Trump, RNC announce $10 million plan to battle Dems on voting lawsuits
It represents an escalation between the two parties in the fight over competing charges of voter suppression and voter fraud.
President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee are pumping more than $10 million into a legal campaign challenging Democratic voting-related lawsuits and building a massive Election Day operation.
The multi-million-dollar effort pits the two parties against each other on the issue of voting rights, with Democrats contending that they’re trying to make it easier for more people to cast ballots — and Republicans arguing that they must guard against potential fraud.
The new endeavor includes a legal challenge in Michigan, a key battleground state that Trump won by an extremely narrow margin over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The RNC and Michigan Republican Party filed a motion to intervene Wednesday night in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan Southern Division to join a lawsuit as defendants against Priorities USA.
The Democratic super PAC has filed multiple lawsuits in the state, including challenges to laws that restrict organizers from helping voters submit absentee ballots and make it a misdemeanor to organize vehicles to transport voters to their polling places unless the voters are “physically unable to walk.”
In the filing, the RNC and state Republican Party said the laws are “constitutionally valid statutes that the legislature has enacted to help structure and ensure the integrity of the electoral environment.”
In its November suit, Priorities cast both bans as a “severe burden” on citizens’ ability to vote in Michigan, particularly among minorities, seniors, voters with disabilities and low-income voters. But the RNC insists that Priorities has failed to demonstrate how any voters would be disenfranchised by the policies.
“If Plaintiffs prevail and enforcement of the statutes is enjoined, the [Michigan Republican Party], RNC, and their candidates will face ‘a broader range of competitive tactics than [state] law would otherwise allow,’” they wrote in their filing. “In particular, candidates should not face the risk that absent ballot applications submitted in their races will be destroyed, manipulated, or otherwise fraudulently altered by unknown actors.”
In a statement to POLITICO, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel accused Democrats of “trying to rig the game with frivolous lawsuits that do nothing but create electoral chaos, waste taxpayer money, and distract election officials in an attempt to advance the Democrats’ voter suppression myth because they know they can’t beat President Trump at the ballot box.”
“These actions are dangerous, and we will not stand idly by while Democrats try to sue their way to victory in 2020,” she added.
Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, called it “shameful and un-American for the RNC to spend millions of dollars disenfranchising voters across the country.”
“We will not stop fighting voter suppression efforts until every barrier to the ballot box in our most vulnerable communities is torn down,” he said in a statement to POLITICO. “We would rather spend our resources on voter registration and education but this fight was brought to us and we will fight it.”
While a constellation of left-leaning groups is laying groundwork for huge voter turnout in November by filing an avalanche of voting-rights lawsuits against state laws they say suppress participation in elections, the RNC has also been active in voting-related litigation in battleground states like Arizona and Florida.
The Trump campaign and RNC also said they will train and deploy an army of thousands of lawyers and tens of thousands of volunteers in battleground states for early voting, Election Day and any potential recounts. They also pledged to spend millions of dollars in an effort to make sure that the general election is run fairly across the country and votes are accurately and legally tallied.