Major GOP Strategists, Donors Fight to Restore Confidence in Elections, One Lawsuit at a Time

It’s no secret that many conservative voters in swing states remain less than confident about the accuracy of the country’s elections.

A July poll from Arizona State University found just 65 percent of Arizonans are very or somewhat confident in the outcomes of the state’s elections. The sentiment around the validity of elections is vastly different between the parties; while 74.6 percent of Democratic voters said they are confident in the outcome, 65.6 percent of Republican voters said they are not confident in the outcome of the state’s elections.

In Pennsylvania, 75 percent of Democratic voters are “very confident” that the “tabulated vote count in Pennsylvania will be accurate if mail-in voting is widely used in the next general election,” according to a Franklin & Marshall poll from April. Among independents that number drops to 33 percent, while confidence among Republicans sits at an abysmal 8 percent.

Nationwide, a significant number of Republican voters remained doubtful of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election as recently as January 2022, according to a Marquette Law School poll. Just 27 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they are very or somewhat confident that the votes were accurately cast and counted, while a whopping 73 percent are not too confident or not at all confident in the accuracy of the election vote totals.

And while President Trump’s false claims around the 2020 election have surely contributed to voter skepticism, the problem stands only to worsen as Democratic activists challenge existing laws around election security.

That’s why longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove, hotelier Steve Wynn, and lawyer Bobby Burchfield worked together to launch Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE) last year. The nonprofit works to restore integrity and trust in elections by fighting in the country’s courts to “defend attacks on mechanisms that state legislature put in place to ensure the integrity of the election, to safeguard the ballot, to promote trust and confidence in the election, and to elevate the quality of the electoral process.”

“RITE is working hard on [voters’] behalf to help give them confidence,” Derek Lyons, the president and CEO of RITE, told National Review.

In the first year since its founding, RITE has become engaged in at least 27 cases across 15 states, including several states where flashpoints had arisen in the 2020 election, including Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

RITE is “trying to be part of the solution that gives [voters] reason to have faith again in the system,” said Lyons, who previously served as White House staff secretary and counselor to then-President Trump.

In its short one-year career, RITE has a win rate approaching 66 percent, Lyons said.

“After the 2020 election, there were a lot of losses on the Republican side and I think people may have had some sense that not only are these election administrators tinkering with the rules but those manipulations . . . the courts were letting them go and there was little hope that anything could be done about it.”

“If you can’t trust the administrator, you can’t trust the court, you can’t trust your vote,” he said. “What are you as a citizen supposed to do? But I think we’re trying to close off one of those areas of doubt, which is to say that when we litigate forcefully, when we litigate at the right time and in the right way, we can win these things.”

RITE was largely founded as a response to the sense that a lot of measures were “distorted and bent” during the 2020 election and that while many states responded to the election by putting new measures in place to address some of those “shortfalls” that there was still an “overwhelming onslaught of litigation in the space that folks like [Democratic party elections lawyer] Marc Elias were bringing,” Lyons said.

“There was a sense that he was winning too many of these cases, that too many election safeguards were being struck down by the courts on grounds that should have been won and so we formed to fill the gap to make sure that wherever these challenges were taking place, there would be an organization there ready to mount a defense so that the … safeguards and election integrity measures would be in place,” he said.

Bad actors in the Republican Party have seized on voters’ real election-security concerns to sow distrust. But relitigating the 2020 election proved to be a losing platform for candidates in the midterms, including for Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters.

But Lyons suggested candidates “questioning electoral outcomes is beside the point when it comes to voter confidence.”

“The real issue is the role that activist lawyers, judges, and administrators play in eroding voters’ confidence when they ignore, distort, and misapply election laws. If run with integrity, voters will participate in future elections, regardless of what politicians say about past elections,” he claimed.

Polling does, however, show that faith in elections plummeted ahead of the 2020 election, as Trump began insisting that the contest would be rigged. But this collapse in trust also coincided with a widespread blue-state push to erode voter integrity measures in the name of pandemic safety.

Lyons emphasized that his organization’s work “focuses on rules and regulations that are put in place by democratically elected people.”

The group is “always on the lookout” for opportunities to encourage election administrators to follow the law that’s written and established by their state legislators.

RITE is involved in defending three Wisconsin election laws against a lawsuit brought by Priorities USA, which is being represented by Elias’s law group.

The laws in question regulate absentee voting in Wisconsin, including a witness requirement for absentee ballots, a prohibition on drop boxes, and a deadline for correcting absentee-ballot errors.

The plaintiffs in the case claim the laws infringe upon voting rights under the Wisconsin constitution.

In that case, RITE PAC supported parties to file a motion to intervene in August. A hearing on the motion is set for October 31.

“These are three frontal assaults on measures that the Wisconsin legislature put in place to ensure that mail-in ballots, which are growing increasingly popular and entering into the use in more broad and widespread fashion, won’t be abused,” Lyons said. “The laws ensure that people can look at the system and trust that it isn’t as vulnerable to attack or manipulation as it could be, thereby ensuring increased trust.”

RITE also sued the state of Arizona to get election officials to follow the law that’s on the books governing signature matching.

The legislature in Arizona decided to grant access to mail-in ballots to make voting easier but said there would need to be a way to know that the ballot is coming back from the person it was intended for. The state decided the best way to do so would be via signature matching between the signature on the envelope with the ballot to a signature on file from when a voter registered to vote or updated their information.

“Fairly sensible, not a perfect system, no system will be perfect but a sensible system,” Lyons said.

However, election administrators in the Grand Canyon state decided to expand the number of signatures that it would compare against.

“When you expand the database of comparators, you’re more likely to get matches and it may be the case that those are good matches but . . . you have limited reliability, limited ability to trust that all those matches are from where they say they are,” Lyons argued.

“And in an environment that’s low trust with election administrators saying, just trust us, and then they go and they expand beyond what the statute allows, it breeds this distrust where people say, ‘I don’t know if my vote’s counting,'” he said.

RITE successfully fought against the ability to count undated ballots in Pennsylvania after Elias successfully fought in state court to allow undated ballots in the 2020 election and in the 2022 primary. The Pennsylvania supreme court ultimately sided with RITE-sponsored litigants who argued that state law prohibits election officials from counting undated and incorrectly dated mail-in and absentee ballots.

In celebrating the win, RITE said in a statement that the measure is a “commonsense election integrity measure that protects the ballot box from election fraud, manipulation, and abuse.”

The group has also been involved in defending Ohio House Bill 458, which “provides for free photo ID, four weeks of no-excuse early voting, four days post-election to cure ballots, and one 24/7 ballot drop-box per county.”

The measure also includes a photo ID requirement for in-person voting — changing from an earlier law that allowed voters to use some forms of identification without photos, like utility bills. While the new law requires photo ID, it allows voters to show a number of types of photo ID to meet the requirement, including an Ohio driver’s license or state ID, an interim state ID form, military IDs, and a U.S. passport. Voters can also still vote by mail without an ID, and for those in need of a photo ID, they can now obtain one for free, whereas the process previously cost $10.

Elias challenged the law in state court on behalf of several groups, including the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans, the Union Veterans Council, and Civic Influencers, Inc. The groups argue the new requirements violate the First and 14th Amendments.

RITE argues the law is “unquestionably constitutional” as it “creates minimal burdens (if any), that help ensure security in Ohio’s progressive voting system.”

In summing up RITE’s mission, Lyons explained: “In our view, if the voter follows the rules and they’re not particularly complicated and they’re spelled out, those votes all count — those legitimate votes. It’s just that when you try to rehabilitate votes, people start to have questions because at the end of the day that ballot box sets the course for how we’re going to govern the country and people want to be certain.”

“The ballot box is always going to be . . . something of a black box. It’s all the more important that safeguards are put around on the front end so that everybody can be extra sure that what goes in is what’s supposed to go in because what comes out is monumentally consequential for the country,” he said.