Funding for “To the Contrary,” provided by: This week on “To the Contrary,” the firehose of lawsuits unleashed by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee challenging voting rules and long standing practices ahead of the upcoming elections.

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbé.

Welcome to “To the Contrary,” a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

Republicans have filed a flurry of lawsuits challenging voting rules and practices ahead of next month's elections, setting the stage for what could be a far larger and more contentious legal battle over the White House after Election Day and the closing arguments of the Trump campaign.

Two weeks ago, we interviewed the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund on this and other topics.

Today, we welcome May Mailman, director of the Independent Women's Law Center, on this topic and others.

May was a legal advisor to former President Trump while in the White House.

She also worked in the office of the Chief of Staff.

After the White House, May was deputy solicitor general for the state of Ohio.

Welcome, May.

Good to see you.

Hi, Bonnie.

Voting rights experts say lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and the GOP appear to be an effort to prepare to challenge the results of the presidential election after Election Day.

Should former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, lose and refuse to accept his defeat as he did four years ago?

Do you see the purpose of these lawsuits similarly or differently?

Well, I definitely see them differently.

But I guess high level an election challenge is not in itself a bad thing, a bad election is a bad thing, right?

So an election challenge, if it's frivolous, that's bad.

But if it's actually just trying to get to the accurate election results is a good thing.

Recently in Bridgeport, Connecticut, there was a woman that was just stuffing ballots in a drop box.

And of course, you didn't have true evidence of fraud.

Maybe these were correct.

You know, where did she get.

But they just decided to redo it anyway because it was so bad.

And so in that case, a challenge is a good thing because it gives people confidence that the primary was actually accurate.

So I don't think we can just say a challenge is bad, a bad election is bad, and a challenge can be a good thing if it's in service of that.

But what is the purpose of these current cases?

It is not to make it easier to challenge the election on the back end.

I think it is always going to be hard to challenge an election on the back end.

It is to create as clean, as legal, as trustworthy of an election as possible, so that you do not have a certainly frivolous, but hopefully no election challenges on the back end.

Of course, no election challenges on the back end means that everything is perfect and this is life.

And life isn't perfect.

But I do think that the point is to minimize, the questions that can be asked after an election.

Why do you think the Georgia electors, three of whom were Trump supporters, voted to do a hand ballot count, which, of course, last week was thrown out by the Georgia Supreme Court.

How is that supposed to make it?

The court believed it would make things way more chaotic.

So tell me about why you think this is going to make it more accurate.

And also, hand ballot counts are less accurate than machine counts.

Well, I definitely agree with you that if you're talking about somebody trying to count all the dots, millions of dots, that is a horrible idea.

But actually what was being proposed in Georgia is that the number of ballots match the number of ballots that went through the scanner because actually, in the 2020 election, there was evidence.

I mean, this did happen that some ballots were scanned multiple times.

You know, they caught it and it worked out.

But I do think that people in general are concerned that ballots if you.

“Oh, did I, did I already scan this?

What did I do with this?” Just to have the number of ballots match the number of ballots that were scanned.

I don't actually think that that's a bad rule, a stupid rule, a particularly hard to manage rule.

And yet you had two different courts say that they couldn't do this.

One court said, you know.

And by the way, Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, and the attorney general of the state both informed the electoral board that what they were doing was not constitutional.

It's funny, I think that that's pretty arguable.

And I would say that actually the liberal position would be to allow this type of rule by the state elections board because in general, I think that conservatives want to have more control in a legislative body, right.

And less control and an administrative body and so that's exactly what the attorney general is saying was, “Hey, there's a general grant of power here to the elections board to kind of make our elections better.

But that general grant of power can't be interpreted to do this.” I don't know, I don't know.

I mean, state elections boards do a lot of things.

I have a different view.

I just want to ask you about of of what, you know, Democrats, what the Democratic Party that wanted in this case, they don't want confusion after the, you say they want to have it in a legislative body, not an administrative body, but the fact is, they didn't.

They sure as heck didn't want Dobbs, going to the States.

They, you know, that just flies in the face of a lot of their positions.

Tell me about that.

But if I'm looking at, judges and whether judges think that you have to have a really strong textual basis in order to do something, let's even take something like Dobbs.

The Constitution doesn't say abortion in it anywhere.

I mean, it doesn't have a trimester system.

It doesn't have undue burden.

Right.

And so if you want the power to be with the people in dictating what the laws are, then you're going to say, “Well, the legislature is the body.

That is the democratic body, and that's the body that should speak.” They never, they never said that.

And so that in this Georgia case, okay, if the people of Georgia want to count the number of ballots, then the people of Georgia can vote for that.

And they can have a lot to that extent.

And why would, the leader of the party, the former president and the GOP itself, the Republican National Committee, file this time 3 to 4 times as many election law challenges as they did in 2020, when in 2020, they filed 62, they lost 61.

Now, as of last week, anyway, it was up to 185 legal challenges.

Explain to me.

And also as one who has covered presidential elections since 1976.

Yes, in the Bush v. Gore case that went to the Supreme Court and Gore lost, there was a substantial election challenge.

But generally speaking, over the years, Americans are not people who don't trust their electoral systems.

No, and hopefully that continues, that we don't have a reason to trust our election system.

And I think that that's, that that's a good thing.

And when I think about why a lot of, especially Republicans don't trust elections, it's because of a lot of litigation from the left that sought to change laws.

And this was especially in 2020.

So, Mark Elias, we want to talk about failed election challenges.

Mark Elias spent tens of millions of dollars to lose seven cases for every one that he won in the run up to election.

So we want to talk about losing, It is the left bringing pre-election challenges where they would challenge everything from voter ID to registration deadlines, ballot receipt deadlines and signature matching, all of these sorts of things and lost time and time and time again until the Supreme Court had to say, “Please stop saying that everything is racist.” I mean, that is the basis of your complaint.

Oh, you have to have an ID in order to turn something in.

Well, that's racist.

The Supreme Court had to had to really put the brakes on that.

But why do we see a lot more challenges now than after the election?

I think, yeah, but the system is working the.

The vast majority of the cases, I mean, just about the Democrats have responded certainly to the challenges waged by President Trump, former President Trump.

But they have not seen anything like this number of filings ever in American history.

What I don't know if that's, 185 lawsuits.

Yeah, I would say that that's eclipsed by the the number that's brought by groups on the left, from the ACLU to the NAACP to the DNC to the Sierra Club.

You know, there are tons of groups on the left who are constantly challenging vet votes, existing law.

And so when you look at what these Republican challenges look like, they're pretty narrow.

It's things like, “Hey, you are supposed to have an equal number of poll workers who are Republican and Democrats.” Instead, you have a 8 to 1 ratio.

You've got a 6 to 1 ratio that is not parody.

And of course, sometimes it's not going to be exactly equal.

You've got more Democrats living, but you can't have it that much.

So it's things like that where you've got a law that says something and it's just trying to enforce the law.

So I think that's very different of you have a law you need to enforce it versus I think a lot of the times on the left, it's I don't like this law.

I'm going to get rid of this signature matching requirement.

I'm going to get rid of this voter ID requirement.

And those are the types of challenges, I think, that really make people question the outcome of their election.

Well, but, Voter ID requirements are set by states, by the state legislatures.

Correct?

Yes.

And that's what the Democrats like to challenge.

Okay.

In multiple states.

Why is it that the, tell me the basis of what's the difference between the basis of these Democratic challenges you're referring to and the basis of what the Republicans are trying to do in this election?

Let's start with the Democrats, and well move to the Republicans.

So, for example, take the state of Ohio, or the state of Georgia.

A lot of these states that have somewhat recently enacted election integrity laws, well call them, but they do things like add a voter ID requirement, say that if you're a ballot harvester, you can only do ten ballots at a time or, you know, something like that.

Things that you can help manage what's going on in your election.

And I think the common arguments are a couple of things.

One is that it violates the Voting Rights Act because it's racist, essentially, that somehow by the color of your skin, it is harder to get a driver's license, which of course, is a pretty racist thing itself to say.

But that's one basis.

And then the other is that you can't actually just burden the vote, unnecessarily so that you can you can achieve election integrity, but you can't do it at the expense of making it super hard to vote.

And but it is kind.

But it is true, is it not, that there are more there are more impediments in the way of people of color and poor people getting to vote than there are for white people or wealthy people.

I mean.

I don't think that if you are Black, it's hard to get a driver's license.

I think that if you show up to the DMV, despite the color of your skin, you're going to get that driver's license.

Well, right.

But I'm talking about things like mail in ballots.

And if you have if you have a construction job, for the most part, if you have a factory job, wherever you have jobs where you have to show up every day or the work just doesn't get done, why not allow people to mail in ballots?

Why not?

Why not allow them to vote ahead of time?

I mean, it's easier to vote than ever before.

And so the idea that there's been this, like, huge, you know, President Joe Biden went down to Georgia and said that it's election integrity law was, Jim Eagle was Jim Crow 2.0.

And Georgia has broken every single record as far as early voting, explaining how easy it is to vote.

I mean, part of the Department of Justice's challenge against Georgia was that Georgia now doesn't allow people to essentially bribe people in line.

You can't give people snacks in line.

And they challenge the no snacks in line provision.

As if the Constitution of the United States says that you have to have snacks in line.

I mean, these are crazy things.

Most of the laws, the cases that were dismissed, the 61 out of the 62 in 2020, filed by the Trump campaign and the GOP, were dismissed for lack of evidence or lack of standing.

After elections, it is going to be very, very difficult to challenge cases.

Let's take Stacey Abrams.

Stacey Abrams did not concede her 2018 gubernatorial race.

She is an election denier.

Why?

Because she said that there was vote suppression going on.

There were people who wanted to vote, but because Georgia didn't let them vote, that's why she lost.

Okay, so she raised almost $1 million.

That's a more material fact.

I should think then saying that that voters should, you know, should have to present identification to vote.

These are talking about different things.

I'm talking about post-election challenges, post-election challenges versus pre-election challenges just live in different universes because pre-election challenges say that these laws shouldn't exist.

Post-election challenges generally say because of something I lost.

And so the because of something I lost challenge is always going to be very difficult.

So I'm just taking Stacey Abrams case where she said that there was vote suppression.

It is hard to bring post-election challenges.

And I think that the Trump campaign found that out.

And so the hope is you're not bringing post-election challenges.

These are not likely to succeed.

It's really hard to prove fraud.

Having the election over again for the United States of America presidential race is impossible.

It is impossible.

And so no judge is going to say, you know what, I think I found enough fraud, let's just redo it.

Let's just redo it.

Like they're never going to say that.

And so that's why post-election challenges are just not likely to succeed.

Okay.

But it is easier will you not, do you not agree, to suppress the vote of people, particularly people with no money?

It doesn't matter even what race they are, but they happen to be, you know, low-income people have happened to be disproportionately Black and of color.

So there's a difference between voter suppression, which I think brings up Jim Crow and the types of suppressive tactics that were used to deny people the right to vote, including such things as, like, you know, tell me how many beans are in this counter.

Otherwise you can't vote.

And like, if you were white, they would let you vote if you're close enough.

And if you're Black, you couldn't.

Voter suppression is illegal and should not happen.

And it is unfortunate that in our nation it ever happened.

The fact that early voting is 14 days versus 15 days, okay, that those are the types of challenges that we're facing.

And to say, well, a 14-day window suppresses Black people in a way that a 15-day window is not.

It's like to me that that's actually offensive to the memory of what was happening to people, and to say that somehow Black people are unable to get their ballot in one day earlier is just like, like almost flooring to me how these lawsuits are often raised.

Are not if, for example, they've been illegally taken off the voter rolls in advance.

But I want to get to one last thing because you're talking about illegal practices, do you think what Elon Musk is doing, paying people, he says to sign a petition.

But actually, in order to sign that petition, you have to register to vote.

So I heard one legal commentator say that he is, and he's violating the very basis of the law that says you can't pay people to vote.

Do you think he'll end up being prosecuted for that?

Who knows?

You know.

Should he be?

I don't, I don't think so.

You know, I have to, would have to look into the history of FTC enforcing these types of things.

But, you know, I'm reminded of in D.C. after you voted, you could have access to any number of like Sweetgreen salad or like little, little fun freebies.

And you had to have voted, right, that they would get you on the back end, but they weren't exactly paying you to vote.

They weren't saying, like, here's some money or here's a salad, go vote.

It was just meant to be part of the atmosphere.

And I think actually Elons is less than that.

These are previously registered voters.

This is not here's some money and I know they have their.

But if they want the money they have to go register to vote to sign.

He asked them to sign this petition.

You have to be registered to vote to sign that petition.

Yeah.

It's a backdoor way of paying people to register to vote.

I think there's the same exact distinction with what I just described.

Right.

So you've already voted and now you get the salad okay.

And that's a 1 to 1.

That's not a lottery to win the salad.

You actually do get any of the foods or any of the like masks or the tape measures or whatever.

But it's not saying I'm paying you to do this.

It's now that you've done this, you can not register, but you can actually have this.

And I think that's the same thing that I see with Elon.

It's not, hey, here's something to go do it.

It's now that you are part of this community, now that you're part of this voting community, now that you're part of the registered community, you can sign this petition.

But the thing that you actually have to do is sign the petition.

Let's switch to a couple of questions about how Donald Trump is winding up his campaign.

And do you think he's persuading voters to vote for him with the memory lapses, with the changes in position he was against mail in ballots for the longest time.

And more recently, earlier this year, he switched to being for them.

And then just last week, he switched again to being against them.

Is that a good way to wind up your campaign?

Donald Trump's position has always been a little bit the same, which is, you know, unclear in the sense that he wants people if they're going to vote for him, to vote for him, however.

Right.

If that's mail, if that's early, like if you're going to vote for me, vote for me.

But on the other hand, the expert at Heritage always gives this example.

If you had one lottery ticket and you had to get it in to the lottery commission, otherwise you didn't get, your money, would you send it in the mail or would you show up in person?

And it's like I'd show up in person.

You know, I don't want this to be lost.

And I think that's the thing with mail in ballots, it's like, I want to trust it.

And I probably could, but just to be sure, just to be sure, like, why don't you eliminate that and just go in person?

So I think there's this tension of like, you know, vote for me however you can.

But on the other hand, if this is your one lottery ticket, is this how you would want to treat it?

So is that unclear?

Perhaps.

But I think everybody, you know, Republican enthusiasm for early voting certainly is indicated.

So the Republicans are voting in larger numbers early than certainly previously.

But the early numbers as of last week show most, early two-thirds of all early votes were Democratic in the in some of the not all of the but some of the battleground states.

Republicans are not going to catch Democrat numbers by the end.

And still people like to vote in person.

I don't think that that's just a distrust.

I think there's something communal and just there's something that feels democratic about showing up in person, casting your ballot with full information alongside your neighbors that people enjoy.

Election Day is an enjoyable experience in that sense.

And then there's working people who say, oh my gosh, the line, the traffic like, what if it rains?

What if my kids are screaming like, so, you know, enjoying that element of democracy does drive a lot of people.

But of course it doesn't drive everybody.

But as far as Trump's closing pitch to voters, I don't think that it's memory lapses that's his closing pitch.

I think that we see a more like I think the joy is now with the Trump campaign.

I'm just thinking, for example, I'm.

Sorry, the what is now?

Joy, joy, joy, joy.

What Kamala Harris was campaigning on for ages.

Right.

That it no longer seems joyful, from Kamala Harris versus President Trump putting on an apron and going to McDonald's.

Yes, this was all screened by the Secret Service.

But like watching Trump salt some fries is hilarious.

Like it is.

It is just classic Trump.

But is being hilarious, a man who has said that he will be a dictator, and John Kelly was this chief of staff longer than anybody else, came out last week saying that he was a fascist.

He did not believe in the rule of law.

He was a big fan of Adolf Hitler, etc.

Should you be paying attention to him putting on an apron and cooking McDonald's food, or should you be paying to what is coming out of his mouth?

I worked for John Kelly.

I know John Kelly.

I think that he is a really good person.

And that he cares about his country.

He's given everything.

His son died fighting for our country.

This is a genuinely good person who people should listen to.

But he has people who work, you know, for that long of a time that close to somebody can end up really not liking them.

And I think, like, you can let your personal distaste for somebody color a larger decision.

And, but, you know.

But his personal taste was based on him seeing Donald Trump in action, acting like a fascist, praising Hitler and having no respect for the rule of law.

So, I mean, think anybody like somebody when they see that happening.

Yeah.

And I don't think that he's come out and said, like he's going to vote for Kamala or anybody, but that he just didn't like the way that Donald Trump operated all the time.

And, of course, a lot of us don't like the way that Donald Trump operated all the time.

I think the run up to January 6th felt whiny.

And it felt, sort of not presidential.

And I think that we can all acknowledge that.

But I do think that at the end of the day, at the end of the day, you have to vote for somebody who you think on balance is better than the other person.

And it doesn't require me saying that somebody is perfect.

And I don't think anybody who votes for Donald Trump actually thinks that he's perfect.

It really is, you know, between Kamala and Donald Trump, who's going to be better for the future of our country?

Thank you, May Mailman, excellent presentation of the Republican perspective on these issues, which are gripping the country right now.

That's it for this edition of “To the Country.” Keep the conversation going on our social media platform.

Reach out to us @tothecontrary and visit our website, the address on the screen.

Whether you agree or think to the contrary, we'll see you next time.

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