The RNC’s 2024 Platform Escalates Attack on Voting Rights
With the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) procedural presidential nominating convention just around the corner, the platform committee adopted the party’s official agenda for the 2024 election. Though the GOP’s new platform appears to soften its dangerous and divisive stance on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, Trump and the Republican party are doubling down on their anti-voting agenda and assault on U.S. elections.
“Republicans will offer a clear, precise, and USA oriented plan to stop the Radical Left Democrats’ Weaponization of Government and its Assault on American Liberty,” said a draft of the GOP’s new platform, which passed “with overwhelming support” in a committee meeting on Monday morning. “We will restore Government of, by, and for the People, ensuring Accountability, protecting Individual Liberties, and fixing our once very corrupt Elections.”
The GOP’s new platform doesn’t specifically get into how Trump and the GOP plan to fix “our once very corrupt Elections,” other than briefly mentioning the myriad ways that the Republican party have tried to make it harder to vote. The platform says that the Republican party will “implement measures to secure our Elections” and mentions voter ID laws, a return to paper ballots, proof of citizenship and same-day voting as the specific voting issues it’ll focus on.
It’s almost identical to the language on election integrity in the party’s 2016 platform — the same platform Trump ran and lost on in 2020. In that platform, the party also called for requiring proof of citizenship to vote, voter ID laws and to “strongly oppose litigation against states exercising their sovereign authority to enact such laws.”
This cycle, the RNC has brought nearly a dozen anti-democracy lawsuits that could impact the outcome of the November election.
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In the years since the 2016 platform was adopted, the GOP has launched an all-out assault on voting and elections in the U.S. The 2020 election saw a massive, coordinated effort from Trump, top GOP officials and some of the most powerful conservative billionaires and mega donors to push conspiracy theories and disinformation to subvert President Joe Biden’s decisive victory at the polls. Ever since, a number of red states have precisely followed the GOP’s anti-voting platform, passing strict voter ID laws, proof of citizenship laws and limiting mail-in voting that will potentially disenfranchise millions of voters.
Trump, the RNC and other various right-wing entities and organizations have amplified their assault on voting in the current election cycle, with dozens of lawsuits filed in the past couple of years targeting various aspects of voting in America. According to Democracy Docket’s legislation tracker, there’s currently 60 anti-voting cases making their way through various courts in 21 states and the District of Columbia. The GOP itself has filed at least 40 active anti-voting lawsuits this election cycle, while the RNC has filed nine.
In April, Democracy Docket obtained an internal RNC memo that outlined its anti-voting strategy in the courts and, while the document greatly inflated its legal attack on voting, it did outline the Committee’s larger strategy for “recruiting and training tens of thousands of poll watchers and poll workers” for the upcoming election.
Though Trump and the GOP are walking back some of their hardlined positions on key issues, voting is not one of them. In recent months, Trump and House Republicans have promoted the false notion that noncitizens are voting en masse in federal elections and introduced a nationwide proof of citizenship bill, despite the fact it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. The House is set to vote on the bill, dubbed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, sometime this week.