Election lawyer (and candidate for RNC Chair) Harmeet Dhillon:
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.