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

Like a homeowner who sees evidence of termites on the windowsill, the RNC has finally woken up to the election integrity crisis, years after Democrats systematically began hollowing out safeguards ensuring that our elections be limited to legal voters only. Too many of our states have introduced rules seemingly designed to invite fraud, while Democrat lawyers convinced courts to eliminate sound laws in the name of far-fetched civil rights claims, often with little, if any, meaningful resistance from Republican interests. Every Republican voter knows 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.

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. By all reasonable expectations, the RNC should have been training and placing the right people on the ground, filing the right lawsuits in court, aggressively opposing Democrat lawsuits, and messaging clearly about the problem to alert the entire American public to lead the way to legislative change.

A 1982 consent decree sidelined the party from conducting so-called “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. But starting in 2018, when the consent decree expired, the party could have done much more to oppose legal challenges to sound voting laws, to model best practices in election integrity, and to support state efforts to upgrade safeguards for fair and accessible elections. Why didn’t we? Too many cautious insiders were afraid of being called names if they insisted on voter ID, on strict adherence to rules, on purging outdated voter roles of ineligible voters.

I’m a veteran of the internal battles to motivate the party to take the issue seriously. In 2019, after a disastrous midterm election, my complaints were answered with a reward familiar to squeaky wheels in bureaucracies everywhere: I was appointed to chair an ad hoc committee on election integrity. For a year, our committee earnestly studied everything from bloated voter rolls (in blue and red counties alike), to overseas voters, to the hazards of same-day registration 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 neglect and inaction was a failure with ominous consequences. The 2020 election descended into a tsunami of COVID-changed rules, papered-over windows blocking legal observers from watching the ballot-counting, pseudo “nonprofits” funded by Mark Zuckerberg selectively juicing ballot-chasing and Democrat turnout in swing states, and entire jurisdictions that simply ignored time-honored voting safeguards ranging from signature-matching to ensuring that state-specific absentee ballot legal requirements were satisfied. When the wave receded, the party raised money on the promise of challenging 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.

On the watershed day of January 8, 2021, Ronna McDaniel was elected at an RNC meeting to a third term as RNC chairman. At the time, she promised it would be her final term. Recent years have been a mixed bag for the cause of election integrity. Only a fraction of funds the RNC raised in the name of election integrity issues in 2020 went to that cause; most of it was diverted to fund other initiatives or projects. Republican communications — other than fundraising solicitations — were almost nonexistent. Democrats, led by election lawyer Marc Elias consumed most of the oxygen on this issue. Their gross distortions of venerable civil rights principles to make it easier for Leftists to win elections motivated their own base and likely attracted some low-information swing voters.

During McDaniel’s last RNC term, the party improved its commitment to election integrity litigation. It isn’t exactly the torrent of effort portrayed by the incumbent, but our election litigation output went from negligible to palpable. We intervened in a portion of the lawsuits filed by the Left, both for the RNC and on behalf of state Republican parties. We filed amicus briefs in litigation initiated by others. What we did not do is initiate much of our own litigation, put the Left on its heels, or leave any lasting marks on our opponents. We showed up, which is a good start, but decades of inactivity have left us with a wide gulf to overcome, and a generation of lawyers to find, fund, train, and sustain, even as we must strategize how we go from playing catch-up to winning this battle. 

For decades, even as Democrats greased the election machinery with the efforts of highly paid corporate fat cat litigators-turned-progressive-legal-gladiators, Republicans have relied on volunteer election lawyers acting as a ragtag army of free, seasonal law militia. These dutiful attorneys abandoned their workspaces or home offices for a few days, taking their laptops into the field, scrambled to figure out where they might be needed, sourced court forms from buddies, and hoped hotel printers would work. Would parties or campaigns even pay expenses? Often, not. This shambolic seasonal spectacle is no way to run a winning political party’s election integrity operation, and under my leadership, it will be a quaint, nostalgic memory of our hackneyed past.

Future Focus

As we focus on the future, this is my vision for an RNC that leads and wins on election integrity. Whether we perform these functions in the party or as the conductors of an orchestra of allied interests, the needs are the same.

At a high level, we need to get both spending and communications right. That’s a skill I’ve mastered as a litigator. I’ve helped many of my clients leverage relatively small budgets to raise the profile of their free speech, freedom of religion, and election contest issues. When it comes to elections, Americans need to know that there’s a problem — and that we Republicans are the solution. Too many Republicans view the RNC itself as the problem! Integrity in fundraising and consistency in budgeting and spending on this important prerogative is required to build up voter and donor trust that we are well-equipped to lead on this issue.

As I analyze the RNC’s recent efforts, I am reminded of the motto of my childhood state, North Carolina – “esse quam videri” – to be, rather than to seem. We had this backward at the RNC in recent years. Our election integrity initiatives merely tried to look and sound good. Rather than focusing on nuts-and-bolts solutions that might actually work – but which take years of commitment, funding, effort, and attention, we formed committees, issued reports, and filed briefs, sometimes lawsuits. We achieved small victories in states like Arizona and Nevada — precisely the states in which the midterm elections remained problematic. We saw action – without lasting change.

Anyone who has started and grown an institution knows that there are no shortcuts or substitutes for leadership, vision, discipline, and execution. Commitment comes first, together with the vision of what we can achieve with the necessary resources. Next comes the effort to raise the resources even as we refine the vision and identify the personnel needed to develop the infrastructure and implement the plan.

As a 30-year litigation veteran and a 35-year political…