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Cecile Clocheret

Lara Trump possesses the most important qualification for service as co-chair of the Republican Party in 2024: the last name “Trump.” As traditional power centers <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/28/mcconnell-steps-down-trump-republican-party/" target=_blank>recede</a>, the party machinery that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> exploited to win the party’s 2016 presidential nomination is now firmly under his control.

That means a full embrace of the cause closest to the former president’s heart: boosting allegations that American elections are rife with fraud and illegality.

“We have the first-ever election integrity division at the [Republican National Committee],” Lara Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday evening. “That means massive resources going to this one thing. If people out there, Sean, don’t feel like their vote counts, they don’t trust the system we have, then we are no longer the country we once thought we were.”

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This argument that it’s worrisome if Americans don’t trust the electoral process is not a new one; it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/03/two-republican-lawyer-senators-look-loopholes-democracy/" target=_blank>undergirded</a> much of the effort to block Joe Biden’s victory in January 2021. It is also a bit like Russia lamenting that Ukrainians are concerned for their personal safety. The reason Republicans <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/24/6-10-republicans-still-think-2020-was-illegitimate/" target=_blank>continue to believe</a> the 2020 election results were somehow tainted is not that they were tainted but that people like Donald Trump insist that they were.

People like Trump’s longtime attorney Rudy Giuliani. People like Christina Bobb, onetime host on the fringe-right cable channel One America News and, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/12/rnc-trump-firings-takeover/" target=_blank>now</a>, the RNC’s senior counsel for election integrity.

Until this appointment, Bobb’s legacy from this era was likely to relate to her service as one of Trump’s enormous, evolving coterie of attorneys. Bobb signed the June 2022 document asserting that Trump had turned over to the government all material marked as classified in his possession. (He <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/07/trump-classified-documents-fbi-search/" target=_blank>had not</a>.) But now she has a chance to make her mark on Trump’s signature electoral issue.

She has a robust pedigree, at least as far as Trump is concerned. Soon after the 2020 election, she began <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23889023-bobb-giuliani-messages" target="_blank">working with Giuliani</a> and others to elevate baseless or later-debunked claims about the results in various states having been tainted by fraud. She was involved in the “audit” of votes in Arizona, working with Trump campaign official (and Georgia co-defendant) <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/02/mike-roman-trump-georgia-election-case-fani-willis/" target="_blank">Mike Roman</a>. She wrote a book, published in January 2023, cataloguing familiar (and baseless or debunked) criticisms of the results. It’s all there, from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/21/donald-trumps-rationale-seizing-voting-machines-was-worse-than-you-might-have-assumed/" target="_blank">Antrim County</a> to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/02/trump-lies-2020-election-fraud-indictment/" target="_blank">State Farm Arena</a> to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/15/dsouza-2000-mules-repudiation/" target="_blank">True the Vote</a>. (The book’s forward was written by Stephen K. Bannon; Jim Hoft of the conspiracy-promoting site <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/03/gateway-pundit-conservative-news-election-fraud/" target="_blank">Gateway Pundit</a> wrote a blurb.)

Bobb’s book posits that the reason Republican Glenn Youngkin won his gubernatorial race in Virginia in 2021 wasn’t that there was a swing to the right in an off-year election during the first year of Biden’s presidency but, instead, that Republicans in the state finally figured out how to defeat fraud. (That Democrats in the state eventually <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Party_control_of_Virginia_state_government" target=_blank>gained control</a> of both chambers of the legislature is not addressed.)

Virginians “worked as poll watchers, challengers, and volunteered where needed,” Bobb wrote, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/10/27/virginia-poll-watchers-election/" target=_blank>pointing</a> to a Washington Post story about the effort. “Most importantly, Republicans worked as sworn election officers, a role that Republicans typically don’t bother to fill. Physically securing poll locations, meaning having volunteers watch and make sure the process is fair, was key to Youngkin’s win in Virginia.”

This is what Lara Trump told Hannity was coming to the national party.

“We will have trained poll watchers, poll observers, poll workers, people in tabulation centers all across this country,” she said. “If you want to volunteer as a poll watcher, poll worker or a volunteer lawyer because we want those as well.”

She noted that, for 40 years, the RNC had “a moratorium on doing this. It has recently been lifted, and now we are able to do it. And I will tell you, we want everybody out there.”

That moratorium was imposed on the party because, in 1981, Republicans <a href="https://www.politico.com/states/new-jersey/story/2020/10/08/new-jersey-democrats-saw-voter-intimidation-in-81-they-say-trump-could-do-it-nationwide-1321983" target=_blank>stationed</a> off-duty police officers at polling places in New Jersey and offered rewards for claims of voter fraud. The party agreed to refrain from “poll watching activity” until the agreement was <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/01/09/576858203/decades-old-consent-decree-lifted-against-rncs-ballot-security-measures" target=_blank>lifted</a> in 2018. You’ll notice that 2018 isn’t really “recently”; the Trump campaign tried to get poll watchers in place in 2020 and the party also <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/15/rnc-election-integrity-trump-mcdaniel/" target=_blank>did so</a> in 2022.

The most important part of all of this, of course, is that in-person fraud of the sort that these efforts are meant to combat is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/03/heres-how-rare-in-person-voter-fraud-is/" target=_blank>vanishingly rare</a>. The odds that someone “watching” a polling place and uncovering someone trying to vote illegally are near-zero. The odds that those poll-watchers will, instead, hassle someone trying to vote legally or scare off people uninterested in being similarly hassled are much, much higher.

This was the point in New Jersey in 1981: that Black and Hispanic voters were intimidated away from voting. Given how Trump has focused on cities as hotbeds of fraud, we can predict that polling places in those cities would be a focus of this effort. Research shows that <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4148928" target=_blank>an intimidating effect exists</a>. In an era when cable news hosts are <a href="https://x.com/atrupar/status/1766838042734567902" target=_blank>wildly speculating</a> about the immigration status of random Hispanic people, what would we expect to happen if Trump- or RNC-allied “observers” linger at polling places?

Even things like requiring voter identification have been <a href="https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-14-634" target=_blank>shown</a> to disproportionately affect turnout among Black and younger voters, groups that vote more heavily Democratic. In the pre-Trump era, there was often an understanding on the right that the advantage of making it harder to vote wasn’t that it prevented fraud (given how rare it was) but that it offered a perceived advantage in suppressing Democratic votes. By all appearances, the new GOP actually thinks that fraud needs to be combated.

All of this may end up having no significant effect on the election. It may, instead, simply serve as a new benchmark in the evolution of the Republican Party into an organization completely in Trump’s sway. Not only has control of the party as an arm of the Trump family been formalized, so has Trump’s insistence that elections are unreliable.

The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America

Ohio State University

Philip Bump is a Post columnist based in New York. He writes the newsletter <a href="https://wapo.st/3m3QTiy">How To Read This Chart</a> and is the author of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696653/the-aftermath-by-philip-bump/">The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America</a>.

Philip Bump

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