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Steve Wynn’s mark on the Las Vegas Strip is hard to miss. He built opulent casinos that changed the skyline of Sin City. Now the longtime Republican donor is backing something much less glitzy: an election law group whose purpose is to make it harder to vote. Billionaire Wynn is playing a key financial role in Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a Virginia-based law group that launched over the summer. Among its leaders are political heavyweights Karl Rove, former Attorney General Bill Barr and Bobby Burchfield, who served as the Trump Organization’s outside ethics adviser. The group is one of a handful of legal organizations that are filing lawsuits and assisting plaintiffs seeking to restrict access to the ballot across the country, often by asserting states’ rights to control the time, manner and place of the voting process. The organization’s launch came just as other Republican-affiliated groups were stepping up their efforts to restrict voting, according to a recently released report by Democracy Docket, a group led by Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias. They say there has been a five-fold increase in new lawsuits by GOP-affiliated groups since 2021. * * * The primary purpose of such GOP lawsuits is “to make it harder for people to register to vote, with the thinking that that’s going to benefit the Republican Party,” said UCLA Law Professor Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, which launched in July. While the partisan impact of these lawsuits is unclear, “They help feed into the narrative that Democrats are trying to bend the rules in order to gain advantage,” he said. RITE’s emergence in 2022 follows a year of unprecedented productivity by Republican-dominated legislatures seeking to enact voting restrictions, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York-based think tank. As a nonprofit organization, RITE is not required to reveal its donors. Wynn, who is RITE’s national finance chair, did not respond to requests for comment. RITE staff members did not respond to requests for comment, either. Their July press statement says it is trying to restore “voter confidence in the electoral process,” and places most of the responsibility for that lack of confidence on “the left” rather than on the persistence of false claims of election fraud by Republican candidates. A report by the group Democracy Docket found a five-fold increase in anti-voting lawsuits by GOP-affiliated groups since 2021. “By defending the rule of law in the election process, RITE will both ensure that elections are conducted according to the rules and that voter confidence in the results is restored,” Burchfield said in a July statement, which blames the left and “some on the right” for “numerous often unfounded claims of election irregularities.” Wynn has recently donated to those who have advanced such claims. He has contributed to Republican senatorial candidates J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona, and given $250,000 to a super PAC that supports Missouri senatorial candidate Eric Schmitt. All are election deniers who have promoted the “great replacement theory” espoused by white nationalists. (Masters has recently scrubbed his website of some of its more controversial content.) In August, Wynn, who is 80, donated $10 million to a pro-Trump super PAC that is attacking Democratic senatorial candidates. The PAC spent more than $900,000 supporting the campaign of Pennsylvania senatorial candidate Mehmet Oz, according to the Federal Election Commission. Like Oz, a majority of GOP nominees running for seats in Congress and for key statewide offices have “denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election,” according to a recent Washington Post analysis. * * * RITE is not itself in the 2020 election denial business. The group rejects claims by some Republicans that the election was stolen, Burchfield, one of the co-chairs, told Reuters in July. Barr has dismissed his former boss’s claims that the 2020 election was tainted by widespread fraud as “bullshit.” After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Rove blasted Republicans who repeated the president’s claim that the election was stolen. But to some observers, the difference is simply one of degree. “It’s a great strategy,” noted Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and a historian of the right. “It’s kind of like [saying], ‘We’re, you know, sensible people, a former attorney general, critics of Donald Trump. So take us seriously.’ When really, they’re working towards the same goals and probably with greater strategic acumen and expertise and efficiency.” RITE has filed briefs advancing voter restrictions in courts in Montana, Florida and Wisconsin. An amicus brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit supports a Florida law that, according to a spokesperson for the state’s nonpartisan League of Women Voters, “makes voter-registration drives, voting by mail and rendering basic assistance to voters in line needlessly difficult, resulting in voting suppression.”

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