Selling Americans a 'lie': How election integrity attorneys battled left-wing efforts to upend voting laws
The 2024 election cycle was rife with repeated legal battles to protect the voting processes from left-wing attorneys leveraging the courts to strip election safeguards, the chief of an election integrity nonprofit who saw a string of legal wins told Fox News Digital.
"They've been selling American people a lie," Restoring Integrity & Trust in Elections (RITE) President Derek Lyons told Fox News Digital in a Zoom interview, referring to left-wing efforts to undermine election laws. "And I think that these past two election cycles, where people have said ‘No, voting is very easy and millions, hundreds of millions of people have been doing it,’ have shown that what they're doing is misleading, at the very least."
RITE is a non-profit organization founded in 2022 following voters’ concern over the security of the 2020 election during the COVID-19 pandemic. The group was co-founded by Fox News contributor Karl Rove and includes board members such as former Attorney General Bill Barr and Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy. The organization hit the ground running in 2022 to ensure its "mission of protecting the rule of law in the qualifications for, administration of, and tabulation of voting in the United States," according to the group’s website.
Lyons spoke to Fox News Digital just less than a month after Election Day, when he took a victory lap for his team’s battles against efforts to reportedly undermine election integrity, detailing the top legal tactics left-wing activists took during the election season.
POLITICAL HEAVYWEIGHTS LAUNCH EFFORT TO RESTORE INTEGRITY AND TRUST IN ELECTIONS
Lyons, an attorney and former White House staff secretary and counselor to the president under President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, explained that Democrat activists were hyper-focused throughout the election on decrying efforts put forth by state legislatures to ensure safe elections, such as voter ID laws, frequently claiming such a policy would disenfranchise voters.
"The main thing they do is anytime anybody puts up any sort of election integrity measure, whether that's voter I.D., voter photo I.D., whether that's rationalization of cure periods – the ability of people to fix errors in their ballots sort of after the election – ballot receipt deadlines, so that we can know the result of the election quickly … they attack it and say, this is disenfranchising," he said.
ELECTION INTEGRITY IS ‘PARAMOUNT’ FOR 2024 RACE, SAYS FORMER FEDERAL PROSECUTOR
"'This makes voting harder … this takes away people's right to vote.' …. They invoke federal voting rights laws that were meant to prevent the worst abuses of Jim Crow. They're sort of shameless about it. They'll throw any, any tactic at it," he explained of Democratic efforts to change voting laws.
When groups such as RITE step in to challenge claims that such voting laws are legal and protect elections from illegal activity, Lyons said left-wing activists slam them in court as holding no standing.
"They try to kick us out on procedural grounds because, ultimately, a lot of times they don't want to defend the merits of what election administrators are trying to do."
Lyons pointed to a successful case in Wisconsin back in 2022 when RITE challenged state officials from enabling what he called "re-voting" procedures, which entailed absentee voters who already submitted their ballots changing their votes mid-election. RITE challenged the practice and won to ensure that once a ballot is mailed, it cannot be changed.
"We were able to win that case on the grounds that once a ballot is put into the mail, received by the election officials, that's the end of that person's vote. There's no fishing ballots back out and putting them back in, etc. Which obviously creates a risk of errors and double voting and all sorts of other problems. And so they tried to kick us out on standing. We were able to defeat that and secure that victory in Wisconsin," he said.
ARIZONA BALLOT HARVESTING CASE LEADS TO 2 WOMEN BEING SENTENCED
Pennsylvania was again the premier battleground state this year, with both Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris and a bevy of their respective surrogates criss-crossing the state to rally support ahead of Election Day. For RITE, the group has filed and taken part in 10 different election cases since 2022, including a case revolving around potential double votes.
"In Philadelphia, we just got them to admit that they had planned to eliminate a crucial check against double voting to make sure that people weren't both voting in the mail and in person. So we had that in place for both elections [the 2022 midterms and 2024 election] to prevent that type of double voting, which does happen in Allegheny County," he said of the double vote case.
WHY THE LEFT HATES ELECTION INTEGRITY AND THE SECRET BALLOT
Lyons also celebrated a win in a case he described as the "crown jewel" of Pennsylvania: ensuring undated and incorrectly dated mail-in ballots were not counted in the official tally.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in September that mail-in ballots without the correct dates on ballot envelopes cannot be counted in elections.
The ruling gained widespread attention following Nov. 5, when Democratic-led election boards bucked the state high court's ruling and voted to include such ballots in a recount concerning longtime Democratic Sen. Bob Casey’s race against Sen.-elect Dave McCormick. Democrats in the state openly defied the ruling before the state Supreme Court ordered counties to not include undated ballots, and Democrats walked back their decision.
"We took it to state court and got a declaration that this had to be done under state law," Lyons said of RITE’s battle against Democratic activists over undated ballot envelopes. "They ran to federal court and said federal law prevents this. We won that case. They took it to the Court of Appeals. Democrat judges disagreed with them and said the date requirement does not violate federal law. They went back to state court and said, ‘well, this violates the state constitution.’ That case was procedurally improper. That case was thrown out. And then they tried to bring some other little case that nobody was paying attention to and use that case to revolutionize the way election administration was done in Pennsylvania. And finally, the state Supreme Court, to its great credit, said enough."
In Arizona, RITE had another win when it led a coalition of groups against a ballot initiative all the way through the Arizona Supreme Court that Lyons said would have expanded ballot harvesting.
"One of our first engagements that we're very proud of was, we quickly led a coalition of like-minded groups to litigate against a ballot initiative that was pending … in Arizona that would have eliminated things like precinct voting, would have expanded opportunities for ballot harvesting. It would have prevented efforts to keep noncitizens off the voter rolls and a host of other, I think, really bad rules for elections," he said.
"We were able to invalidate hundreds of thousands of signatures that the left, the liberal organizations that were pursuing this initiative had, quote unquote, gathered. We invalidated them. We litigated the case up to the Arizona Supreme Court. It actually went back a couple of times. And in the end, that ballot initiative was not approved. And so that meant that the 2022 election, but I think more importantly the 2024 election in Arizona, was not infected by ballot harvesting."
When asked if Democrat activists essentially cried uncle amid the avalanche of election lawsuits, Lyons pointed to Democratic Party elections attorney Marc Elias and a case originating out of Ohio as his "favorite" example of defeat over liberal attorneys.
VAST MAJORITY OF AMERICANS SUPPORT PHOTO ID REQUIREMENT TO VOTE, NEW POLL SAYS
"Marc Elias went to Ohio. Ohio passed a very sensible voter photo ID law. He started out the year in 2024 boasting and proclaiming to all who would listen on Twitter and in the media, that if Ohio passed this law, it will be sued and the law will be struck down. So he went to Ohio, and he did file that lawsuit. He followed through on his threat."
"We showed up, and we defended that lawsuit. We defended against that lawsuit alongside the state. And the victory was complete and total. A Democrat judge appointed by President Clinton, I believe, threw out his entire case, said 'you have not proven at all that there's even a remote chance that any voters are disenfranchised or burdened by this law. Case dismissed. Final judgment.' [Elias] didn't even appeal that case. Didn't even bother to try to take it up to the courts of appeals," he recounted.
Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed the voter ID bill into law in January 2023, which mandated voters provide a driver’s license, state ID, passport or military ID when casting a ballot, instead of previous forms of identification such as a bank statement.
Democrats and some residents in the state dubbed it one of the most restrictive ID policies in the nation and the "worst anti-voter" bill, arguing it would disenfranchise lower-income voters who have suspended licenses or lacked the required documentation. The Ohio Secretary of State office found over the summer that more than 8,000 voters who tried to cast ballots since the law's passage were not included in final vote tallies as they lacked the proper identification, USA Today previously reported.
Republicans have defended the law as "an elementary precaution to protect the voting process," citing that Americans cannot board a plane or buy alcohol without the same requirement.
Concerns over election integrity have been brewing for years and were underscored during the 2020 election as voters hunkered down amid stay-at-home orders, and mail-in and absentee ballot voting grew. Heading into the 2024 election, a poll from January found 46% of registered Republicans said they had no confidence ballots would be accurately counted and reported, Fox Digital previously reported. On the other hand, 81% of registered Democrats reported in the poll they are "very" confident the 2024 elections would be "fair."
Polls focused on specific measures touted by Republicans and conservatives to ensure safe elections have received widespread support across the board. A Gallup Poll released days ahead of Election Day found that 84% of respondents favored requiring voters to provide a photo ID, while 83% said they support providing proof of citizenship when registering to vote for the first time. The poll noted that voter attitudes toward these issues were similar to those seen in its July 2022 poll.
"Voter photo ID is supported by something like 80% of the country. The notion that this is somehow unconstitutional has been rejected time and time and time again," Lyons said.
Looking toward future elections, Lyons said RITE will focus on election laws surrounding left-wing efforts to "normalize" noncitizen votes in blue states before such efforts seep into red states, as well as continuing their efforts on voter ID laws, enhancing the integrity of signature matching requirements, and unraveling what Lyons said was left-wing "lies" surrounding claims of disenfranchised voters over practices such as voter ID laws.
"I think our organization was able to do and to plug into a much broader coalition of of groups ,who really care about what I call the crown jewel of the United States of America, which is our elections. That's the key. It's the foundation of our self-government. And I think today we can believe, and we can have confidence, and we can be proud of the fact that they're a little more secure today than they were two years ago and four years ago," he said.
