Exclusive—Ronna McDaniel: The RNC Is Defending Election Integrity from Biden’s DOJ

Since Joe Biden took office, Americans have seen time and time again that his Department of Justice has failed to live up to its name.

From labeling concerned parents at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists,” to helping Hunter Biden avoid consequences for his alleged crimes, to targeting Catholic Americans, the Department of Justice has been politicized beyond recognition. Unfortunately, their attacks on the American people extend to trying to make our elections less secure, especially when Republicans pass good commonsense election integrity laws. The RNC is committed to protecting good laws from DOJ attacks, and we’re devoting massive resources into defending them in courts across the country.

Let’s get one thing straight: polling shows that Americans believe in basic election integrity safeguards. Eighty-eight percent of Americans support voter ID; 89 percent of Americans believe every ballot should be received by election day; 66 percent of Americans support increased guardrails around absentee and mail voting. These policies and others drive good election integrity legislation, like the reforms Republicans have passed in Georgia (Senate Bill 202) and Texas (Senate Bill 1). Both of those laws make absentee voting safer and strengthen voter ID. Democrats can’t have that – so Biden’s Department of Justice sued both states.

There’s a cynical logic behind their strategy. The Department of Justice filed one of nine lawsuits against Georgia challenging SB202. The fact of the matter is that states do not have the resources to stand alone against coordinated attacks from the Department of Justice and allied dark money left-wing groups.

Pitting the resources of the federal government against a state just because their elected legislators passed good legislation is a waste of taxpayer dollars and a perversion of the Department of Justice’s mission. The RNC proudly intervened in the lawsuits to defend Georgia against that legal shock-and-awe strategy, and we’re confident that our legal team’s resources, expertise, and experience with these cases will lead to victory. The RNC was already successful in ensuring that virtually all of the law was in effect for the 2022 elections.

We intervened in Texas, too, when the Lone Star State came under a similar legal attack from Biden’s lawyers and dark-money groups. We are fighting to protect Texas’s Senate Bill 1 in court as I write this.

It’s the same story in Arizona, where local Republicans are trying to ensure that only American citizens vote in Arizona’s elections. When the Department of Justice came after Arizona’s House Bill 2492, which requires proof of citizenship for Arizonans registering to vote using a federal form, the RNC was there to immediately intervene.

These interventions matter because states standing against federal government overreach need all the financial and legal support they can get. The RNC is uniquely positioned and uniquely qualified to provide that crucial support – and we stand ready to do so anywhere election integrity is challenged across the country.

During the midterm cycle, the RNC engaged in nearly 100 election integrity lawsuits across the country. We’re currently involved in 59 election integrity lawsuits in 16 states. We’ve secured massive wins including at the Supreme Court in DNC v. Brnovich, which upheld Arizona’s ballot harvesting ban and rejected the Democrats’ radical reading of a key Voting Rights Act provision, and in RNC v. DNC, which upheld key mail voting safeguards in Wisconsin during the COVID pandemic. We’ve notched other key victories in federal and state courts around the country.

The RNC understands that aggressive lawfare protects election integrity, and that Democrats trying to make voting less secure must be stopped in the courtroom.

We remain fully committed to battling the Department of Justice, dark-money left wing groups, and elected Democrats trying to make your vote less secure. And as our litigation record shows, we fight to win.

Ronna McDaniel is the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee (RNC).