First posted on Instagram · @profilopolitics
The Republican National Committee has launched a two-front legal offensive over how the November midterms will be run, suing Michigan election officials for appointing nearly twice as many Democrat poll workers as Republicans in violation of state law — and taking the fight to left-wing groups trying to force North Carolina to count absentee ballots that don't meet security requirements.
The Michigan lawsuit, filed by the RNC together with the Michigan Republican Party and the Ingham County Republican Party, targets election officials in Lansing. Michigan law requires poll worker positions to be split as evenly as possible between Republicans and Democrats. But Lansing appointed 140 Democrats and just 71 Republicans to Election Day poll worker positions — a nearly 2-to-1 edge for Democrats. Republicans say they provided Lansing with qualified poll worker candidates, yet Democrats still received the overwhelming share of appointments. When Republicans asked to review the poll worker records, which should be open to the public, Lansing officials refused.
"Democrats stacked the deck, pushed Republicans aside, and then tried to hide the paper trail," RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said in announcing the suit. "That's exactly why voters are losing confidence in our elections. Michigan has become ground zero for election integrity violations, and the RNC is watching this state like a hawk. When left-wing officials break the rules, we'll take them to court and stop them." The RNC says it repeatedly tried to work with Lansing officials to fix the problem before filing suit, and is now asking the court to restore transparency and bipartisan oversight.
In North Carolina, the battle lines are drawn around the State Board of Elections' new absentee ballot rules. On September 23, a coalition of left-leaning groups — represented by the national law firm of Marc Elias and including the N.C. Alliance for Retired Americans, N.C. Asian Americans Together, and Down Home North Carolina — sued to block the new guidelines, which require counties to reject absentee ballots returned with unsealed inner envelopes and set new signature-verification standards. Republican organizations have moved to intervene in the federal case to defend the ballot-security requirements. A federal judge in Winston-Salem has scheduled an October 14 hearing on a preliminary injunction.
The two sides tell sharply different stories about what's at stake. The left-wing plaintiffs argue the new North Carolina policies "will invalidate thousands of qualified voters' ballots" over innocuous technical errors unrelated to anyone's eligibility to vote, and that vague signature-matching standards will subject ballots to unequal scrutiny across counties. Republican board member Stacy "Four" Eggers defended the rules at the board's September 4 meeting, saying "the voter experience in casting their ballots will not change" and calling the memo updated guidance on how counties process ballots. In Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson's office has previously called the RNC's lawsuits an effort to cast doubt on election administration, while the RNC points to a string of wins — including a Michigan Supreme Court ruling letting the party's poll-worker parity case against Flint proceed — as proof the courts are taking the claims seriously.
The RNC's push comes as part of a broader pre-election litigation campaign: the committee recently sued New Jersey officials over voter-roll records and has concentrated resources on poll-worker parity and voter-roll maintenance disputes in battleground states. With more than 81,000 North Carolinians already requesting absentee ballots and the November 3 midterms less than a month away, both the Lansing poll-worker case and the October 14 North Carolina hearing will help decide the rules under which those votes are cast and counted.