text: "Key Legal Fights Over Voting Remain Unresolved As Election Day Draws Close" | Election Law Blog
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  "Key Legal Fights Over Voting Remain Unresolved As Election Day Draws Close"
  Posted on October 8, 2020 8:04 am by Rick Hasen
  With so many cases still up in the air, legal experts say it's difficult to tell whether Democrats or Republicans are coming out ahead. Democrats have won numerous victories — including fending off a Republican effort to prevent Nevada from automatically sending out ballots to all registered voters.
  "I would say Democrats and voting rights group had some important victories, but on those cases that made it up the food chain, they have tended to do not as well," said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine.
  Hasen thinks such victories could be even rarer in the weeks ahead because courts are reluctant to make changes in voting rules too close to an election. "Any kind of last-minute changes that expand voting rights coming now are going to have a really tough road as they go up the appellate process," he said.
  Alabama Secretary of State Merrill this week also released a letter, signed by a number of Republican secretaries of state, that calls for swift Senate confirmation of Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, to ensure that all the seats on the high court are filled by Election Day.
  "In the case an election issue is challenged in court, America cannot afford a tie vote," they wrote Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
  "The fact that the courts have weighed in on that issue now means it's far less likely to want to weigh in on that issue after Election Day. And that's true for a lot of the different claims that have been pressed so far about which ballots are legitimate and which aren't," he said.