RNC invests more than $10M in legal efforts to 'preserve integrity' of 2020 election

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Trump campaign presses legal challenges in key battleground states

Trump campaign files lawsuit alleging two-tiered voting system in Pennsylvania; John Roberts reports.

EXCLUSIVE: The Republican National Committee (RNC) has invested more than $10 million into ongoing legal efforts in key battleground states to ensure that “all legal ballots” are “properly cast and counted to preserve the integrity” of the 2020 Election, Fox News has learned.

The Fox News Decision Desk declared President-elect Joe Biden the winner of the race on Saturday, but the Trump campaign, and the RNC, have mounted lawsuits in states like Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Arizona challenging the results, and claiming Democrats tried to “disenfranchise voters.”

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The RNC, in their multimillion-dollar effort, according to an official, is looking into “thousands of allegations of voter fraud and working to bring them to light.”

“For every illegal ballot that is counted, the integrity of every legal vote is compromised,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told Fox News. “The RNC is fighting to ensure that all legal ballots are properly counted to preserve the integrity of our electoral process and democratic institutions.”

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An RNC official told Fox News that they are working with the Trump campaign, and allowing recounts and lawsuits to run their course to ensure that Americans “can be confident of the results of the election.”

The official told Fox News that as of this week, they have a combined 429 signed affidavits in five states -- Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada -- claiming instances of voting irregularities. The official also said that there have been more than 12,000 incident reports filed in those states.

The official touted a “victory” for election integrity in Pennsylvania Thursday, when the judge ruled in favor of the Trump campaign, ordering that the state may not count ballots where the voters needed to provide proof of identification and failed to do so by Nov. 9.

State law said that voters have until six days after the election -- this year that was Nov. 9 -- to cure problems regarding a lack of proof of identification. After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots could be accepted three days after Election Day, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar submitted guidance that said proof of identification could be provided up until Nov. 12, which is six days from the ballot acceptance deadline. That guidance was issued two days before Election Day. 

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“[T]he Court concludes that Respondent Kathy Boockvar, in her official capacity as Secretary of the Commonwealth, lacked statutory authority to issue the November 1, 2020, guidance to Respondents County Boards of Elections insofar as that guidance purported to change the deadline … for certain electors to verify proof of identification,” Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt said in a court order.

This was in line with the Trump campaign’s argument, which was that there was no basis in the state’s law to extend the identification deadline, and that Boockvar did not have the power to unilaterally change it.

The court had previously ordered that all ballots where voters provided proof of identification between Nov. 10 and 12 should be segregated until a ruling was issued determining what should be done with them.

On Thursday, Leavitt ruled that those ballots shall not be counted.

This is one of several legal challenges the Trump campaign is bringing in Pennsylvania. On Friday, they are scheduled to have a hearing over thousands of ballots that they claim were improperly counted despite lacking required information.

Additionally, the campaign awaits action from the Supreme Court regarding whether the Pennsylvania Supreme Court acted properly in granting the three-day extension for accepting mail-in ballots.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, the campaign and the RNC are involved in a federal lawsuit citing multiple witness accounts of “irregularities, incompetence, an unlawful vote counting,” while claiming that in one county, Republican poll watchers “were denied their legal right to monitor the election and purposefully kept in the dark” saying that poll workers blocked windows and pad-locked the doors.

In Georgia, all ballots will be recounted by hand; and in Nevada and Wisconsin, the GOP says there have been a number of irregularities, which they said “raise serious concerns that need to be further examined.”

President Trump and his campaign will continue to fight the legal battles, however, sources close to him told Fox News that he would concede and commit to a peaceful transfer of power if the campaign’s legal challenges fail to open up a path for a second term.

Some Republicans have already hinted that Trump would run for president again in 2024, however, a Trump campaign official told Fox News that they are "still focused on the 2020 election." 

Fox News’ Ronn Blitzer contributed to this report.