Exclusive: Report confirms 2020 abuses and RNC deploys 'year-round' election integrity unit

by Paul Bedard, Washington Secrets Columnist |

August 19, 2021 08:35 AM

A months long investigation into the 2020 presidential vote has found that Democrat-run cities and states used the COVID-19 crisis to change the rules that likely helped Joe Biden’s ascent to the White House.

The Republican National Committee report found several cases in which Democrats used the virus as an excuse to scuttle voter identification rules, flood mailboxes with ballots, and limit poll watching and vote-count observations.

“The pandemic brought chaos and comprehensive changes to voting processes beginning in the spring primaries and lasting through the post-election process,” said the 23-page report from the RNC’s Committee on Election Integrity, created by party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.

“Democrats, including some public officials, used the pandemic as a pretense to achieve long-sought policy goals, such as expanded mail voting and the elimination of key safeguards, specifically for absentee voting, such as witness and ID requirements,” added the report provided to Secrets.

It was focused on the voting process and key areas in which state voting laws were abandoned, not on county-by-county claims of voting fraud.

McDaniel, who has weathered criticisms over the election, immediately set up a new election integrity unit that will challenge future voting schemes and advise states on election reform.

She told us, “The RNC established an election integrity committee to examine how Democrats attack election integrity — and more importantly, to lay out a blueprint for protecting our elections from the far-left.”

McDaniel applauded the panel’s leaders, Chairman Joe Gruters and Co-Chairwoman Ashley MacLeay, and said, “Republicans believe in making it easier to vote and harder to cheat, and we’re building a historic election integrity operation to do just that.”

Since the election, several in the GOP led by former President Donald Trump have challenged election results and drawn attention to states where rules were lifted because of the coronavirus. No elections, however, have been overturned.

The issues found in the report, shown below, are technical but amount to improper changes, said the RNC, which provided this list of highlights:

• Democratic leaders leveraged the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to water down election integrity safeguards by ramming through last-minute changes to the election process.
• Many changes were enacted by courts that disregarded long-standing laws, by Democratic governors who abused their emergency powers, and by officials such as secretaries of state who ignored state laws duly passed by their legislatures.
• Some public officials used the pandemic as a pretense to expand mail voting and eliminate key absentee voting safeguards such as witness and ID requirements. Policies such as automatically mailing ballots to all voters and waiving ballot delivery deadlines also led to chaos and decreased confidence in our elections.

The committee also took note of the millions dumped into election coffers by liberals such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Now on alert, the RNC plans to fight back. It already spent $40 million on election integrity initiatives during the 2020 contests. It is building from there.

Officials said that a "year-round election integrity operation" will be created. They said that will include "hiring in-state election integrity directors, monitoring state and county-level election processes to ensure laws are being followed, training thousands of poll watchers to observe all steps in the elections process, and continuing to engage in lawsuits that protect and promote election integrity."

The report issued several recommendations that McDaniel is acting on and the party sharing with states eyeing reform legislation.

Many of the recommendations are common sense but opposed by some Democratic lawmakers who instead are using reforms to paint Republicans as proponents of limiting voting. The committee’s top recommendations:

• Clean up their voter rolls.
• Eliminate same-day and automatic voter registration.
• Enact ID requirements for all voting methods, while ensuring officials educate the public on ID requirements and provide free IDs to those few without one.
• Only use voting systems that produce a paper record of a voter’s selections that is reviewable pre-tabulation and auditable post-election.
• Prohibit ballot harvesting.
• Enact uniform and enforceable standards for rejecting and accepting absentee ballots.
• Enhance cybersecurity requirements for voting systems, including that they have no wireless, network, or internet connectivity at any stage of the election process.
• Allow political parties and state legislatures to have standing to bring or intervene in election-related litigation.
• Prohibit the acceptance or the use of any non-governmental, third-party, or private money, grants, or gifts from outside sources to assist in the administration of an election.