There are three types of election lawsuits out there right now.  First, an increasingly vanishing handful of cases in a few states over limited election procedures might still yield a result in the next few days. … As important as they are to the individual voters involved, they’re not going to change a result before the election.  And that means they’re not going to change a result after the election either.

Second, there are a handful of cases with real arguments over significant issues that have yielded an answer effectively locked in for this election.  But they’re now out of time.  The fighting will continue — some will eventually be upheld, some overturned — but without further impact on the 2024 cycle.

The third category is by far the largest: the slew of cases that. Were. Never. Going. To. Win.

Ever. …

There’s a notion that these cases are galaxy-brain traps, “zombie lawsuits” waiting to ravage the post-election landscape.  But there’s a pretty big missing step [trigger warning: clip from “South Park,” contains profanity and gratuitous violence, but does perfectly illustrate the psychology behind many of these lawsuits] between here and there: a plausible legal argument sufficient to grant election-swinging relief.  Just as in 2020, courts this cycle in election cases have not simply been indulging what some might presume to be partisan priors: if you look only at the ostensible partisan composition of the bench, you’d get the outcome wrong much of the time.  Instead, courts have largely been acting like … courts, discarding most nonsense as it comes.  There’s more than enough horror going around already this Halloween — we don’t need to indulge the litigious supernatural.