has lawyers at the ready in the state, and Republicans have been battling Democrats on voting-rights cases across the country for months. In many cases the local lawyers mobilized by the national Democratic team have been playing a similar role for the party for years, and a Biden aide said the campaign had hired twice as many “voter protection” staffers as Hillary Clinton’s had four years ago, while a Democratic National Committee official pointed out that the party had put such operatives on the ground in battleground states earlier than ever before. . .
“The Biden team clearly understands that in the Trump organization they’re not just going up against someone who challenges the rule of law, but who does not believe in the rule of law,” said Fernand Amandi, a veteran Florida pollster and strategist. The state’s election laws have undergone significant reforms and streamlining since 2000’s recount, and even since 2018’s recounts in several races. But, Amandi continued, “This is more than just a bare-knuckle fight. This is jungle politics here, where only one comes out alive. At the very least, they’re going to need the greatest assemblage of lawyers since the [O.J.] Simpson defense team.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/biden-prepares-legal-war-against-trump-in-florida.html
Post any sources you come across, please
= new reply since forum marked as read
