Ashley Oliver writes for the Washington Examiner about national Republicans’ electoral legal strategy.
The Republican National Committee is going on offense in the heat of campaign season, involving itself in election-related legal fights in several battleground states as ballots are finalized and early voting is around the corner.
The RNC filed an emergency application before the Supreme Court in Arizona this month over noncitizens voting and saw a partial victory. The committee just brought a lawsuit in Detroit because it wanted more Republicans watching over polling locations. And a lawsuit the RNC brought in North Carolina this week is one of many legal fights playing out over how states manage their voter rolls.
The legal battles are being driven by the RNC’s election integrity program, the largest-scale initiative of its kind for the committee after a consent decree dramatically limited the RNC from partaking in election security activity from the 1980s until 2018.
For the 2024 election, the RNC has enlisted tens of thousands of volunteers, including a swath of attorneys, to participate in what it describes as “protecting the vote.” Claire Zunk, a spokeswoman for the election integrity program, confirmed that the committee was, as of August, involved in more than 100 lawsuits “and counting” as part of its program.“We are stopping Democrat election interference schemes in real time,” Zunk told the Washington Examiner.
Often Republicans at the national and state level find themselves at odds with Democrats in election litigation. A common refrain from Republicans is that Democrats are threatening election fairness and making it easier to commit fraud by trying to do away with voting safeguards. Democrats, on the other hand, argue that Republicans are trying to make it harder to vote and causing disenfranchisement.
High-powered attorney Marc Elias, who has for years been at the forefront of Democratic election litigation, dismissed Republicans’ court battles as an attempt to manipulate rules to keep power because they do not, in Elias’s view, hold a majority of voter support and cannot win if more people can vote.
