The Republican National Committee is working on an internal report that recognizes the electoral damage that lies about voter fraud have caused — but suggests doing nothing to call out those lies as a problem. Instead, the report’s proposed solution lies in an ever-increasing focus on “election integrity,” a term that is easier to sell than “voter suppression.”
The Washington Post, which was the first to report on the draft prepared by the RNC’s “National Election Integrity Team,” says the group’s recommendations are “based on unsubstantiated claims that Democrats have implemented election procedures that allow for rigged votes.” That includes the familiar refrain that the GOP’s push to tighten access to the ballot box is needed in the face of a “continuing onslaught of Democrat election manipulation.”
Rather than treat the disease, the RNC continues to focus only on the symptoms.
The draft report is an apparent update to the work of the RNC Committee on Election Integrity, which was first announced in February 2021. Six months later, the committee released a report asserting that “due to a lack of transparency during the 2020 elections, Americans are understandably skeptical about aspects of our voting process and will continue to be unless transparency improves.” The solution the committee offered was to take advantage of a lapsed court order that once barred the RNC from repeating past “ballot security” measures to launch a “year-round effort to recruit, train, and organize volunteers with whom the party can engage at every step of the election administration process” as part of an “Election Integrity Operations” initiative.
At no point in the committee’s earlier work or the reported pending update do the committee members acknowledge the source of Americans’ supposed skepticism: former President Donald Trump and his cadre of election deniers. More than two years later, Republicans continue to pretend that the…
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