The bogus right-wing legal battle to keep Joe Biden on the ballot

A powerful right-wing think tank is threatening a legal battle to make sure that Joe Biden is the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 2024.

But it’s unlikely that any lawsuit would be successful, election law experts say, pointing to state laws that allow the candidate who is nominated at a party’s convention to be the name on the ticket.

If the president ultimately decides to hang up his re-election campaign before the Democratic National Convention, where party members would then come up with an alternate nominee, there aren’t any legal pathways to force states to keep his name on the ballot.

The point of waging a potential legal blitz is more about making Democrats scramble in court rather than keeping Biden on the ballot, experts and voting rights groups told The Independent.

While the threats won’t be credible in court, they could be used to plant seeds of doubt to challenge the legitimacy of a new campaign and the results of the election, fitting into a pattern of other Republican-led lawsuits targeting election rules across the US.

The Heritage Foundation — architects of the Project 2025 plan for Donald Trump’s presidency — hopes to at least “make the process difficult” if Democrats switch up the nominee, according to a memo from the group.

The Heritage Foundation and Trump campaign did not return The Independent’s request for comment.

A memo drawn up by Heritage’s Oversight Project specifically mentions election rules for candidates in Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — battleground states that Biden won in 2020 — that the group believes are ripe for litigation.

But none of those states have any laws on the books that would prevent the Democratic Party from submitting a different nominee, if Biden were to