The RNC’s Election Integrity Efforts Have Left Much To Be Desired. I Have A Plan To Succeed.

As a homeowner who finds termites on his windowsill, the RNC finally recognized the crisis in election integrity years after Democrats started systematically removing safeguards to ensure that legal voters were allowed to vote. Too many state laws have been introduced to encourage fraud. Meanwhile, Democrat lawyers convinced courts that sound laws could be repealed in the name far-reaching civil rights claims. Often, there was little or no resistance from Republican interests. Every Republican voter is aware of it. Yet the Democrats’ denials, amplified by their allies in the media, mean that far too few Americans understand the depth of the problem or the danger that it poses to voter confidence in our elections — and ultimately to the nation itself.

Take a look at the past 

Ever since I joined the RNC in 2016, after many years serving as an election lawyer laboring in isolation, I’ve been ringing the alarm: the RNC should be leading the fight to restore election integrity nationwide. It has the access to resources, the platform, and the vision – at least in theory – to issue-spot, prioritize, and lead nationally. All reasonable expectations would have called for the RNC to be training and placing the correct people on the ground. It should also have filed the right lawsuits before the courts and aggressively opposed Democrat lawsuits.

1982 consent decree prohibited the party’s conduct of so-called “interference”. “election day operations,” – a fact often used by party insiders as an excuse, to this day, for complete legal inaction on just about every front. Starting in 2018, the consent decree expired. The party could have done much more in opposition to legal challenges to sound voter laws, to demonstrate best practices for election integrity, or to support state efforts in improving safeguards for fair, accessible elections. Why didn’t we? Too many insiders were too cautious to insist on voter ID and strict compliance with rules on the purging of voter roles that had expired.

I’m a veteran of the internal battles to motivate the party to take the issue seriously. After a terrible midterm election, I had my complaints answered by a reward that was familiar to bureaucrats everywhere: I was elected to head an ad-hoc committee on electoral integrity. Our committee diligently examined everything, from the bloated voter rolls in blue and red counties, to overseas voters, and the dangers of same-day registrations and ballot harvesting. We prepared a detailed action plan … which gathered dust throughout 2020 as COVID was used to shred our voting laws on a wholesale basis nationwide, even as the party sat inert, doing little to fight back. At times, the party claimed it was the Trump campaign’s problem to do the legal heavy lifting in 2020 – but how can an ephemeral campaign, focused on winning a single, presidential election, address long-seated, structural problems in voting nationally, or the storm of changes wrought by COVID? It couldn’t — and it didn’t.

The Status Quo

Leading up to the 2020 election, the important work of election integrity challenges fell – either neglected or unaddressed by the RNC or campaigns, while the Democrats aggressively pressed their cause. This inaction and neglect led to serious consequences. 2020 election was marred by a tsunami of COVID-changed regulations, papered windows that prevented legal observers from viewing the ballot-counting and pseudo-observers. “nonprofits” Mark Zuckerberg funded selective ballot-chasing and Democrat participation in swing states. Whole jurisdictions ignored time-honored voting protections, from signature matching to ensuring that absentee ballot legal requirements were met. When the wave receded the party raised money with the promise to challenge the irregularities.

Meanwhile, many election law amateurs rushed into the vacuum created by the party’s inaction to protect our election laws, lobbing half-baked and belated election challenges – some so ill-considered and futile that they damaged election integrity. To this day, some members of the RNC and state parties continue to struggle with the aftermath of the election chaos of 2020 – January 6 committee legal bills, ongoing investigations, decreased voter confidence, divisive grass-roots debates over machines, ballot handling, and more.

Ronna McDaniel was elected as RNC chairperson to a third time at an RNC meeting. She had promised that it would be her last term. Recent years have not been good for election integrity. Only a small fraction of the funds that the RNC raised for election integrity in 2020 went to this cause. Most of the money was diverted to other projects or initiatives. Republican communications — other than fundraising solicitations — were almost nonexistent. Democrats, led