After rampant fraud in the 2020 election, Republicans have fought bravely to preserve the integrity of the vote. We thank God for them!

From The Federalist. If Republican candidates do as well as expected on Tuesday, they can credit the new, widespread, and coordinated effort to begin securing U.S. elections, helping give candidates the best opportunity possible to win a fair fight in the new voting environment of mail-in balloting.

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The Republican National Committee, other party entities, and dozens of public interest election nonprofit groups built over the last two years a multimillion-dollar election integrity infrastructure that passed laws improving voter ID and other election security measures, defended those laws from legal attacks by Democrats, and sued states and localities that failed to follow the law. They also recruited, educated, trained, and placed tens of thousands of new election observers and other workers throughout the long midterm voting season.

And they did it all in one of the most hostile propaganda environments on record.

2020’s Wake-Up Call

The 2020 election was a massive wake-up call for many Americans on the right. In the months leading up to it, Democrats forced through changes to hundreds of laws and processes governing how elections are conducted. …

The 2020 election plan, some of which was admitted to in a flattering Time magazine story, sought to flood the zone with tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots, historically understood to be riper for fraud and other election irregularities than supervised, in-person voting. The plan also involved the private takeover of government election offices to run Democrat-focused get-out-the-vote operations. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, financed the project, doling out $419 million to two left-wing groups that focused grants and assistance to government offices in the Democrat areas of swing states.

This radical change — “practically a revolution in how people vote,” as Time put it — included the widespread practice of placing ballot drop boxes predominantly in Democrat areas of the country, mailing out unsolicited mail-in ballots or applications for mail-in ballots, using well-funded teams of ballot harvesters both inside and outside of government, lowering and changing the standards for mail-in ballot acceptance, and fixing or “curing” ballots that were improperly filled out. …

In the end, Americans learned that Joseph Biden, who had spent most of his campaign at home, had become the most popular American president in history, collecting an astounding 81 million votes. …

Republicans Spent 40 Years on the Sidelines

Part of the reason Republicans hadn’t more effectively fought the election integrity battle before now is somewhat shocking. The 2020 contest was the first presidential election since Ronald Reagan’s first successful run in 1980 in which the Republican National Committee could play any role whatsoever in Election Day operations. For nearly 40 years, the Democratic National Committee had a massive systematic advantage over its Republican counterpart: The RNC had been prohibited by law from helping with poll watcher efforts or nearly any voting-related litigation.

Democrats had accused Republicans of voter intimidation in a 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race. The case was settled, and the two parties entered into a court-ordered consent decree limiting Republican involvement in any poll-watching operation. But Dickinson Debevoise, the Jimmy Carter-appointed judge who oversaw the agreement, never let them out of it, repeatedly modifying and strengthening it at Democrats’ request.

Debevoise was a judge for only 15 years, but he stayed 21 years in senior status, a form of semi-retirement that enables judges to keep serving in a limited capacity. It literally took Debevoise’s dying in 2015 for Republicans to get out of the consent decree. Upon his passing, a new judge, appointed by President Obama, was assigned the case and let the agreement expire at the end of 2018.

The effect of this four-decade hindrance on GOP poll-watching cannot be overstated. Poll watchers serve many functions. They deter voter fraud, but they also help with getting out the vote. Poll watchers can see who has voted, meaning campaigns and political parties can figure out which areas and voters to call and encourage to vote. They also can observe who was forced to vote provisionally or who was turned away at the polls. …

But First, Election Reforms

Before mounting successful lawsuits, however, better laws had to be passed — a difficult task in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, when Democrats claimed any criticism of how that election had been run was unacceptable and possibly criminal. That campaign, designed to suppress efforts to bolster election security, continues to this day. Nevertheless, Republican lawmakers in dozens of states began pushing for election reforms.

For example, bans on so-called Zuckbucks, the private takeover of government election offices, were passed and signed into law in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Six Democrat governors vetoed attempted bans, understanding how key Zuckerberg’s funding was to Democrat success in 2020. …

Recall that despite tremendous pressure from Democrats who alleged massive GOP-led voter suppression, including Biden who smeared election integrity efforts as “Jim Crow 2.0,” Georgia passed much-needed reforms related to voter ID, mail-in voting, and drop boxes, in addition to the Zuckbucks ban. The result has been record-breaking early, in-person voter turnout, across demographics, surpassing 2 million voters this week.

Meanwhile, the Foundation for Government Accountability worked with states to make policy changes to clean voter rolls, ban ballot trafficking, secure ballot custody, roll back Covid waivers, enact penalties for election lawbreakers, require chains of custody, secure drop boxes, pre-process absentee ballots, improve absentee voter ID, and dozens of other types of reforms. …

Litigate, Litigate, Litigate

While the RNC and the Trump campaign did achieve some legal successes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, it was nowhere near sufficient against the well-funded and coordinated Democrat effort. Republican donors and grassroots demanded more. …

The RNC wasn’t the only big change in the litigation battle. Hotelier Steve Wynn, strategist Karl Rove, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and top Republican election lawyers launched an election litigation group, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), in July 2022, and within three months chalked up several major victories. …

Monitoring Polls

U.S. elections used to occur on one day, requiring just one day of poll observations. Now that elections can spread out over days, weeks, or even months, many more workers are needed to monitor the casting of ballots.

The RNC hired 17 in-state election integrity directors and 37 state-based election integrity counsels in key states. They conducted more than 5,000 election integrity trainings, recruited more than 70,000 poll watchers and workers, and worked with more than 110,000 unique volunteers nationwide. They set up an issue reporting system and distributed copies of Poll Watcher Principles for states. If voters encounter election issues, they can file a report, and attorneys will be dispatched to resolve the issues. …

Congressional Republicans also got in on the action. Rep. Rodney Davis, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee, notified all 50 states that he would be deploying dozens of specially trained election observers to protect the integrity of the ballot box. …

The Vulnerable Voters Working Group meets to develop and implement ideas to protect nursing homes from left-wing ballot harvesting. The American Constitutional Rights Union is one coalition partner working to protect seniors from illicit activities.

Part of the benefit of an aggressive legal strategy is that it incentivizes election bureaucrats and officials to follow the law, which helps restore trust in elections …

What Remains

While reforms were passed in more than two dozen states, key lawsuits were filed and won, and poll workers are being deployed nationwide, many problems remain. Even with the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court victory, that state remains essentially lawless when it comes to election integrity. North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, and other battleground states retain problematic election processes and guidance. And inflated voter rolls, combined with unsolicited mail-in ballots, are a recipe for disaster.

The new election integrity groups have much work to do in the years ahead. But many Americans, from establishment Republicans to grassroots conservatives, have poured themselves into restoring integrity to elections nationwide. They have begun to achieve major successes in lobbying for election security, litigating against a well-funded activist opposition, and training poll watchers. And they did it all in the face of a hostile propaganda press that maliciously disparaged them as election deniers.

How are you praying for election integrity? Share your prayers and scriptures below.

(Excerpt from The Federalist. Photo Credit: Element5 Digital on Unsplash)