A political party was precluded from exercising its political rights?

The things you don't know. The integrity of the American voting system is a real issue. It fortunately resides in the context of a huge dose of trust but there are rational grounds to be concerned.

I am not sure that there is anything systemically wrong. I know there are plenty of instances where there are clear voting failures and clear evidence of bad action. However, it is hard to tell how much, how often, and how consequential.

We know that there are all sorts of valid reasons to be concerned about the underlying technology for voting, principally in terms of cyber security and vote count validity. We know that are frequent problems with voting processes in terms of hours, locations, number of voting sites, volunteer supervision etc. We know that close elections with recounts consistently favor one party over the other.

All those things are demonstrably true. Whether they amount to a material impact to the entirety of the voting process is hard to tell.

The Democrats have, as policy, have long focused on expanding voting access. Fair enough, though sometimes they appear to sacrifice voting integrity in order to achieve greater voting access.

I have been surprised over the years that the Republicans were not as structurally aggressive about pursuing voting integrity as Democrats have been aggressive about pursuing greater voting access. And to be clear, I don't think the goals are irreconcilable. We want a voting system that poses as few barriers to voting as possible AND we want a voting process that ensures only those who are allowed to vote, do vote (and vote only once.)

Lots of individual Republicans have voiced concerns about voting integrity but there hasn't ever seemed to be much energy, structure, or institutional support and that has struck me as odd.

In another example of our living in the Age of the Great Reveal, there is this news report, RNC, freed from consent-decree limits, goes on ballot security offensive by Gregg Re.

Really? The RNC was not allowed to pursue electoral system integrity? How on earth was that possible. I can believe that they might not be wise enough to pursue it but that they weren't allowed to pursue it never crossed my mind.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has unanimously approved a major new working group to focus on ballot security measures and support for candidates facing election challenges, following accusations of voting irregularities in key races in Florida, North Carolina, California, and elsewhere.

A federal court consent decree, ended last year, had prohibited the RNC from engaging in ballot security activities for nearly 40 years. The aggressive new step, Fox News is told, is meant to level the playing field with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) as close elections increasingly become litigious and, in turn, bring discord, division and fiery talking points.

[snip]

The RNC's new initiative was made possible by a decision last year by Newark-based U.S. District Court Judge John Michael Vazquez, an Obama appointee. For more than three decades, the consent decree had effectively prevented the RNC from engaging in ballot security efforts, and made RNC officials reluctant to become involved in lawsuits pertaining to to voting rights and election integrity -- including disputes regarding ballot harvesting, voter ID compliance, or voter registration list maintenance.

The 1982 consent decree arose from a Democratic National Committee (DNC) lawsuit alleging that the RNC had targeted minorities to discourage them from voting. And, Republicans have long said, the arrangement gave the DNC a major leg-up when fighting for Democrat candidates in pivotal election integrity disputes.

The decree was renewed several times, but Vazquez ended it in 2018, saying that despite Democrats' accusations, a preponderance of evidence did not establish any violations by the RNC.

How many more elections might Republicans have won had they been able to bolster voting integrity. I don't know and I it could easily be that it did not make a difference.

But that they were precluded from exercising their free speech for 40 years never occurred to me.

Another iota of evidence supporting the idea that we are indeed in the Age of the Great Reveal.