Expiration of consent decree
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See also: 2020 United States Postal Service crisis
The consent decree restricting Republican Party conduct was set to expire on December 1, 2017, but Democrats sought an extension,[19][20] alleging that statements from Donald Trump campaign officials showed the RNC had engaged in activities in violation of the decree.[20] U.S. District Judge John Michael Vazquez allowed the Democratic Party to take the deposition of Sean Spicer before issuing a decision on whether the decree should be allowed to expire, but denied Democrats' motions for hearings on the issue.[20] On January 8, Judge John Vasquez ruled that the decree had expired on December 1, and would not be extended.[2]
The 2020 presidential election was the first presidential election since 1980 in which the Republican Party was able to deploy "ballot security operations". In 2019 Justin R. Clark, an official in Trump's re-election campaign, was recorded telling Republican lawyers that the expiration of the consent decree was a "huge, huge, huge, huge deal" for the campaign's election day operations in Wisconsin.[21] In March 2020 the RNC announced plans to mobilize 50,000 poll watchers to swing states, while Trump described plans to mobilise law enforcement as poll watchers, and the True the Vote group sought to recruit police officers and military veterans. The political scientist Kenneth Mayer of the University of Wisconsin–Madison argued in August 2020 that the lifting of the consent decree raised the prospect of a return to practices of voter intimidation, while Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School argued that the RNC was unlikely to have the capacity to mobilize such numbers.[22][23] In October 2020 the Trump campaign said it had enlisted more than 50,000 volunteer poll watchers in swing states.[24] In a September 2020 opinion column, Florio likened Trump's rhetoric to the use of voter intimidation in the 1981 campaign.[25]