How the RNC Is Helping Trump Carry Out His Election-Integrity Agenda Ahead of Midterms

The Republican National Committee is executing President Donald Trump’s election-integrity agenda ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. 

“Through our litigation efforts, we are very focused on helping the president achieve his goals around election security,” an RNC official told The Daily Signal. 

Trump signed an executive order in March requiring states to use proof of U.S. citizenship for federal voter registration, setting Election Day as the uniform deadline for receiving ballots in federal elections, and conditioning federal election funding on compliance with those and other election-integrity rules. 

The RNC is working to defend Trump’s executive order in states where practices prohibited by the directive continue. While the president is taking the national approach to election integrity, the RNC is coming alongside him with a state-by-state approach. 

“We are challenging these things on a state-by-state basis to make sure that they are compliant with the statutory schemes as constructed now, and that they provide the most balanced security as we can have in those states,” the official said. 

Most necessary ballot-safeguard reforms concern mail-in voting, the official said. 

“The more steps you separate the voter from the ballot,” he said, “the less secure it becomes.” 

The RNC has also expanded its litigation strategy in support of election integrity.

Party officials say they were engaged in more than 170 lawsuits during the last election cycle, three times more than in any previous cycle, marking a shift away from a reactive to a proactive legal strategy.

“We actually went out and looked for opportunities to engage, instead of waiting for somebody to get sued and then rushing in to defend them,” an RNC official said.

States with universal mail-in voting, like California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington, are particularly of concern. 

Nevada, a swing state, has the “trifecta of bad election-law practices.” It mails ballots to every voter whether or not they request it, it has problems with its voter-roll cleanup, and it has unlimited ballot collection, the official said.

In March 2024, the RNC filed a federal lawsuit against Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, arguing that the state has failed to properly maintain its voter rolls. 

The RNC also sued to challenge Nevada’s law regarding the counting of mail-in ballots. The law allows ballots without a clear postmark to be counted if they arrive within three days of the election.

Earlier this year, the RNC sent records requests to nearly every state as well as Washington, D.C., asking for documentation about voter-list maintenance practices.

“Since we’ve gotten some of that back, we have initiated some lawsuits based on not complying with those records requests, or actually sent [National Voter Registration Act] violation letters to some states as well, saying that they are out of compliance, and that is a tool that we can use to force them to clean their rolls,” the official said. 

Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act requires states to remove ineligible voters—such as those who have died or moved out of the jurisdiction—from the voter rolls.

The RNC is supporting the Department of Justice’s focus on cleaning up voter rolls, as well. 

“We have flagged for the Department of Justice the correspondence in a few areas where we thought that were problematic in some states that were having problems,” the official said. 

In July, the RNC filed a lawsuit in New Jersey against the Division of Elections accusing it of failing to produce records on voter-roll maintenance and election integrity.

The official said the RNC was “very successful” in the Democrat-controlled blue states it focused on last cycle. But now that the focus has shifted to congressional elections, every state has House races the RNC cares about. 

The RNC defended Indiana’s law prohibiting the use of student identification cards as a form of voter ID. In Kansas and Mississippi, the RNC intervened to defend the law saying that all ballots must be received by Election Day.

The RNC’s efforts to carry out the president’s election-integrity agenda will yield significant results in the outcome of midterms, according to the committee. 

“We’re being as aggressive as we can be with what we’re working with right now,” the official said. “That’s why we’ve got dozens and dozens of lawsuits already.” 

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