With Thanksgiving week all but underway, the Trump campaign has vowed to continue to dispute election results in key battleground states. Trump has alleged widespread voter irregularities in the 2020 presidential election, related to mail-in ballots and voting software systems, and has refused to concede until the claims have been fully investigated. Republicans from Capitol Hill to local statehouses have come out in support of the president’s right to pursue any irregularities that could swing the election.
Republican National Committee Chair, Ronna McDaniel, told The Cats Roundtable that Republicans and Trump were committed to preserving the “faith in the election process.”
McDaniel reported that Republicans had seen thousands of complaints at polling places over the course of the election, including poll observers being removed from polling locations and being kept too far from the count to meaningfully observe.
“We are pursuing all of those, and making sure that we hold to account election integrity,” McDaniel said. “Ultimately, it’s going to be in the courts and in the states to decide, but from a party perspective, we need to run down every single irregularity and make sure we pursue it to make sure it doesn’t happen again and see if it changes the course of this election.”
But time is running out, as state after state begins to certify their votes ahead of the meeting of the electoral college.
To McDaniel, a longstanding uncertainty and erosion of the faith in the election have been exasperated by the pandemic, with many states changing their election laws, with a heavy emphasis on mail-in ballots.
“I think part of the issue with Covid is, many of these states just changed their laws, and upended their election system, in the name of Covid, and it’s created a lot of chaos,” McDaniel said, adding she believed the election system needed a complete overhaul.
“We really do need an election overhaul—there is no reason why states should take two, three weeks to count their votes—this isn’t good for our system, and it creates concern.”
With so many doubts surrounding software systems, signature-matching, mail-in ballots, and meaningful observation of the election count, McDaniel told The Cats Roundtable the safeguards and standards fall short of building trust in the reported outcome.
“We should know who’s voting—everyone should want legal voters to vote, but we should also make sure our elections are not so porous and wrought with insufficiencies that allow bad ballots to get in, or people to vote who shouldn’t be—and I think that’s the biggest issue with this election.”
While the RNC and Trump’s campaign continue to fight reports of voter irregularities in the courts, McDaniel declared that the “election has been a historic election for Republicans.”
November 3rd again sent many pollsters reeling, with a predicted blue wave receding in the face of unprecedented participation by American voters, and historic turn out for both candidates. But pending the run-off election for Georgia’s two senate seats this January, Republicans held onto a majority in the Senate, and picked up 12 seats in the House, while again solidifying their hold over state and local legislatures.
“What we learned from this election is people want checks and balances, and they do not want socialism, and they want democracy and freedom,” McDaniel said. “That’s why Republicans won across the board, and now we’re still fighting to figure out what happened in this presidential election, and pursuing every single irregularity to make sure it’s free and fair.”
Listen to the interview below
