GOP chairwoman leans into election claims: Party will ‘run down every single irregularity’

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Sunday said GOP members need to “run down every single irregularity” in the 2020 election, adding to continued efforts from President Trump and his allies to delay the certification of election results.

McDaniel, in an interview with John Catsimatidis on his radio show “The Cats Roundtable” on WABC 77 AM, made several claims about voting irregularities while noting that a number of absentee ballot poll books in Michigan were out of balance and that an audit in Georgia revealed 6,000 votes not counted on Election Day. 

“Ultimately it is going to be in the courts,” the chairwoman said. “From a party perspective, we need to run down every single irregularity and make sure we pursue it so it doesn’t happen again, and see if it changes the course of this election.”

Trump’s legal team has led a multi-state legal battle alleging widespread cases of voter fraud and making other election challenges, although several of these cases have since been dismissed by judges or dropped by lawyers in Michigan and Georgia, as well as in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada. 

President-elect Joe Biden is projected to take each of those states, leading Trump in the electoral vote count 306 to 232. 

In Michigan, Biden won Wayne County with 597,170 votes, while Trump received 264,553 votes — including a margin of more than 200,000 votes in Detroit.

On Friday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) certified the results of the Nov. 3 general election in favor of Biden, who won the Southern state by more than 12,000 votes. An hour later, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) said on Friday that he would accept this certification. 

Despite this, McDaniel and other top GOP members have continued to call for additional safeguards to be put in place to protect the integrity of U.S. elections. 

“We should know who is voting,” McDaniel said in the interview that aired Sunday. “Everyone should want legal voters to vote.”

“But we also need to make sure that our elections are not so porous and fraught with insufficiencies that allow bad ballots to get in or people to vote who shouldn’t be,” she continued. “I think that’s the biggest issue we are seeing with this election. States that really lowered their standards, that didn’t care about signature matching, that didn’t care about voter ID laws, that ignored things that put safeguards in place to protect the election.” 

“We have to get back to higher standards,” she added. “I don’t know why Democrats have gone so long with saying that we shouldn’t have voter ID. People should have to show an ID to vote.”

More than 30 states currently require voters to show some form of identification at polls before casting a ballot. Some groups argue that voter ID laws can disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color and those in low-income communities, as there can be some costs associated with obtaining the documentation necessary to receive an ID, like a birth certificate or Social Security card. 

John Catsimatidis is an investor in The Hill.