Despite Trump Win, RNC Keeps Foot On The Gas With Election Integrity Efforts

As President Donald Trump moves at breakneck speed to enact his agenda, the Republican National Committee is quietly racking up election integrity wins and gearing up for the next election cycle, the Daily Caller has learned.

The RNC won three lengthy legal battles related to the prevention of election fraud in March across the key states of Arizona, Georgia and Washington.

“These cases represent that a lot of times, things get started and resolved during an election year, but many times they don’t, and the RNC doesn’t walk away from them,” an RNC official told the Caller. “We are here to see these things through.” 

In March, Arizona’s Court of Appeals announced that the secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, did not “substantially comply” with the state’s proper rule making process when finalizing the 2023 Election Procedures Manual. The court’s ruling was the result of a February 2024 lawsuit filed by the GOP, which argued that Fontes’s Election Procedures Manual would weaken “safeguards against non-citizen voting,” “unlawfully limited the ability to challenge early ballots,” and “violate[d] numerous provisions of state law meant to protect election integrity,” a party official shared with the Caller.

Another significant win came in Georgia on March 7. The RNC intervened in a case in May 2024 after a local labor union sued trying to overturn the state’s absentee ballot rules. The state’s law sets the deadline to request absentee ballots at 11 days prior to election day, but the union wanted to extend the deadline.

Nearly a year later, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia threw out the union’s lawsuit, ultimately ruling in the RNC’s favor.

“When I became RNC chairman last year, President Trump gave me a clear directive: secure the vote. We successfully did that in 2024, and we are already hard at work to do it again in 2026, fighting to set the rules of the road that make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.  These three cases are important victories in that mission, but they are just the start,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley told the Caller in a statement.

In Washington, the state’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the RNC’s favor that the state’s signature verification law does not violate the state’s constitution. The RNC first got involved in that legal battle in 2023.

An RNC official told the Caller that while the next year isn’t a high profile campaign year, the election integrity department is still continuing to build its staff and presence in the nation’s capitol and across the country.

“Just because the election happened and President Trump won doesn’t mean we stopped or we’ve accomplished some sort of goal or that we’ve reached the finish line — because we haven’t,” the official told the Caller. 

(L to R) Michael Whatley, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Frank Larose, Secretary of State of Ohio, and Hogan Ridley, Vice Chair of the Center for Election Integrity America First Policy Institute speak during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on February 21, 2025. (Photo by ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

In the 2024 election cycle, the RNC filed more than 100 election integrity lawsuits across 20 states, according to the party’s website. Prior to 2024, the RNC was trying to catch up to the Democrats’ massive head start on influencing election law. For nearly 40 years, the GOP was subject to a 1982 consent decree — enacted following a lawsuit from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — that neutered the party’s ability to engage in election integrity lawsuits. That decree was lifted in 2018.

The RNC finally began diving head first into the election integrity realm in 2022, an official previously told the Caller. RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel established an official department for election integrity following the 2022 midterm elections. That move allowed the RNC’s election integrity operation to pull resources from all departments, such as communications, politics, and legal, the Caller previously reported.

The 2024 election cycle was about building up the department, an RNC official told the Caller. This positioned the party to make real progress in the upcoming off-year elections and the 2026 midterms, especially with a supportive White House at its back. The party is also planning on engaging in longer-term legal battles, such as voter list maintenance, the official explained. (RELATED: RNC Sues Michigan Secretary Of State Jocelyn Benson Over Voter Registration Rolls)

“As we continue, we’re going to leverage all of those advantages to do more of what we did, which was build an amazing field program around this — which is the volunteer side, which is poll workers and poll watchers … and the volunteer attorneys,” the RNC official told the Caller. “We’re also going to continue our legal efforts. We are looking at new cases too.” 

I spoke to a former party official a while back who told me that the biggest problem in 2020 was not having poll watchers and lawyers on standby ready to call bs and file suits immediately. Since, the party has adjusted to do such and it appears to be paying off. https://t.co/geFoq1Qepj

— Reagan Reese (@reaganreese_) October 30, 2024

Then-co-chairs Michael Whatley and Lara Trump took over the RNC’s election integrity department in early 2024 with the intention of charging full speed ahead. They launched a “Protect The Vote Tour” to train hundreds of thousands of poll watchers on how to identify suspicious activity at polling locations. From there, poll watchers were instructed to contact RNC lawyers or the party’s election integrity war room, who would instantly address the issue. (RELATED: Inside Team Trump’s Big Bet On Election Integrity — And How It Paid Off)

Trump previously told the Caller that the poll watchers identified around 20,000 tips through this program, some of which were flagged via X. This allowed the RNC to stay on top of any potential election integrity issues prior to and on Election Day and is the groundwork the party is looking to expand from for future elections.

“Chairman Whatley has been very clear that we are not just going to focus on places where we’ve got a tight congressional race or anything like that. We are active in places like Washington and Maryland and other places, because he wanted to create a national program,” the RNC official said. “Where there are bad laws and there are bad practices — to the extent that the RNC has those resources — we’re going to get in there and try to change [them].”

Beyond the RNC, there is also an expectation that Congress will deliver legislation to help strengthen the party’s on-the-ground efforts. Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump announced in April 2024 that they would be pushing the SAVE Act, legislation that would require individuals to prove that they are an American citizen prior to voting in a federal election.

“I think the speaker and the majority leader in the Senate both see that there’s a few things that we could be doing here on this, and I anticipate that there will be forthcoming legislation,” the party official told the Caller. “The SAVE act is still around. That’s a great piece of legislation. It doesn’t have literally everything in it. But it was very focused around some of the issues around non-citizens voting and overseas voting. That would be a huge peg in any sort of legislation that comes forward on election integrity.”