Near-Universal Denial of Discovery in Technically Complex Election Cases (US)

In the vast majority of cases characterized as merits decisions, plaintiffs operated without access to any meaningful discovery process-unable to subpoena election records, machine logs, chain-of-custody documentation, or tabulation data. Plaintiffs were limited to affidavits, expert reports, and publicly available statistics, which courts then found insufficient. The structural asymmetry-election officials testifying how elections are “supposed to work” while observers could only testify to what they personally witnessed-rendered the “merits” designation analytically incomplete for technically complex claims.