Although 2025 was a year of off-year elections, the Republican National Committee (RNC) “secured decisive wins across the country protecting election integrity,” its chairman, Joe Gruters, told the Washington Reporter.
With President Donald Trump in the White House, the RNC has prioritized election integrity measures across the country, and as chairman, Gruters this year filed 115 lawsuits in 31 states relating to election integrity.
“The RNC secured decisive wins across the country protecting election integrity,” Gruters said. “As Democrats push to make it easier to cheat, Republicans are fighting for clean voter rolls and secure elections nationwide. We’re building on the momentum of the last cycle heading into 2026, so Americans can have confidence in our elections going into the midterms.”
The RNC’s legal efforts focus on requiring proof of American citizenship for ballots to be cast, defending voter ID bills passed by states, and forcing states to purge voter rolls of dead residents. The moves follow a successful 2024 for the RNC, in which it helped send Trump back to the White House and ran a nationwide election integrity program.
When it comes to ensuring that only American citizens can vote in and decide American elections, the committee intervened in a legal challenge to a Trump executive order that directs the Election Assistance Commission to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, requires mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day, and directs agencies to clean up voter rolls.
On a state level, the RNC won a legal victory from the New York Court of Appeals, which ruled 6-1 that a 2021 bill that would allow noncitizens to vote in local elections violated the state’s constitution; that bill, if left unchallenged, could have added almost one million non-citizens to New York City’s voters rolls.
In Michigan, the RNC sued the Secretary of State for issuing an election manual that allows some non-residents who have never lived in America to vote in Michigan.
Even in red states, the RNC moved to ban non-citizens from voting; in Kentucky, for example, the RNC appealed to the Democrat-run Department of Transportation following reports that it was giving driver’s licenses to non-citizens, who could then use them to vote. The RNC wanted public records about the plan, and the Attorney General ruled that Kentucky’s Department of Transportation was engaged in a “clear subversion” of Ketucky’s public records requirements.
When it comes to voter ID requirements, which have near-universal approval, the RNC took twin measures to both defend states that have robust voter ID laws and to oppose states that wanted more permissive forms of identification, like student IDs, to count for proof of identification.
In Gruters’s home state of Florida, the RNC joined with the State of Florida in Florida Rising Together v. Byrd to defend the Sunshine State’s election integrity policies. Likewise in Indiana, the RNC filed an amicus curiae brief that supported the state’s law banning the use of student IDs as being permissible forms of voter ID. On the flip side, the RNC successfully obtained an injunction against a North Carolina policy that allowed for digital student IDs to count as acceptable identification.
Finally, when it comes to cleaning up voter rolls, the RNC has focused on primarily blue states to force them to maintain accurate voter rolls filled only with living voters. The RNC sued Maryland, for example, following reports that several of the state’s counties reported registration rates of over 100 percent; the RNC also alleged that Maryland failed to remove both ineligible and dead voters from its voter rolls.
In Maine, the RNC went directly to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and accused the state’s Democratic Secretary of State of violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) by refusing to keep accurate voter rolls.