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.
“While Democrat and progressive lawyers like myself and others are in court trying to expand voting rights, protect drop boxes, allow for people to register, those things, they’re in court trying to allow their henchmen and vigilantes to intimidate voters and harass election officials,” Elias said during a recent podcast.
Below is a look at some of the RNC’s recent election legal fights playing out across the country.
Arizona
The Supreme Court granted the RNC’s emergency request to the court this month to allow Arizona election officials to require proof of citizenship from people registering to vote using a state form.
The ruling was a partial win for the RNC amid worries about noncitizens voting in a battleground state that has been ravaged by illegal immigration.
But the high court also handed a victory to Democrats and the Department of Justice, who argued to the justices that federal forms available for Arizonans to register to vote already require them to sign off that they are citizens and that requiring documentation of citizenship, such as a driver’s license, was redundant. The Supreme Court said that if a voter has registered to vote using the federal form and did not provide a document proving citizenship, that voter could still apply for an absentee ballot and vote in federal races, just not in state and local races.
Michigan
The RNC filed a lawsuit in Wayne County last week, arguing the Midwestern metropolis violated a “parity requirement” in the Michigan primary by having a lopsided number of Democratic poll workers, known as “election inspectors,” at hundreds of polling places.
The RNC argued that Detroit’s election commission appointed 2,337 Democratic election inspectors and 310 Republican election inspectors “despite the fact that qualified Republicans applied or were identified but were not pursue or selected,” according to the legal complaint.
The RNC has asked the court to require Wayne County to follow procedures that force it to reach parity more closely at polling places.
North Carolina
The RNC brought a lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections this week, asking a court to order the board to address more than 225,000 voters on its rolls who registered without providing state-required identification.
North Carolina’s voter rolls are “potentially replete with ineligible voters—including possible non-citizens—all of whom are now registered to vote,” attorneys for the Republicans wrote.
While there is no evidence that the registered voters who did not meet the state’s identification requirement were, in fact, ineligible to vote, the Republicans have argued that the mere possibility of ineligible voters being registered puts North Carolina’s election integrity “in jeopardy” and that a court should force the election board to correct the matter.
The lawsuit was the second from the RNC in as many weeks directed at the North Carolina election board related to voter rolls, a pursuit that Elias called “ridiculous.”
“This is just an effort by Republicans to inject further lies and misinformation into the system to explain to their voters why when they lose in November they lost,” he said.
Georgia
The competitive purple state was ground zero for election fraud claims in 2020, and many eyes across the political spectrum are once again on the state ahead of what is expected to be another nail-biting presidential contest.
While the Georgia Election Board’s recent implementation of modified election certification rules has invited a lawsuit from Democrats, national and state Republicans have intervened in a separate legal case brought by the New Georgia Project, a left-leaning group founded by voting activist and twice-failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
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The RNC argued in its request this month to intervene in the lawsuit that it was pushing for “accurate voter-registration lists” after the New Georgia Project moved to halt enforcement of Georgia’s election law provisions that allow officials to purge voter rolls.
“We continue to fight for clean voter rolls, stopping Kamala from using our tax dollars to benefit her campaign, making sure states follow election law, and fixing the existing threats in our election system,” Zunk said of the RNC’s lawsuits. “Our unprecedented operation is committed to securing the election and fighting to protect the vote for all Americans.”
