Heading into the 2024 presidential election, the Republican National Committee is haunted by the ghost of 2020. Donald Trump’s various efforts to question the integrity of that election – in which Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory rested on a razor-thin 40,000 vote margin across three states – loom large. A number of key Trump claims about widespread fraud were laughed out of the court of public opinion and dismissed in the courts. And the traumatic events of Jan. 6, 2021, have poisoned the well for even good-faith discussions about the need for election integrity.
At the same time, in the years since 2020 the concerted efforts of Democrats, left-leaning activists, and major corporate media to dismiss the risks posed by mail-in balloting and other issues in the 2020 election have proven misleading in key respects. Typical of this effort was the Brookings Institution, which asserted in 2020 that “there is no evidence that mail ballots increase electoral fraud.” This is in spite of the fact that previous reports by The New York Times and Jimmy Carter, as well as a joint analysis by Cal Tech and M.I.T., all affirmed that mail-in ballots are more susceptible to fraud.
Connecticut authorities are currently recommending criminal charges against campaign workers for the mayor of Bridgeport – the largest city in the state – over potential fraud involving mail-in ballots in that city’s 2019 Democratic primary election. Now local authorities are investigating again after fellow Democrats have produced a video apparently showing the same mayor’s campaign fraudulently stuffing ballot boxes to narrowly win another primary election last month.
As a result, questions about the radical alteration of how Americans voted in 2020 as a result of COVID and aggressive Democratic Party litigation have never been settled, and Republican voters remain suspicious. Ahead of next year’s presidential election, questions about how to address election integrity concerns are paramount for the RNC.
“I always give the example of Pennsylvania. In 2020, they had about 2.6 million [mail-in] votes, but in 2016, they had fewer than 300,000, right? We saw a massive increase in mail and voting and just tons of concern comes from our voters about what are we going to do,” says RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. “And we’ve watched Democrats systematically try to codify those post-COVID changes that they made, and we’ve been in the courts trying to keep those pre-COVID protections in place for our elections. There’s been a battle waged.”
In the years since 2020, the RNC has been busy putting in place staff, programs, and systems to address the new reality of pivotal elections being narrowly decided by rules that are rapidly changing. The result is the creation of a dedicated, year-round infrastructure within the RNC solely dedicated to addressing concerns about election integrity.
“It’s a big deal. The election integrity department has dedicated resources and dedicated staff and it’s on a permanent, ongoing basis. This is all we do,” says Josh Helton, senior advisor for Election Integrity at the RNC. “We don’t have other things to think about or worry about like voter contacts, get out the vote efforts, organizing the convention, or other legal matters that arise.”
To that end, the RNC is touting a number of big new capabilities. There’s now year-round coordination with 80,000 poll watchers and poll workers across the country, and the new election integrity legal department worked with over 90 law firms in the 2022 midterm cycle and participated in nearly 100 lawsuits.
Technology and data are also a big component of the RNC’s new efforts. They’ve developed new software to process on-the-ground reports of election problems, which they say helped them process and prioritize 20,000 issues that were reported in the midterms, and this is in addition to new software to manage the coordination with the 80,000 volunteers at the polls. Finally, GOP officials stress that they’re also investing in communications staff. This is more than window dressing. In addition to being highly technical, it’s controversial – Democrats routinely characterize such efforts as “voter suppression – so Republicans know they need public relations staffers who are experts in understanding and communicating the issues involved.
Many Republicans were frustrated by the rapid pace of changes to state election laws brought on by the chaos of 2020, and they wonder why the RNC wasn’t better prepared to fight against what was happening. One reason is that through 2020, the RNC was legally barred from doing many things that are now key parts of their election integrity efforts.
Republicans were accused of voter intimidation in a 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race. The case was settled, and the national GOP entered into a court-ordered consent decree limiting Republican involvement with any poll-watching operation. However, Dickinson Debevoise, the Jimmy Carter-appointed federal judge who oversaw the agreement, never let Republicans out from under the consent decree and even repeatedly modified and strengthened it. Though Debevoise only served on the bench for 15 years, he stayed 21 years in “senior status,” a form of semi-retirement that enables judges to keep serving in a limited capacity.
It wasn’t until Debevoise’s death in 2015 that Republicans were released from the consent decree. Eventually, another jurist was assigned the case and let the agreement expire at the end of 2018. But the RNC found that the relevant muscles had atrophied in the previous 40 years, leaving them flat-footed for 2020.
They vow that this is no longer the case. “We keep using the phrase, there’s no longer an election day, there’s an election season. There’s not an election year, either. Elections are always happening,” says McDaniel. “And right now it’s happening in the courts, and in your ground game, and in building out your infrastructure to get poll watchers and poll workers in place. You want them in early so that you’re seeing if problems are happening on the ground or in specific counties. In Wisconsin, we have to nominate those poll workers [for the 2024 election] in November of this year.”
The RNC has already achieved some victories: The party won a lawsuit in Pennsylvania to keep the state from counting undated mail ballots. Another RNC lawsuit helped protect poll-watcher access in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Republicans have also successfully sued to stop noncitizen voting efforts in multiple jurisdictions and have ongoing lawsuits to ensure the fairness of poll workers in Nevada and Arizona. “We want to push to have good election law in as many states and in as many places as we can,” says McDaniel.
But McDaniel stresses that the election integrity unit is also about making sure that Republican voters and candidates are aware of these changes and are receptive and responsive to them.
“If we’re not up to date on the changes that are happening at a rapid pace in these states, and not educating our voters as to the changes in the laws and adapting our infrastructure, we’re not going to be successful,” she says. “There’s a point where we have to recognize these are laws on the books, and we have to deal with what we have and adapt. Nevada is going to send a live ballot to every voter, right? They’re going to have unrestricted ballot harvesting. So that is what we’re going to have to contend with in Nevada.”
While RNC officials are optimistic about their new election integrity efforts and insist they saw beneficial results in the midterms, the fact is that many of these new resources have yet to be tested in a presidential election. And in many respects, the RNC is playing catch up, trying to deploy technologies and capabilities that the Democratic National Committee has already deployed to tangible effect. Still, it’s a big step forward for the modernization of the Republican party that they hope will pay dividends past the 2024 election.
“One of the challenges I think we have as a party is we’re [a] shiny object party. We love candidates, we don’t want to engage until we have a candidate nominated and we know who that candidate is going to be,” says McDaniel. “But a car doesn’t run without an engine, and we have to be investing more in the infrastructure and these non-sexy parts of the political ecosystem, if we think we’re going to be successful – and that’s what the RNC is doing.”
via wnd
