虽然特朗普的盟友花了几个月时间发动一场旨在散播对投票的怀疑的运动，但哈里斯的竞选团队一直在加强防御。
Zoom 上聚集，指示未来的民意调查观察员在观察非美国公民的非法投票时要“自信和积极”。长达数月的社交媒体猛烈攻击，传播有关选民欺诈的谎言。试图清除选民名册或引入繁重的新身份证明要求的长篇大论的诉讼。
自三月唐纳德·特朗普获得共和党总统提名并迅速任命他的儿媳担任共和党全国委员会联合主席以来，共和党及其盟友发起了一场广泛的、多管齐下的竞选活动，旨在散播对周二投票公正性的怀疑。这一努力有效地为可能重演 2020 年奠定了基础，当时特朗普输给了乔·拜登，但花了数周时间进行一场混乱的、最终以暴力的方式推翻结果。
zoom training sessions where future poll watchers are instructed to be “ssertive and aggressive” as they watch for illegal voting by people who aren’t U.S. citizens. A monthslong social media onslaught propagating lies about voter fraud. Long-shot lawsuits that seek to purge voter rolls or introduce onerous new identification requirements.
Since March, when Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination and promptly installed his daughter-in-law as co-chairperson of the Republican National Committee, the GOP and its allies have waged an expansive, multi-pronged campaign intended to sow doubt about the integrity of Tuesday’s vote. The effort has effectively laid the groundwork for a potential replay of 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden but spent weeks pursuing a chaotic, ultimately violent effort to overturn the result.
民主党人并没有坐视不理。虽然卡玛拉·哈里斯（Kamala Harris）一再强调特朗普不愿意接受他不喜欢的结果——“他就是近四年前站在这个地方，向美国国会大厦派遣武装暴徒推翻人民意愿的人，”她在周二的闭幕词中重申——她的竞选活动 一直在忙于加强其防御机制。它组建了一个由数百名律师组成的团队，并动员了一个由大约 10,000 名律师组成的网络，他们可以依靠这些网络来获得有关州选举法的具体知识。它还建立了一支志愿者队伍，他们专注于在投票前教育和协助关键州的选民，并打算在投票过程中收集证据，以帮助打击特朗普盟友的任何虚假欺诈指控。
“我认为这是100%确定的 - 我认为唐纳德·特朗普不可能在没有法律斗争的情况下不下台，”乔治华盛顿大学（George Washington University）的政治竞选专家托德·贝尔特（Todd Belt）说。“民主党人说他们有一本剧本，他们已经为任何事情做好了准备，他们已经让他们的法律团队准备好了。”
哈里斯的法律团队由几位知名政治资深人士领导：前总统巴拉克·奥巴马（Barack Obama）的前白宫法律顾问、拜登总统的前私人法律顾问鲍勃·鲍尔（Bob Bauer），以及曾担任拜登 2020 年竞选总法律顾问的达娜·雷姆斯 （Dana Remus）。马克·埃利亚斯 （Marc Elias） 是一位位高权重的律师，曾担任哈里斯 2020 年的主要竞选总法律顾问，然后在当年领导拜登竞选团队成功反击特朗普试图推翻结果的诉讼，他也被邀请领导今年潜在的重新计票之战。
莱姆斯在《纽约时报》援引的一份声明中说，该团队实际上“在过去四年里从未间断”地工作，“在关键州制定战略计划，增加更多人才和能力，并为所有可能的情况做好准备。
Democrats are not sitting idly by. While Kamala Harris has repeatedly emphasized Trump’s unwillingness to accept a result he doesn’t like – “He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people,” she reiterated in her closing speech on Tuesday – her campaign has been busy beefing up its defense mechanisms. It assembled a team of hundreds of lawyers and has mobilized a network of some 10,000 more it can lean on for help with specific knowledge of state election laws. It has also built an army of volunteers who have focused on educating and assisting voters in key states ahead of the vote and who intend to gather evidence during the voting process to help counter any false fraud claims wielded by Trump allies.
“I think it’s 100% certain – I don’t think there’s any way Donald Trump doesn’t go down without a legal fight,” says Todd Belt, a political campaigns expert at George Washington University. “The Democrats say they have a playbook and they’re ready for anything, and they’ve got their legal teams ready.”
The Harris legal team is led by a few high-profile political veterans: Bob Bauer, the former White House counsel to former President Barack Obama and former personal counsel to President Biden, and Dana Remus, who served as general counsel to Biden’s 2020 campaign. Marc Elias, a high-powered lawyer who previously served as Harris’ 2020 primary campaign general counsel and then led the Biden campaign’s successful pushback that year against Trump’s lawsuits seeking to overturn the result, was also brought on to lead this year’s potential recount fight.
The team has actually been working “uninterrupted over the last four years,” Remus said in a statement cited by The New York Times, “building strategic plans in key states, adding more talent and capacity, and preparing for all possible scenarios.”
如果计票结果显示哈里斯获胜，而特朗普竞选团队像 2020 年一样提起一连串诉讼，试图阻止或质疑关键州或县的计票结果，那么其中许多情况可能会在未来几天甚至几周内上演。法律戏剧也可能在选举日本身上演，哈里斯团队表示，他们也为此做好了充分的准备。
“我们的计划将包括训练有素的、为比赛日做好准备的投票站投票和计票观察员，”雷布斯和律师兼民主党全国委员会执行官莫妮卡·瓜迪奥拉（Monica Guardiola）在NBC新闻最近获得的一份备忘录中写道，“观察MAGA的滑稽动作，并与全国网络合作，迅速解决问题。
法律斗争已经在顺利进行中：随着RNC通过其所谓的“选举诚信行动”，在全国范围内提起了大约130起诉讼，这些诉讼通常旨在减少合格选民群体并施加额外的计票要求，哈里斯的法律团队和DNC有时会作为具有法律地位的政党进行干预。
他们自己也提起了诉讼，也许最引人注目的是针对佐治亚州选举委员会（Georgia State Elections Board）的备受瞩目的案件，该委员会现在由特朗普的忠实拥护者控制，该委员会在9月通过了一系列第11小时规则的修改，包括要求所有选票必须由三个不同的人手工计票，并且这些计票必须相互匹配，机器计票必须匹配。
DNC 领导的诉讼没有像选举委员会声称的那样确保信任，而是声称手工计数规则实际上会造成选举后的延误和混乱。本月，一名州法官同意了这一决定，推翻规则修改的裁决最终得到了佐治亚州最高法院的支持。
这是民主党人的法律胜利。然而，专家强调，从更广泛的意义上讲，正在进行的选举战并不是真正的党派之争：即使与特朗普站在同一阵线的冒犯偶尔会在法庭上取得胜利——包括最高法院一项有争议的临时命令，允许弗吉尼亚州在最后一刻从选民名册中清除 1,600 人——其核心是共和党领导的努力， 不仅仅是击败民主党人，而是攻击美国的民主制度。
“自2015年以来，将选举制度描绘成根本腐败的努力一直在进行，”洛约拉马利蒙特大学（Loyola Marymount University）宪法学教授、前白宫投票权顾问贾斯汀·莱维特（Justin Levitt）说。“这不是游戏或比赛的参与者——这是对比赛本身概念的攻击。…这不是道奇队对洋基队的问题。这是其中一支球队试图摧毁棒球的问题。
Many of those scenarios could play out over the coming days or even weeks, if the vote count shows Harris winning and the Trump campaign, as it did in 2020, files a barrage of lawsuits that seek to halt or contest the tallies in key states or counties. Legal drama is also likely to unfold on Election Day itself, which the Harris team says it’s also well prepared for.
“Our program will include highly trained, game day-ready poll and count observers at polling stations,” Rebus and Monica Guardiola, an attorney and Democratic National Committee executive, wrote in a recent memo obtained by NBC News, “watching for MAGA antics and working with a national network to quickly resolve issues.”
The legal battle is already well underway: As the RNC, through what it calls its “election integrity operation,” has filed some 130 lawsuits across the country that generally seek to reduce the eligible voter pool and impose additional vote counting requirements, the Harris legal team and DNC have sometimes intervened as parties with legal standing.
They’ve also filed lawsuits of their own, perhaps most notably a high-profile case against the Georgia State Elections Board, now controlled by Trump loyalists, which in September passed a slate of 11th hour rules changes, including a requirement that all ballots had to be hand counted by three separate people, and that those tallies had to match each other and the machine counts.
Rather than ensure trust, as the elections board claimed, the DNC-led lawsuit alleged the hand-counting rule would effectively create post-election delays and chaos. This month, a state judge agreed, and the ruling to throw out the rules changes was ultimately backed by the Georgia Supreme Court.
It was a legal victory for Democrats. Yet experts stress that, in a broader sense, the ongoing election war is not really partisan: Even if the Trump-aligned affront has notched occasional court victories – including a controversial provisional order from the Supreme Court that allows Virginia to carry out a last minute purge of 1,600 people from its voter rolls – at its core the GOP-led effort, more than beating Democrats, is about attacking the American democratic system.
“The efforts to portray the election system as fundamentally corrupt have been going on since 2015,” says Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Marymount University and former White House voting rights adviser. “It’s not participants in a game or a contest – it’s an attack on the very notion of the contest itself. … This is not a question of the Dodgers vs. the Yankees. It’s a question of one of the teams trying to tear down baseball.”
随着 DNC 和哈里斯竞选团队的反击，一个包括无党派地方官员、美国公民自由联盟 （ACLU） 和布伦南司法中心（Brennan Center for Justice）等具有公民意识的非营利组织以及草根投票团体在内的联盟也开始反击。一些知名共和党人，如佐治亚州国务卿布拉德·拉芬斯伯格（Brad Raffensperger），他反对他的州选举委员会规定，最近启动了一个新基金来支持地方选举官员反对恶意干预，也参与了其中。
And as the DNC and Harris campaign have been pushing back, so too has a coalition that includes nonpartisan local officials, civic-minded nonprofits like the ACLU and Brennan Center for Justice, and grassroots voting groups. Some high-profile Republicans, such as Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who spoke against his state elections board rules and recently launched a new fund to support local election officials against malicious interference, have also gotten involved.
“任何选举官员都不应该独自面对无聊的诉讼和骚扰，”拉芬斯伯格在该基金宣布成立后的一份声明中说，“仅仅为了遵守法律并保护你的选票。
莱维特还指出，尽管有所有的噪音和攻击，美国的投票系统仍然坚持住了：“法院的行为就像法院一样”，权衡法律论点并驳回无聊的诉讼。四年前，全国各地成千上万的选举工作人员和官员即使面临巨大的压力和人身威胁，也履行了他们的职责。
他有信心会再次获胜，而且很有可能——除非出现 2000 年那种选举只剩下数百票的怪异结果——哈里斯的胜利实际上并不取决于大批律师的努力。
“这是第五层、第六层或第七层额外的安全保护，它的存在真是太好了，”他说。“它可能会有所帮助——可能会有所帮助——选举进行得更顺利一些，但这种部署并不是由任何实际的五次警报火灾引起的。”
标签： 卡马拉·哈里斯， 唐纳德·特朗普， 选举， 政治， 2024 年总统大选
“No election officials should have to face frivolous lawsuits and harassment all by themselves,” Raffensperger said in a statement following the announcement of the fund, “simply for following the law and protecting your vote.”
Levitt also notes that, despite all the noise and attacks, the American voting system has held up: “Courts are behaving like courts,” weighing legal arguments and dismissing frivolous lawsuits. Four years ago, thousands of election workers and officials around the country performed their duties, even in the face of enormous pressure and physical threats.
He’s confident it will again, and that in all likelihood – barring the kind of freak result that occurred in 2000, when the election came down to just hundreds of votes – a Harris victory won’t actually depend on the efforts of legions of lawyers.
“It’s the fifth or sixth or seventh extra layer of security, and it’s great that it exists,” he says. “And it might help – probably will help – the election run a little bit more smoothly, but that deployment is not occasioned by any actual five-alarm fire.”
Tags: Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, elections, politics, 2024 presidential election
