Democrats have little concrete to show for a week of legal battles charging Donald Trump and his allies with a sweeping voter intimidation campaign, but the effort may pay off politically for Hillary Clinton by energizing her backers to get to the polls to stop a real or imagined GOP onslaught.

The latest flurry of court actions brought by the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties — punctuated with a plea for relief late Sunday night to the Supreme Court — has so far failed to yield any change to the legal playing field heading into Election Day. Still, the litigation has drawn more attention to claims of a Republican effort to suppress the votes of African-Americans and Latinos — groups Clinton urgently needs to show up at the polls for her on Tuesday.


“They’re turning the court into an arm of their PR effort,” complained one GOP staffer closely tracking the lawsuits.

“There’s probably been a couple hundred stories reprinting the AP” article summing up the lawsuits, the source added. “It reinforces the narrative they’ve worked on for years is that Republicans are racists.”

The Democrats biggest victory in the current round of cases came Friday, when a federal judge in Ohio granted an injunction against Trump's campaign, as well as Trump backer Roger Stone and a related group called Stop the Steal, amid allegations that they were planning to harass voters at the polls. But that order from a Democratic appointee was quickly halted Sunday by a panel of three appeals court judges, all of whom are Republican appointees. As a last resort, Democrats made their pitch for help to the Supreme Court, an uphill climb given the current 4-4 split and the need to win over five justices to reverse the stay.

Trump and his Republican backers have already beaten a similar Democratic lawsuit in federal district court in Arizona. But several other cases making the same set of arguments are still on the move against Trump, the state GOP and Stone, though they too remain mired in lower district courts. Hearings are scheduled for Monday in Las Vegas, Greensboro, North Carolina, and Philadelphia, on different parts of the lawsuits.

Both Democratic and Republican sources tracking the litigation said they had their doubts a Supreme Court appeal would be very effective. But they also acknowledged that coupled with the other cases still ongoing, it all would have the tangential effect of keeping the issue alive in front of the press and for Democratic constituencies that Clinton needs to show up at the polls by Tuesday.

“You can add it to the mix,” Jim Manley, a longtime Democratic operative and former spokesman for Nevada Sen. Harry Reid. “Look at some of the photos of what’s going on in Vegas. Hispanic voters get the drill.”

Republicans also complained that the cases were little more than a way to rile up Clinton’s base.

Timothy La Sota, lead attorney for the Arizona Republican Party, questioned the timing of the Democratic lawsuits early last week just as Clinton was mired in the latest turn in the FBI investigation saga. “They’re desperate to change the storyline,” he said.

“These lawsuits were big on nasty hot-button words like ‘conspiracy’ and the Ku Klux Klan Act but bereft of actual substance,” he said. “Their goal was to use a lot of nasty words and sort of hope that that would carry them.”

In an interview Sunday, Stone complained that his planning for the Stop the Steal effort had been slowed by the litigation. “The fact is I’m spending all my time with lawyers,” he said.

Still, Stone said Stop the Steal’s exit polling is full steam ahead, and it will involve sending hundreds of volunteers to about 20 Democratic-dominated and mostly urban precincts in eight battleground states — Florida, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin — “to see if there’s a pattern” where the voting machines do not produce the same results as what he sees in his polls.

In a separate court filing Sunday in one of the Democratic lawsuits, Stone outlined plans to brief Stop the Steal volunteers before Election Day and explained they’ll be instructed to ask participants only three questions: “Did you just vote; did you vote four years ago; and for whom did you vote today.”

The longtime Trump confidant also insisted that Democrats have misrepresented what he’s doing with Stop the Steal. “I will under no circumstances be part of any effort, now or at any time in the future to violate the civil rights of any voter. I will not target voters based on their race.” He also said he had no coordination with the state GOP or the Trump campaign on the issues in the lawsuit “and any suggestion by the plaintiffs to the contrary is rank speculation.”

As he fends off the lawsuits, Stone plans to send a witness to Monday’s hearing in Las Vegas who has volunteered as a training coordinator for the exit polling effort. The witness, San Diego-based stand-up comedian Travis Irvine, said in a court declaration that he’s a registered Democrat who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and is now backing Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson.

While the Democrat vs. Republican litigation has a distinct partisan flair, it also has some practical effects, too.

“It means the courts are primed and ready and thinking about this, so if something happens on Election Day they don’t have to file a brand new lawsuit,” said Myrna Perez, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

This late frenzy of lawsuits around voting rights also represents a “critical” attempt to get immediate relief to voters, said Chris Melody Fields, the manager for legal mobilization at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Her group helped Common Cause win an order Friday night from a federal judge that forces the New York City Board of Elections to provide affidavit ballots to any voter who says they are registered to vote but doesn’t appear on the registration rolls.

Should the laws change as a result of the late lawsuits, Fields said “it’s critically important that groups doing GOTV on the ground and going to contact voters get that information so the voters know when they’re casting their ballot whether or not it is going to count.”

That so much litigation is arriving now, she added, “speaks to what we’ve lost with not having full protections of the Voting Rights Act.”

But David Becker, head of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, cautioned against relying too much on litigation so close to Election Day. Poll workers have already gone through their training, and many polling places have already been set up.

“Rule changes close to an election aren’t good for anyone,” he said.

With early voting drawing to an end and Election Day fast approaching, the battle over who should be going to the polls, and when, has clearly reached a very partisan pitch. During a Trump rally Saturday night in Reno, Nevada, the state GOP chair complained that the voting booths had stayed open three hours later than their scheduled closing time “so a certain group could vote.”

The comment drew quick condemnation from Democrats, who argued it was an incendiary attempt to embolden Trump backers while overlooking state rules that allow anyone in line by a predetermined deadline the right to cast a ballot. Reports of long lines for early voting have actually been a common occurrence throughout the weekend from across the country, including a 3½ hour wait Saturday in a line extending into a park in North Hollywood, California, a line 4,000-people deep on Sunday in Cincinnati, as well as long waits in Delaware County, Ohio, and Indianapolis.

Confusion about voting procedures have also prompted more than 14,000 calls since last week to the 866-OUR-VOTE helpline, which is answering the public’s questions on everything from voter ID requirements to polling place locations and taking reports of malfunctioning balloting equipment and voter intimidation.

The highest volume of calls are coming from Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas, though there’s also been a surge specific to Florida and Pennsylvania for people who are reporting they did not receive absentee ballots in time.

And the late-season litigation has produced a couple of rulings that heartened Clinton allies.

On Friday, a federal judge acting on a suit brought by the North Carolina NAACP ordered officials in three counties there to restore about 4,000 voters stricken from the rolls in the past three months as a result of an organized voter-challenge campaign based on mailings returned as undeliverable.

And a day earlier, a federal judge in Philadelphia rejected a suit from the Pennsylvania Republican Party demanding that it be allowed to send official poll watchers across county lines. The GOP hoped to send observers from rural and suburban areas into inner-city precincts where Republican votes are rarely recorded, but the judge said the Republicans waited until too close to the election to try to challenge the state law requiring poll watchers to be voters in the same county as the polling place they’re observing.