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The tight presidential race between Democratic challenger Joe Biden and Republican incumbent Donald Trump looks like it could end up in the courtroom.

The Trump campaign filed lawsuits on 4 November in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania over the counting of ballots, the start of what could be a prolonged legal brawl.

The close race, with neither side yet able to claim victory, could end up in the Supreme Court.The country's highest court determined the outcome of the 2000 election between George W Bush and Al Gore by ruling in Bushs favour.

Political law experts told Financial News that they expected to see ongoing legal challenges in states with close election counts over the next month.

Craig Engle, head of political law at Washington D.C. law firm Arent Fox, said he expected a messy state-by-state legal fight initially.

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"Things are going to play out slowly, and differently in each state with parties probably arguing contradictory points depending on the state."

Elliot Berke, a political and election law lawyer for Berke Farah in Washington D.C., said: "We will continue to see a barrage of legal challenges in four or five states at least up until the Electoral College delegations meet on 14 December."

Both sides have already spent millions on major international law firms throughout the campaign and could spend millions more before the election is settled.

Team Trump

The law firm most closely associated with the Trump presidency is US M&A and litigation powerhouse Jones Day. The firm has billed the Trump campaign more than $4.5m during the current election cycle, according to analysis of federal data by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Jones Day has received payments of $13.3m during the current election cycle, including $3.5m from the Republican National Committee and $1.6m from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the analysis shows.

Trump relied heavily on Jones Day for his 2016 campaign and appointed Jones Day partner Don McGahn as his top lawyer in the White House on his inauguration. McGahn in turn brought a string of Jones Day partners and lawyers into the administration.

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McGahn rejoined Jones Day in 2019 with reports that he had fallen out with Trump over his co-operation with The Mueller Report on the investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.

Federal records show that other major law firms used by the Trump campaign include King & Spalding and Winston & Strawn.

Team Biden

Biden has turned to Washington DC-headquartered law firm Covington & Burling to act as his campaign counsel. Covington has billed the Biden campaign more than $800,000 already this year, according to Federal filings.

The firm is home to former attorney general Eric Holder who re-joined as a partner after his six years in the Obama White House.

Covington fields a 15-strong election and political law group that advises political and corporate clients on lobbying, campaign finance and government ethics issues.

The firm had revenue of nearly $1.2bn in 2019 and profit per equity partner of $1.8m, according to Am Law data.

READWhy Deutsche Bank has stopped shorting the US dollar following the tight presidential election

Seattle, Washington, law firm Perkins Coie could also play a role in any upcoming election litigation thanks to its role as counsel to the Democratic National Convention.

The firms political law group includes more than 50 lawyers and advises a range of companies, trade unions, PACs and Super PACs on political issues.

Its former head Bob Bauer is acting as a senior legal advisor to Biden and was formerly White House counsel to Obama.

Perkins Coie had revenue of $934m last year and profit per equity partner of nearly $1.4m, Am Law data showed.

To contact the author of this story with feedback or news, email James Booth

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These are the big law firms Trump and Biden could tap if the election ends up in court - Financial News

Just two days until Tuesday 3 November when voters will have their last chance to cast a vote in the 2020 US Election. President Donald Trump has made questioning the validity of the outcome, what votes should count and who can cast them a pilar of his campaign drawing accusations of trying to suppress the vote.

President Trump has been outspoken in his attacks on mail-in ballots with unsubstantiated claims that they are prone to fraud. Among his claims he has used an anecdote about a friend of his whose son had tragically passed away but received a voting card. More recently that votes for him in Philadelphia were thrown out. These tactics are not new to Trump, in the past he said illegal immigrants were pouring over the border to vote en masse for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and said busloads of out of state voters were driven to New Hampshire to cast illegal votes in 2016.

In previous elections Republican voters have taken advantage of mail-in ballots in larger numbers than their Democrat compatriots so Republican politicians seeing that it was suppressing their own voters tried belatedly to encourage the use of mail-in ballots. Michigans Secretary of State and Eric Holder have now advised against sending a ballot by mail as there is no longer enough time as Republicans in various states are fighting to block the counting of ballots postmarked before the election but that arrive after Election Day from being counted which has been a normal practice in some but not all the states.

Trump uses this strategy mostly to raise question marks if he loses but it also makes some people question their own right to vote. This muddying of the waters has been successful for Trump in the past and has led us to a post-truth world, nobody knowing what is actually true and what is a lie.

So who can vote in the presidential elections in 2020?

The best place to check is the government's own website. If you are 18 years old on or before election day, you can vote for the outcome of the presidential elections in 2020. In almost every state, you can register to vote before you turn 18 if you will be 18 by Election Day according to the government website. See a table of voter registration age requirements by state.

If you are homeless, you are allowed to vote. In all 50 of the United States, you can register to vote if you are experiencing homelessness.

Most states have some duration of residency requirements for voter registration for example, having resided for 30 days or more before the Election Day in the state or county. Contact your local elections officials to find out what the rules are in your state.

If you have a felony, you can't vote in some states but you should check your state's laws on this. Again, depending on the state, some people who ar mentally incapacitated are not allowed to vote. Check your state's laws on this issue. For example, in some states, you can not vote if you are declared an idiot or legally incompetent or legally insane.

You can also not vote if you are not a citizen of the United States even if you are a permanent legal resident.

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Who can and can't vote in the 2020 US Election? - AS English

Whats the likely second term Trump foreign policy or Biden foreign policy agenda? Think pieces and Twitter threads abound, and dozens are willing to share their predictions on background. The re-elected president or the president-elect will have to make a series of critical choices on process and personnel during the next few months. These decisions, typically made during the transition period and not always as intentionally as they should be, will serve as the foundation for policy outcomes for the next four years.

Who leads, how agencies implement policy, and the role of the National Security Council process draw less attention than strategy and policies, but they shape the impact of a presidency. Habits set early in an administration will drive foreign policy outcomes during the next four years. While some personnel and process questions lend themselves to soundbite solutions like adopting the Brent Scowcroft model, holding over leaders of the opposing party, or shrinking the National Security Council staff they are not always realistic in practice for a particular administration and may not be best for a presidents policy agenda, or for the country.

Carefully considering these matters may be more important for second-term presidents than first-term presidents. A newly elected president is forced to dedicate time to personnel and process questions due to the requirements of setting up a new government. A president entering their second term, however, is liable to gloss over these issues. As former White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten has said, Every two-term presidency has had the same problem, which is the president doesnt think of it as a transition.

As we move towards transition, observers of national security should take careful stock of how these personnel and process questions are addressed and practitioners should push their principals to handle such choices with the seriousness they deserve.

Continuity and Change Among Senior Officials

The most public choice a new president needs to make is who will be kept on and who will be replaced.

Keeping experienced and effective leaders can ensure that ongoing operations are not disrupted, allow a new president to signal a predecessors policy decisions will not be repudiated, or serve as a bipartisan olive branch. In 2008, for instance, President Barack Obama decided to retain Robert Gates at the Defense Department. Doing so smoothed the Pentagon transition amid two major conflicts, and reassured skeptics of Obamas foreign policy instincts. As one Obama advisor told the New York Times, the decision to appoint Gates looks pretty damn good because of continuity and stability.

Of course, having the same cadre of senior officials direct American foreign policy can have unintended consequences. According to Kurt Campbell and Jim Steinberg, President Lyndon Johnsons heavy reliance on holdovers [from the Kennedy administration] undoubtedly made it more difficult to give serious consideration to a radical departure in U.S. policy on Vietnam. And though Gates leadership gave Obamas defense strategy and budget process credibility, it may also have prevented the president from pursuing his preferred approach in Afghanistan, given the two leaders divergent policy objectives in that theater.

Retaining the same foreign policy team can also have serious political downsides. During the 1976 Republican primary, President Gerald Ford was slammed by an upstart conservative rival Ronald Reagan for his decision to keep Henry Kissinger as secretary of state. While Reagans primary challenge was unsuccessful, his critique resonated so deeply with Republicans that they forced Ford to accept a plank in the party platform denouncing Kissingers and by extension Fords Soviet policy.

Moreover, new senior leadership can bring about much needed change. President Jimmy Carters selection of Adm. Stansfield Turner as CIA director helped to modernize the agencys collection process and move it past the Church committee-era scandals even if some of his reforms were less than appreciated by agency veterans. A re-elected president can also use the transition into a second term to reset the administration. In 2004, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley advised President George W. Bush to replace his entire national security team in order to distance himself from the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.

A fresh foreign policy team, however, can take time to find their sea legs even if they have served before. Every new team needs time to develop personal rapport, and their years of experience may prove as much of a hindrance as an enabler. A common vocabulary, shared understanding of roles and division of labor, and balanced perception of risk take time to develop and cannot be waved away by lengthy resumes. The foreign policy team and process under President George H. W. Bush and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft is commonly regarded as exceptional. Yet during a showdown with Manuel Noriega, the dictator of Panama, Bush and his team struggled despite decades of collective experience. We did not act decisively. This was our first crisis. We didnt do particularly well, Scowcroft would later recall. Any new foreign policy team will face similar growing pains, making empowering new leadership a potentially risky decision.

Autonomy of the Cabinet

Who a president chooses to lead links closely to the role the cabinet plays in developing and implementing an administrations foreign policy. Senior officials granted autonomy on personnel and resources will have different qualifications and requirements than those more comfortable spending time debating policy in the White House Situation Room or deferring to presidential preferences.

With more than two million full-time civilian employees, the sheer size of the federal government demands some degree of decentralization. And without a leadership team that is empowered to take risks and innovate, the federal government can struggle to respond effectively to crises and threats. At the same time, strong incentives push presidents towards centralized decision-making. As Charles Dawes, a cabinet secretary and Calvin Coolidges vice president, once remarked, Cabinet secretaries are vice presidents in charge of spending and as such are the natural enemies of the president.

During the transition period, a president should evaluate these tradeoffs and decide how to manage the relationship with their cabinet.

Attempts at total decentralization have run aground. Carter began his administration pledging to have a cabinet government that empowered individual secretaries an explicit rejection of the strong White House model developed by President Richard Nixon. The result, according to Stu Eizenstat, Carters chief domestic policy aide, was a disjointed and confused administration in which the White House was blindsided by controversial decisions made by the cabinet. Before the end of his term, Carter abandoned the experiment. More recently, Obama walked back a promise to delegate power to Attorney General Eric Holder after Holder controversially decided to try accused terrorists in the civilian court system.

Hierarchical control, however, also has its downsides. Cabinet secretaries frequently chafe under tight White House control. Gates grew so frustrated with White House interventions that he told subordinates if they ever got a call from the White House they should tell em to go to hell and call me. Micromanagement became the most dire insult of the Obama national security apparatus, though frequently with little attention to why or whether White House scrutiny was necessary. But too often if White House attention or support becomes a necessary condition for policy implementation, a distracted or inattentive White House can inadvertently kill promising initiatives.

Among the most contentious issues is that of sub-cabinet appointments. Presidents often want to place their preferred personnel in political appointments in the agencies, especially personnel with White House relationships. As Reagan aide Ed Meese explained, We wanted our appointees to be the presidents ambassadors to the agencies, not the other way around. Carter bucked this trend and gave his cabinet secretaries free rein to name their subordinates, a choice that empowered greater team-building at the agency level but resulted in less trust and connectivity with the White House.

Cabinet officers generally want to control sub-cabinet appointments themselves. And selections made by external parties like the White House can prove problematic. In 2001, a hawkish John Bolton was placed in Colin Powells relatively more moderate State Department behind enemy lines, as a member of Vice President Dick Cheneys staff put it. The result of this arrangement was a State Department that was frequently at odds with itself, undermining American diplomatic efforts. A lack of control over personnel may also discourage promising candidates from even seeking cabinet positions.

A president will have to decide how to weigh the need for centralized authority against the desire to offer autonomy to their team and do so with purpose.

The National Security Council Process and Role of the Staff

The primary mechanism for enforcing the choice of centralization or autonomy is the National Security Council and its associated staff. Presidents and their advisors can give lip service to the archetypal Scowcroft model for policy process and decision-making, but the National Security Council process the battle rhythm of decisions, the priority of voices, the acceptance of risk, the iteration of policy and strategy reflects the presidents preferences. These habits are set early in an administration and are difficult to adjust midstream, even with leadership rotation.

The National Security Council process is a collection of bureaucratic decisions with major policy consequences: who hosts meetings on what topic; what is on the agenda; when are decisions made; who attends these meetings and who is kept out; and who follows up on decisions when they are made. Some presidents, like Carter and Reagan, have resisted a formalized or centralized decision-making process driven from their West Wing. In Carters case, that decision was explicitly intended to to place more responsibility in the departments and agencies. Other presidents, perhaps best exemplified by President Dwight Eisenhower and Nixon, have attempted to concentrate foreign policy decision-making within the National Security Council, and were supported by an active staff.

Today, many advocates seek to move decision-making out of the National Security Council and into the State Department and other cabinet-level agencies. Less formal or centralized approaches, however, when pursued by Carter and Reagan, have been criticized as leading to disputes and bureaucratic intrigue. In Carters case, the lack of clear responsibilities and formal process led to squabbles between his secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. In Reagans case, an informal and free-wheeling National Security Council process was identified as one of the proximate causes of the Iran-Contra scandal. Without formal process and clear lines of authority, the National Security Council may also struggle to coordinate long-range planning, instead becoming consumed with the issue of the day.

Still, when the National Security Council has driven the policy process, it has faced critiques that it has become less a hub for coordination than a policy and operational entity in its own right. Successive national security advisors across administrations have sought to streamline the National Security Council staff, judging size as a key driver of operational mischief and outsized control. While the size of the National Security Council may enable micromanagement, micromanagement is also driven by the specific preferences of White House leadership and capacity gaps at agencies.

Presidents should be honest with themselves about the sort of policy process they wish to run and transparently organize their National Security Council process and staff accordingly. Though certain models have attractive reputations, the worst outcome would be to select a popular concept and circumvent it with duplicative policy mechanisms or staff.

Each of these three choices will have a profound impact on the way that American foreign policy is implemented and pursued. The transition period first to second is the only time presidents have to wrestle with these decisions and ensure their outcomes are to their liking.

Loren DeJonge Schulman is the Vice President for Research, Analysis, and Evaluation at the Partnership for Public Service, co-host of the Bombshell podcast, and has previously served in senior staff roles at the National Security Council and Department of Defense.

Alex Tippett is a research associate at the Partnership for Public Services Center for Presidential Transition.

Image: White House (Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Manuel Noriega was the dictator of Nicaragua, when in fact he was the leader of Panama.

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Make Good Choices! National Security Transitions and the Policy and Process Decisions - War on the Rocks

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Elections have been rife with litigation since the Bush v. Gore fiasco in 2000, but the coronavirus pandemic has led to an explosion of lawsuits across the country. Stakeholders are clashing over how to make sure voters can safely get to the polls while ensuring election integrity through an unprecedented public health crisis that makes the mundane act of queuing up to the polls a potentially deadly risk.

Some legal scholars have raised the possibility that, like in the 2000 presidential election, the winner of this contest won't be immediately clear due to the time it will take to process and count the historic number of mail-in ballots.

But Loyola Law School, Los Angeles professor Justin Levitt,who has been tracking pandemic-related litigation over the election, said it's unlikely that there will be a repeat of the 2000 election battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore, which he called a "black swan event" that came down to 537 votes in the Sunshine State.

"We had an incredibly rare probability event," he said of the 2000 election. "The chance that it happens twice is that much more rare and the fact that we've had so much litigation so far makes it rarer still."

In recent weeks, The New York Times and other media outlets have disclosed that Biden's campaign has tapped a number of powerful Democratic attorneys to form a kind of legal phalanx to battle through what the litigation trackers call "perhaps the most litigated election season in the last two decades."

With President Donald Trump counting onhis own star legal teamheading into Election Day andbeyond, Law360 looks at some of the key attorneys, firms and groups working for the 2020 Biden campaign.

Dana Remus

Despite rising in the Democratic firmament, Remus also has worked closely with conservative jurists. The Yale Law School graduate clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr. and co-taught with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, a class in Duke University School of Law's 2019 D.C. Summer Institute on Law and Policy, a program for undergraduates and working professionals considering law school.

She also clerked for Judge Anthony J. Scirica of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and was an associate at Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP.

A major concern for Remus will be fending off Republican challenges to alternative voting methods, such as mail-in ballots or curbside voting, as a response to the risks that the coronavirus poses to in-person voting. Trump has called such methods a "scam" designed to help Biden.

The issue has already reached the U.S. Supreme Court. This past week, the justices blocked a deadline extension for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin, while upholding extensions in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. But the litigation is far from over, and Republicans are likely to ask the court to throw out ballots received after Election Day in certain battleground states.

Robert Bauer

Bauer has been a fierce critic of the Trump administration, attacking current White House Counsel Pat Cipollone for his "remarkably partisan performance" during Trump's impeachment trial, as well as the "counterfeit product" of Trump's now-shuttered voter fraud task force. At the start of state lockdowns in March, Bauer called for increased mail-in ballots and $2 billion in congressional funding for state election preparation.

Biden has lined up a top-flight team to wage the likely state-by-state legal fights of local voting and counting rules led by Marc Elias of Perkins Coie LLP, the top lawyer on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, and Obama's former attorney general, Eric Holder, The Associated Press has said. In assembling a robust legal team ahead of the election, Biden is likely trying to avoid the last-minute rush to the courthouse that followed the 2000 election, when litigation broke out in Florida over a recount.

Marc EliasPerkins Coie LLP

Marc Elias

Eric Holder

The special unit overseeing the litigation at the state level may already have the heavy lifting behind it. The hundreds of lawsuits filed around the country since the pandemic started will actually make it less likely that the U.S. Supreme Court, or any other court, will be forced to declare a winner like it did in 2000.

"Those cases got resolved in June, July, August and September, and so that means there's less to fight about in October and November," said Loyola's Levitt. "The big questions about how most Americans are going to cast or count ballots those are already decided."

So even if the winner isn't clear on election night, that doesn't mean there's reason to panic, Levitt said. It will simply be up to the "far more democratic, far more boring" exercise of officials counting ballots, rather than explosive litigation. "I have no doubt that there will be litigation after the election, but I have real doubts about how much of that will be meaningful."

Nevertheless, if the election winds up in the Supreme Court, Democrats fear a repeat of the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision in which a conservative majority ended the Florida recount and effectively sealed the presidency for Bush.

To prepare, Biden's campaign has organized a "national litigation team" consisting of former U.S. Solicitors General Walter Dellinger, now a professor emeritus at Duke University School of Law, and Donald Verrilli of Munger Tolles & Olson LLP, according to the AP. Dellinger and Verrilli served as the government's top Supreme Court lawyers for the Clinton and Obama administrations, respectively.

"In 2000, we were not in the habit of having litigation over national elections," said Barry Richard of Greenberg Traurig LLP, who led the Florida legal efforts for President George W. Bush's campaign. "We didn't have a history of that."

As Bush's top lawyer in Florida in 2000, Richard oversaw 47 lawsuits across the state in the frantic litigation over the recount. "Everything was operating at light speed," Richard said. "You could be in the trial court and the appellate court a few hours later."

Campaigns have learned the lessons of Bush v. Gore and now "everybody has lawyers on call all the time," Richard said.

"I'm sure what they're doing right now is having teams of lawyers studying the issues that are currently arising and likely to arise," he said. "There are probably people even preparing rough drafts of briefing right now, and that's what they should be doing."

Walter Dellinger

Since then, Dellinger has appeared before the Supreme Court numerous times in his private practice. He clerked for Justice Hugo Black during the 1968 term.

Before becoming Clinton's acting solicitor general, he was an assistant attorney general and head of the Office of Legal Counsel in his administration, where he advised on "loan guarantees for Mexico, on national debt ceiling issues, and on issues arising out of the shutdown of the federal government," according to his law school profile.

Donald Verrilli

Since joining his current firm after his government service, his appearances before the Supreme Court include the successful defense of the constitutionality of Puerto Rico's Financial Oversight and Management Board.

Verrilli is the lead attorney for the Democratic Party in a blockbuster case pending before the Supreme Court about whether Pennsylvania can count mail-in ballots received up to three days after the election. Republicans asked the court to strike down the extension and have the battleground state throw out ballots received after Election Day.

Should election disputes move from state to federal courts, Dellinger and Verrilli will likely lead the Biden team as appeals wind their way to the Supreme Court.

Levitt, however, said earlier rounds of litigation this summer may have dampened the chances that the Supreme Court will ultimately decide who won the election.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh were part of the Republican legal team supporting Bush in the fight, as was Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed Oct. 26.

During her confirmation hearings, Justice Barrett refused to say whether she would recuse in an election case, saying that would be "short-circuiting" the normal recusal process.

Levitt said Biden's and Trump's legal teams are likely preparing for such a scenario, however unlikely.

"I think the legal teams are preparing for exceedingly unlikely contingencies, much like the Department of Defense has all kinds of playbooks, all kinds of military plans, for all types of contingencies, even those that never happen."

The Biden campaign did not return a request for comment from Law360 on its legal defense operations.

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.

--Update: This story has been updated to adjust Walter Dellinger's affiliation.

For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.

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The Legal Heavyweights In The Ring For Joe Biden - Law360

Though the Voting Rights Act of 1965 helped ensure the voting rights of citizens, many of the following tactics remain in play in attempts to influence elections at the local, state and national levels:

Voter ID laws: Indiana is among states that require voters to prove who they are. Critics of this practice say it discourages many people from voting. Thats because they may not have money to obtain identification or transportation to a Bureau of Motor Vehicles site.

Polling site consolidation: This tactic disproportionately prevents people of color from voting because it can require them to travel farther, a problem when voters dont have transportation. In some instances, this is overcome when organizations are able to provide group transportation to the polls.

The NAACP filed an unsuccessful suit in Indiana in 2017 because of a consolidation law that applied only to Lake County, which has the states second-largest Black population and largest Hispanic population.

Poll taxes: Begun in the 1890s, poll taxes were specifically designed to prevent African Americans from voting in southern states. Poor white people who could prove that their ancestors voted prior to the Civil War were exempt.

Though poll taxes have been enacted historically in many nations, they were outlawed at the federal level in 1964 when Congress passed the 24th Amendment. Five states continued to enforce poll taxes until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional in 1966.

Critics have accused government officials in Florida of levying unlawful poll taxes as recently as this year by requiring ex-felons to pay back fees before they are allowed to vote.

Literacy tests: Starting in the 1890s, many southern states administered literacy tests, one of the specific types of voter suppression the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to eliminate.

The U.S. had been one of several nations, including Australia with its White Australia policy and South Africa with Apartheid during that same period, that required voters to pass reading and writing tests. Such exams were a way of excluding voters because of race or nation of origin.

As with poll taxes, white people often could be exempted from the requirement through the voting records of their ancestors or a finding of good moral character.

Gerrymandering: This is a manipulation of electoral districts to unfairly favor a particular party or class of people.

Gerrymandering is still considered a problem for minority voters today and is still practiced by the Indiana General Assembly, where the party in power draws congressional and legislative districts every 10 years.

Former President Barack Obama and his former U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, are dedicated to promoting the 28th Amendment, which would reform the redistricting process.

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Follow Rebecca R. Bibbs on Twitter at @RebeccaB_THB, or call 765-640-4883.

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Types of voter suppression | State News | heraldbulletin.com - The Herald Bulletin