Under Chairman Joe Gruters, the Republican National Committee (RNC) is working to make election integrity a mainstream issue; the RNC is currently involved in over 120 cases across 30 states.
Gruters explained to the Washington Reporter that “the RNC is fighting every day to secure our elections. After 2024, we never let our foot off the pedal, continuing and building on the successful election integrity operation that Michael Whatley and Lara Trump created.”
The RNC is focused on several aspects of election integrity, Gruters added. “Ensuring accurate voter rolls is just one part of our efforts,” he said. “We’re working overtime to protect voter ID, prevent non-citizen voting, secure mail-in ballots, and ensure we have poll workers and poll watchers across the country.”
The Reporter interviewed several RNC officials, who discussed in detail the committee’s work, which has taken lawyers from Maine to Hawaii. “For our litigation, we really see it as about four different buckets that we work under,” an official explained.
“There’s the mail-in voting protection,” an official explained. “Where mail-in voting is allowed, we’re trying to just make sure that the protections are being followed, being implemented, and that states are enacting them where they don’t have them. So under mail in voting that’s things like receipt deadline, Watson, sealed envelope requirements, signature match requirements, dated ballot requirements, anything like that. So if you’re going to have mail in ballots, making sure you have your safeguards there.”
“Number two would be non-citizen voting,” the official continued. “Our biggest win in that is probably the New York case, where, because of our lawsuit, we stopped 800,000 non-citizens from voting in local elections. And the reason why that’s so important is, some states, they will allow non-citizens to vote in municipal elections, but then that will bleed over, and they can get on a federal voter roll. Our confidence in New York to actually have those kind of safeguards prevent, that is very minimal. That bleeds into NVRA. Voter list maintenance. We had lawsuits on that in 2024 we continue to focus on that.”
“And then the last one would be voter ID, which is more difficult, but we’ve done things like filed amicus briefs and challenges to like student ID, where North Carolina, Indiana litigation over using student IDs as effective government IDs for voting, so things like that,” the official said.
The RNC’s work did not emerge overnight. “This is a very reputable component of the RNC, we have a lot of cooks in the kitchen, field teams, legal strategy, comms strategy, this is a true effort, and something that people don’t know,” an official said. “It’s really taking up a lot of what the RNC does at the directive of the president.”
The committee had brought its election integrity work to Democratic jurisdictions across America, in part because party officials see Democratic opposition to their election integrity efforts as tantamount to endorsing fraud.
“With us being Republicans, we know that blue states are not vigilant, and they don’t care,” one official said. “We want to protect voter ID. We want to prevent and stop non-citizens from voting, secure mail in ballots, ensure states maintain these voter rolls. With the Save America Act, why would any Democrat not want only American citizens to vote in American elections? You obviously can see the stats there, and our position is, obviously they just want to cheat. Why would they not want secure elections?”
The RNC’s legal argument in many cases is fairly simple: “federal law says only Americans should be voted in federal elections,” an official said. “Baseline, it’s the law. ID is also a baseline requirement to operate in society, to drive a car, board a plane, buy a bottle of wine, come to the RNC. So it’s just absolutely ridiculous. And also it’s very hypocritical to tell people that are of a minority population, that they’re too stupid to get an ID. For instance, in Nevada, the Secretary of State came out and said our state’s all Latino voters. They can’t have the Save America Act. That’s wrong, because 82 percent of Latinos in America want common sense voter ID.”
“Obama, Hillary Clinton, all these people require voter ID for people to attend their rallies, attend their campaign events,” the official added. “They have voted with ID themselves. There actually isn’t a legal argument why Democrats say this is bad for voters.”
A recent case in Maryland shows how the RNC goes toe-to-toe in blue areas. “The issue is that there’s more than 100 percent voter registration rates, which seems impossible,” an official explained. “They’re not making reasonable efforts, which is what’s required. We filed the complaint…and some of the arguments are that it’s not indicative of anything, but the evidence really isn’t there. There’s going to be a dispute about what sort of evidence can be used to show failure to comply.”
RNC officials expect the Maryland case to go their way, in part because of their extensive data work. Their legal opponents’ “way to attack our arguments is going to be to attack the data itself, which is quite ironic, considering most of the data is actually disclosed by the state of Maryland,” the official said.
The case has already gotten the state of Maryland “nailed down on saying, ‘no, we [the state, and not the county government] are responsible for the voter rolls. We take ownership. If there’s any liability in this case, the state of Maryland will be responsible for enforcing any judgment.”
