With one day left before Republican committee members decide who will lead the national party into 2024 and beyond, the party’s two frontrunners, incumbent Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel and California lawyer and RNC committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon, must make their case for why they are uniquely suited for the job. While many issues plague the national party, there is one item both candidates must wrestle with: election integrity.
For almost 40 years, the RNC was unable to oversee poll watcher operations or litigate elections due to a 1982 consent decree. In 1981, Democrats accused Republicans of voter intimidation in a New Jersey governor’s race. The case was settled after the GOP agreed to a court-ordered consent decree limiting Republican involvement with any poll-watching operations. Little did Republicans realize that Dickinson Debevoise, the Jimmy Carter–appointed judge behind the consent decree, would prove to be such a partisan; he never let the GOP out of the decree, and repeatedly altered and strengthened it at Democrats’ request. After Debevoise formally retired from the bench, he stayed on for 21 years in senior status, a form of semi-retirement allowing judges to keep serving in a limited capacity, and kept enforcing the decree. Only after Debevoise died did an Obama-appointed judge let the agreement expire at the end of 2018.
As a result, the Democratic National Committee had an almost four-decade advantage over the GOP. After spending a few years building out and developing poll-watching infrastructure since the consent decree was lifted, McDaniel told The Federalist the 2022
