Republican Party sues over absentee ballots, voter rolls in battleground states

The Republican National Committee and its lawyers are going state to state seeking to influence what laws and procedures will govern the November election.

The RNC, which has been overhauled with loyalists to former President Donald Trump, is reviving failed legal arguments from 2020 as it seeks to get involved in dozens of state and federal lawsuits. The cases are in all the major battleground states for 2024, but also in deep-red and deep-blue states.

Some of the biggest ongoing cases target how absentee ballots are processed and who should be removed from voter rolls. If the cases are successful, fewer people will be allowed to vote in November, and fewer absentee ballots will be counted.

In some cases, the RNC joins with a state party to sue a state or county official. In others, the national party seeks to intervene to support or oppose a case that an advocacy group brought first. The RNC also files friend-of-the-court briefs, seeks to get involved in rulemaking processes, or announces when it seeks public records as part of its own investigation.

The cases often draw from the same false information that has fueled the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump through fraud. Lawyers have argued that RNC must be involved in lawsuits in order to make sure that people can be confident in the outcome of the election, trust the democratic process, and inspire other Republicans to turn out to vote.

“Their legal arguments are premised on misinformation and misrepresentations about election administration, the way that elections work, and election outcomes,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel in the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice, which is representing an opponent in RNC's lawsuit over Michigan's voter rolls. “They are in large part fueled by the election denial movement and lies about the 2020 election.”

The RNC has been providing updates on its litigation program for months through ProtectTheVote.com, a website that it also used in conjunction with the Trump campaign in 2020 to rally supporters as they challenged Biden's victory in court. Judges, including Republican-leaning ones appointed by Trump, overwhelmingly rejected those arguments.

The RNC did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment on its litigation program. Efforts to reach several of the RNC’s election integrity committee members, officials with state parties and plaintiffs in various lawsuits were unsuccessful.

“The RNC legal team will be working tirelessly to ensure that elections officials follow the rules in administering elections," RNC Chief Counsel Charlie Spies said in an April 19 statement. "We will aggressively take them to court if they don’t follow rules or try to change them at the last minute.”

Voter registration lawsuits target Nevada and Michigan

In Nevada and Michigan, the Republican National Committee is asking courts to require the states to remove more registered voters from the rolls under the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 law that requires states to wait several years before removing registered voters from their files.

The RNC argued that there are simply too many people on those states' voter registration lists — including some counties with more registered voters than adults living there — and that means that the states are not following federal law to remove ineligible voters.

Often called the motor voter law, the National Voter Registration Act has become a frequent target of the right’s election advocacy efforts. It’s the same law that House Speaker Mike Johnson recently criticized as not doing enough to stop noncitizens from voting.

In a memo outlining several of its lawsuits obtained by the liberal website Democracy Docket, the RNC wrote, “Voter lists must be kept accurate to ensure that elections run smoothly and that ballots are sent to living, eligible citizens in each respective state. The RNC provides legal muscle to clean up voter rolls.”

Nevada and Michigan's secretaries of state, both Democrats, have asked courts to dismiss the RNC’s cases. Both states say they have substantial programs to remove ineligible people from voter rolls, and that the RNC's math is wrong.

Nevada accused the RNC of using “statistical sleight of hand” that compares voter registration numbers from 2024 in the growing state to population data from 2020. Michigan said the RNC’s lawsuit uses “a questionable interpretation of Census data,” and provided its own calculations showing that no county in Michigan has more active registered voters than potential voters.

“Let’s call this what it is: a PR campaign masquerading as a meritless lawsuit filled with baseless accusations that seek to diminish people’s faith in the security of our elections,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in a statement. “Shame on anyone who abuses the legal process to sow seeds of doubt in our democracy.”

Celina Stewart, chief counsel for the League of Women Voters, said attempts to purge voters from the rolls are often a way to keep Black and brown people from voting.

“What it comes down to is the election for president in this country could come down to a handful of states,” Stewart said. “I think Nevada and Michigan are part of that handful.”

Absentee ballot deadlines targeted in Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, Wisconsin

In Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Wisconsin, RNC lawyers have targeted when absentee ballots can be requested, submitted, counted, and fixed. In three of those states, the RNC tried to defend voting restrictions that Republican legislatures passed but liberal groups want to block.

A record number of Americans voted by mail in 2020 after Democratic and Republican states alike made it easier to fill out ballots remotely during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Unfounded allegations of mail ballot fraud then became a popular rallying cry among Trump supporters who believe the election was stolen.

The RNC is seeking to throw out a lawsuit in Georgia that a union brought in order to give voters more time to request an absentee ballot. At stake is whether Georgia voters can have an additional four days to request absentee ballots.

Georgia’s sweeping election law overhaul from 2021 said voters could only request the ballots up to 11 days before the election. The union argues that violates a provision of the Voting Rights Act allowing people to request absentee ballots up to seven days before an election. The RNC says the federal law is unconstitutional.

More: Voter ID and absentee-ballot limits: the South tightens key voting laws ahead of election

A federal court in North Carolina said the RNC could not intervene in a lawsuit challenging a law enacted in October that requires absentee ballots to be received by the time polls close on Election Day. The law also makes it easier to challenge whether another person’s absentee ballot can be accepted.

The RNC said the law provides “appropriate safeguards and transparency while still offering voters ample opportunities to cast a ballot” and said the lawsuit should not continue “without the participation of one of the nation’s two major political parties.”

A state court in Wisconsin said the RNC and its affiliates couldn’t intervene to oppose a lawsuit there, either. In the suit, the progressive organization Priorities USA challenges, among other things, a state requirement that absentee ballots be returned by 8 p.m. on Election Day. The Wisconsin law also says that in the event an absentee ballot has a defect, the ballot must be cured, or fixed, by that same deadline.

The RNC argued that the laws in question “protect Wisconsin’s elections and allow voters, groups, and candidates alike to trust and navigate the democratic process.”

In a federal court in Mississippi, the RNC joined the state party to sue a county elections official, who is a Republican, over a law allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted up to five days after the election. The defendant, Justin Wetzel, has asked for the case to be thrown out.

So has Secretary of State Michael Watson, also a Republican. He wrote in a court filing in March that the RNC’s “entire case rests on a fiction that Mississippi law permits mail-in absentee voters to ‘cast’ their votes after Election Day. But the Mississippi Statute allows no such thing.”

Signature matching cases in Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Washington

The RNC and its allies’ involvement in lawsuits in  Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Washington seek to require election workers to make sure voters’ signatures on their absentee ballots match specific signatures on file with the elections office.

The vast majority of states perform some sort of signature verification on absentee ballots, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, but states have been implementing stricter laws requiring voters to provide additional identifying information, such as a Social Security number, a drivers license number, a copy of an identification document, or even a notary’s signature.

In Colorado and Washington, an advocacy group called Vet Voice Foundation filed lawsuits asking courts to stop state officials from performing signature matching, saying that signature matching disproportionately disenfranchises young voters, voters of color, and people living in certain counties.

Vera Ortegon, an RNC national committeewoman, is intervening in the Colorado case. Her lawyers wrote in court documents that she tries to increase voter turnout in Colorado and voters “who cannot rely on the signature verification requirement may not trust Colorado’s election procedures, and may ultimately lose interest in voting.” A court in Washington declined to let the RNC intervene in that case.

In Arizona, the state’s Republican Party joined a lawsuit that alleges Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, is being too broad in how he instructs local election workers to perform signature verification. In Michigan, the RNC is suing over guidance that Benson, the secretary of state, gave to local election workers on signature matching.

Sweren-Becker, from the Brennan Center, said courts "should be extraordinarily skeptical of these claims and quickly and strongly dismiss them where they find that the evidence is lacking, and I think that will be in the vast majority of these cases."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: RNC targets absentee ballots, voter rolls in 2024 to 'protect' vote