GOP Stands Up ‘Permanent’ ‘Election Integrity Operations’ Nationwide to ‘Kill’ Democrat Takeover Attempts ‘in Their Infancy’
Editor’s Note: It should be recalled the RNC initially apologized for anyone questioning the outcome of the most recent election and the role of election fraud in the process. This is also true among some Republican leaders, such as the Maricopa Board of Supervisors. Now that the National GOP Committee admits there was fraud and is taking steps to battle it in future elections, will the Maricopa Board and the Governor of Arizona please stand up?
The Republican Party has built a “permanent” structure to battle the left nationwide on election integrity over the last eight months and is winning the longer war with Democrats, senior Republican National Committee (RNC) officials revealed exclusively to Breitbart News through lengthy interviews and documents detailing the efforts.
Justin Riemer, the chief counsel of the RNC who is overseeing the party’s efforts, in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News last week, broke down the GOP’s election integrity push into “three separate categories” which include a permanent staffed infrastructure nationwide and a broad law-fare legal strategy to counter Democrats.
“The first is what we’re doing in the courts and litigating,” Riemer said. “The second is sort of our operational organization out in the field to send teams into the states and the third is the more sort of communications and efficacy efforts we’ve made at the state level and pushing back on HR1 and the congressional overreach that we’ve been pushing back with.”
Riemer told Breitbart News that Republicans have learned much from what happened in 2020 after seeing what the Democrats did in a months-long tumultuous and coordinated push from long before Election Day until weeks afterward filled with mail and absentee voting, drop boxes, a lack of ID and signature matching requirements all combined with kicking poll watchers out of counting rooms, and massive funding surges from leftist big tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg who funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into state and local election offices nationwide through popup nonprofits he and his wife established. The Republicans, as such Riemer said, recognize now that elections are not fought in just one day but over a longer period of time — election day has become election season in other words — and Riemer said Republicans are responding by standing up a permanent structure to fight back.
“The RNC has basically decided election integrity operations need to be a permanent thing,” Riemer said. “In the past what would happen was every four years, because it was really every presidential election year where our side would gear up and to a lesser extent in midterms, but what would happen is it would be the presidential campaign every four years that would set up an operation to do the monitoring and the lawsuits and all these issues. It was just sort of improvised, like a pop-up tent, and then it went away and some of that was because we had a lawsuit against us from the DNC that prevented the RNC from doing anything like poll watching and preventing voter fraud and all of that. That basically was in effect for 40 years — 2020 was the first year we could actually engage in this stuff and what we decided was it makes no sense to just set up an operation every two or four years. It needs to be permanent. That’s why we have permanent staff now working on this stuff, and it’s why we have permanent litigation. If you have litigation going on permanently, and if it becomes a permanent thing it’s just that it’s an ongoing process — we’re always monitoring what’s happening, we’re always monitoring the legislative changes, we’re always in the courts. It just doesn’t end. Part of it is because the election calendar has expanded so much. It’s not even just the mail-in voting, so much of the problem is sort of hatched months before the election like a state cleaning up its voter rolls. That’s not a problem you should just start paying attention to a month before the election. You need to be on that like six months or a year or more before the election. So that’s why we’ve made it a permanent operation to make sure we’re keeping tabs on all of this.”
Litigating election integrity battles — whereby Republicans are defending effective state laws like those in Georgia; fighting to stop bad practices like a recent win at the U.S. Supreme Court against ballot harvesting in Arizona; on down to challenging leftist anti-poll watcher pushes from election boards in places like North Carolina — is proving to be a fruitful battlefield for the GOP, Riemer said.
“On the litigation side we have engaged in all the major lawsuits that have been filed against the states that have enacted reforms in the last several months,” Riemer said. “So, Georgia is the most famous one where they passed their legislation and were immediately sued. They actually have several separate lawsuits against them right now including one by the DOJ who sued them and we have been actively what’s called intervening in these lawsuits which puts us shoulder to shoulder with Georgia and defending the state law. The courts have allowed us in these cases and we’re actively pushing back and fighting back making sure the state stays honest in defending their laws and making sure they don’t settle them and cause problems that way. So we’re doing that in Georgia, in Florida, in Iowa, and as other states get sued which they undoubtedly will as they pass these reforms we will engage in those lawsuits as well.”
A memo the RNC prepared detailing said efforts, also obtained exclusively by Breitbart News, noted the RNC spent more than $30 million in 2020 in dozens of lawsuits — 59 in particular last year — but that the party is expanding and bolstering that legal strategy now heading into the 2022 midterms and eventually the 2024 presidential cycle. Already, the RNC has engaged in at least 19 lawsuits more than a year before the 2022 midterms — with lots more planned on the way. The operation has a multimillion-dollar investment from the party as well, and it is a broad effort that the RNC is overseeing in coordination with other party committees like the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), and perhaps most importantly, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC). The RSLC is a key part of all of this because that committee is a clearinghouse for state leaders like attorneys general, secretaries of state, and state legislators to work together and connect up with national Republicans in Washington. State parties are also key to the strategy, according to both Riemer and this memo — as the RNC has coordinated with state parties like the Arizona GOP and the North Carolina GOP and others to fight the left on election matters most famously so far in the U.S. Supreme Court decision shredding ballot harvesting in Arizona. Riemer believes the Republicans — despite what happened in 2020 and a dejected GOP base since then — have turned the tide and are winning the war, while the Democrats are losing overall.
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