President Trump signed a second executive order on election security this week, directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile a verified list of American citizens with assistance from the Social Security Administration, requiring the Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters on that approved list, and mandating unique barcode tracking in secure envelopes for all mail ballots.
Ally Triolo, director of election integrity for the Republican National Committee, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss the order, the RNC’s broader litigation strategy, and the state of the Save America Act in the Senate.
Triolo said the RNC currently has more than 120 active election integrity cases across more than thirty states, reflecting what she described as a top organizational priority assigned directly by Trump. The cases span a range of issues but share a common thread of enforcing existing election law and removing ineligible voters from the rolls. She noted that the RNC has a case in Illinois supporting a congressman’s effort to stop the counting of mail ballots after election day, identifying that case as Bost versus the Illinois State Board of Elections, involving Representative Mike Bost. The Illinois case connects to the RNC’s landmark Supreme Court case, Watson versus RNC, which originated in Mississippi and challenges the practice of accepting and counting mail ballots that arrive after election day, a policy currently in place in more than fourteen states with varying windows ranging from five days to as many as twenty-one days after the polls close.
Oral arguments in Watson versus RNC drew questions from all nine justices, with Paul Clement arguing on behalf of the RNC that because Congress has established a singular federal election day, the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, states cannot unilaterally extend the period during which ballots may be received and counted. The argument draws on a 2020 opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh warning that disparate state practices around ballot receipt deadlines create uncertainty and undermine public confidence in election results. Triolo said the RNC is optimistic about the direction of the case, though she stopped short of predicting the outcome.
Proft raised the case of a North Carolina man identified in federal complaints who cast a ballot in the 2024 general election at an elementary school despite being a registered sex offender prohibited by law from being near schools, and subsequently registered to vote in a second county and participated in early voting for a recent primary, despite being a convicted felon without restored voting rights. The case illustrates, Triolo said, a systemic problem: there is currently no mechanism in North Carolina, or in many other states, to cross-reference registered felons from other states who relocate and attempt to register. The same gap in verification infrastructure that allows such cases to occur is what both the Save America Act and Trump’s executive orders are designed to close.
She also referenced data from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon’s civil rights division, which has reviewed approximately sixty million voter records from states that have complied with Department of Justice data requests. Of those records, roughly three hundred thousand have been flagged as potentially improper, representing voters who may be deceased, non-citizens, convicted felons who have not had their voting rights restored, or otherwise ineligible. More than half of states have not yet complied with the data requests, meaning the total number of potentially improper registrations in the national voter file is likely considerably higher.
On the Save America Act, which remains stalled in the Senate despite its two core provisions, a voter ID requirement and a fix to the federal citizenship verification gap, polling at over eighty percent support across party lines in multiple surveys, Triolo was direct about where she places the blame for the impasse. Republicans have voted overwhelmingly for the bill. Democrats have blocked it despite the fact that their own voters support it by substantial margins. She said there is no logical explanation for that opposition other than a preference for election conditions that facilitate fraud, and she declined to soften the characterization. She expressed confidence that Republican voters heading into November will see the party as having delivered on its core commitments, including border security, the largest tax cut in American history, the elimination of taxes on tips and overtime pay, and the military campaign against Iranian terrorism, and that the outcome of the midterms will reflect that record rather than the generic ballot polling that currently shows Republicans trailing.