Republicans lodge complaint with FEC over Google's alleged suppression of political emails

Pixabay

The Republican National Committee filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on Monday over Google’s alleged suppression of the conservative vote in November by sending millions of RNC election-related emails directly to users’ spam folders on Gmail.

The RNC alleges that Google, which operates the free email service, Gmail, automatically filtered around 22 million emails sent by the political party in the last three days of September. Over 3.1 million messages were binned as “spam” on September 28, over 9.8 million on September 29, and over 9.97 million on September 30.

“Every single month, like clockwork, Google suppresses important GOTV and fundraising emails at the end of the month, with zero explanation nor commitment from Google to resolve this issue,” said RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in a statement to Fox News Digital. “We are less than 40 days out from Election Day, and important GOTV emails to our opted-in voters in states that have already started early voting are being systematically sent to spam.”

“Enough is enough,” McDaniel said. “Big Tech bias is undermining the democratic process and the RNC is exploring our legal options to put an end to this clear pattern of bias.”

According to an RNC official, the committee has been liaising with Google “for months” but no resolution was ever reached. 

Another official who spoke to the outlet said that the organization’s emails have been suppressed by Google despite changes the organization made to the structure of its emails, which improved performance but “appears to have had absolutely no impact on the timing of this end-of-month spamming.”

In its complaint, the RNC offered evidence that party emails go from “strong inbox delivery - 90-100%” down to 0% on the last three days of the month.

In a statement to Fox News, Google defended its service and claimed that the company does not suppress political organizations. 

“We enable political committees and other organizations to reach their constituents, donors, and key audiences via email,” said the spokesman. “When Gmail users say that they don’t want to receive an email, we place the email in the spam folder, politics or political affiliation plays no role in this determination. We recently launched a Federal Election Commission approved pilot program with a small number of campaigns to study whether these changes improve the user experience during this election period.”