Obama campaign prepping thousands of lawyers for election challenges
The Associated Press refers to it as "a mass of legal support that appears to be unrivaled by Republicans or precedent." Thousands of election law attorneys are volunteering for the Obama campaign, no doubt to challenge voter ID enforcement, among other things.
Romney has been organizing his own legal help for the election. Campaign attorney Ben Ginsberg did not provide numbers but said the campaign has been gratified by the "overwhelming number of attorneys who have volunteered to assist."
"We will have enough lawyers to handle all situations that arise," he said.
The GOP doesn't necessarily need to have a numerical counterweight to Obama's attorneys; the 2000 election showed that experienced, connected lawyers on either side can be effective in court.
Former White House counsel Robert Bauer, who is organizing the Obama campaign's legal deployment, said there is great concern this year because he believes GOP leaders around the county have pursued new laws to impede the right to vote.
"The Republican Party and their allies have mapped out their vote suppression campaign as a response to our success in 2008 with grass-roots organization and successful turnout," Bauer said. "This is their response to defeat: changing the rules of participation so that fewer participate."
Several states with Republican leaders have recently pursued changes that could make voting more difficult, including key states such as Florida and Ohio, despite objections from voting rights groups that believe that the laws could suppress votes from low-income and minority blocs.
Republicans dispute that the laws are political, pointing to cases of election fraud and arguing that measures like those requiring voters to show identification are simply common sense.
Independent from the Romney team, a conservative group is prepping an Election Day team of its own to combat possible fraud.
Catherine Engelbrecht, president and founder of True the Vote, said the organization hopes to train and mobilize up to one million volunteers this year, many of them to serve poll watchers. One of the group's main initiatives is to "aggressively pursue fraud reports."
Republican poll watchers in Chicago have been known to suffer from intimidation and outright violence directed against them, so poll watchers are not always the best solution. But you can bet that the Democrats will seek to delegitimize Romney's victory any way they can.
After all, the president has done such a great job, who would want to vote against him?