In 1981, the Republican National Committee allegedly engaged in an illegal campaign to intimidate minority voters, in some cases even enlisting armed, off-duty law enforcement as part of a “National Ballot Security Task Force.” The RNC eventually settled the lawsuit by agreeing to several conditions, including a promise that they would “refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities in polling places or election districts” for the purpose of targeting voters by race and discouraging them from voting.

Last year, a federal appeals court rejected the RNC’s request to lift this ban on voter intimidation. Under the lower courts’ decisions, the anti-intimidation order will remain in effect until at least 2017. The Supreme Court turned down the RNC’s petition to review this case Monday. Thus the Republicans will likely remain subject to the order’s ban on voter intimidation for at least one more presidential election cycle.

Although the RNC remained subject to this court order last November, other Republican Party groups actively partnered with Tea Party organizations to target African-American neighborhoods for anti-voter fraud witchhunts. Similarly, the Tea Party group True The Vote encouraged its members to circumvent the court order by engaging in voter suppression tactics independently of the Republican Party.

After sending poll-watchers to record any suspicious activity at polling locations on Election Day, Tea Party group True the Vote is apparently having some trouble proving their allegedly widespread reports of voter fraud in the presidential election. According to their newsletter, the organization is “still collecting reports of election fraud and process failure” and is waiting for local election officials to respond to their requests for data. While they wait, True the Vote is switching gears to attack a 30-year-old agreement by the Republican and Democratic National Committees meant to stop the Republican Party from caging African American voters.

In a post-election webinar, Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, reported a meeting with RNC chair Reince Priebus in which he explained the RNC could not directly do anything to combat voter fraud because of this agreement. In 1982, the RNC and the New Jersey Republican State Committee agreed not to pursue “ballot security activities” in minority districts, or to target suspected voter fraud based on racial or ethnic criteria. This agreement was necessary because the RNC was caught compiling lists of mostly Black and Latino voters to challenge at the polls and hiring armed guards to police polling places. The consent decree has been employed many times since to protect minority votes. But True the Vote claims the consent decree “robs” poll watchers of their power:

First, the decree effectively robs poll watchers (and the ballot stakeholders that put them there) of their most important function: spotting and neutralizing attempted voter fraud.Indeed, poll watchers will mostly make note of procedural errors that could have negative impacts on voters. However, poll watchers also improve overall faith in the system when electors know that ALL of the rules are being enforced…The RNC is effectively jammed: choosing between developing a system that the federal court and the DNC agree would be flawless or spending time and energy on developing issue ideas or get out the vote efforts. Time and money being finite, the RNC picks GOTV over “Ballot Security.” [...] However, in this Decree comes opportunity. The RNC, DNC and federal courts have basically created a void where true, disinterested election integrity and ballot security can be created. The answer is in YOU. Should citizens fight to have the Decree overturned? No – such action only legitimizes the agreement. Federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 in particular, empowers you to fight for clean registrations and fair elections in your own communities. Take this whole episode for what it is: an example of how the established political parties and governing interests jockey to consolidate power.

True the Vote is encouraging its volunteers to circumvent the consent decree while distancing itself from the legally-handicapped GOP. Yet the group had no problem coordinating with the GOP during the election, even providing poll watchers for Republican candidates. This coordination could prove complicated not only for True the Vote, which is currently under criminal investigation, but for the RNC. Brentin Mock at Colorlines notes that the RNC could have violated the consent decree through the actions of True the Vote and Tea Party surrogates. A Pittsburgh Tea Party group working for the local Republican Party actively trained poll watchers to target African American neighborhoods as “historical places of fraud” — closely resembling True the Vote language on minority communities. The RNC has not disavowed these surrogates.

Meanwhile, party members not constrained by the decree seem to be jumping at the chance to accuse minorities of voter fraud. Since the election, state-level GOP members have complained that the turnout of “people of color” and “dozens of black people” alone is cause for suspicion.

The Republican National Committee is cutting ties to Strategic Allied Consulting, a voter registration firm under investigation for turning in fraudulent voter registration forms in Florida. The RNC hired the firm to do voter registration drives for $3.1 million this year.

The firm’s founder, Nathan Sproul, is a longtime Republican strategist whose reputation was tarred by widespread accusations of voter registration fraud and attempts to suppress Democratic voter turnout. George W. Bush’s campaign reportedly paid Sproul over $8 million for his work in the 2004 election. Sproul, now under new scrutiny, claims he started Strategic Allied Consulting because the RNC wanted to hide his past:

Sproul said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the RNC’s request because the party wanted to avoid being publicly linked to the past allegations. The firm was set up at a Virginia address, and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.

“In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet,” Sproul said.

The committee is now scrambling to distance itself from Sproul after Florida launched a criminal investigation into the company. Strategic Allied Consulting submitted 106 “questionable” voter registration forms to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, and several other counties have discovered fraudulent forms as well. The Florida GOP fired the firm on Tuesday night.

Republicans have launched relentless efforts to prevent in-person voter fraud, which is exceptionally rare, yet seem to have ignored the real threat of voter registration fraud by their own consultant. In a twist one Florida Supervisor of Elections called “ironic,” Sproul’s organization was in fact registering dead voters as Republicans, even as Republican lawmakers all over the country justified discriminatory voter purges with the threat of dead voters showing up to the polls.

The Republican National Convention Tuesday adopted a party platform that embraces the highly unpopular Citizens United ruling, opposes meaningful campaign finance disclosure, and actually calls for allowing donors to give more money to politicians.

In a section entitled “The First Amendment: Speech that is Protected” the platform states:

The rights of citizenship do not stop at the ballot box. They include the free speech right to devote one’s resources to whatever cause or candidate one supports. We oppose any restrictions or conditions that would discourage Americans from exercising their constitutional right to enter the political fray or limit their commitment to their ideals. As a result, we support repeal of the remaining sections of McCain- Feingold, support either raising or repealing contribution limits, and oppose passage of the DISCLOSE Act or any similar legislation designed to vitiate the Supreme Court’s recent decisions protecting political speech in Wisconsin Right to Life v. Federal Election Commission and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

The Supreme Court has consistently held that free speech does not mean one can give as much as he or she wants to political candidates. Even in his 5-4 Citizens United majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledged that the Buckley v. Valeo ruling found that unlimited contributions directly to a political candidate can “give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

In the same opinion, Kennedy wrote that disclosure “is the less-restrictive alternative to more comprehensive speech regulations.” But by opposing the DISCLOSE Act and other efforts to disclose who pays for independent expenditures, the GOP is endorsing a system in which voters cannot determine and evaluate who pays for political speech.

With groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spending millions on ads attacking Democrats without disclosing any of their donors, it is no wonder that the Republicans are embracing the status quo.

Three quarters of Americans believing there is too much money in politics. The Republican delegates are apparently among the only people in the country who think things would be better with more of it.