While former President Trump has spent years attacking the integrity of early voting and mail-in voting, his campaign and the Republican National Committee this week launched a “massive” and “revolutionary” effort to encourage both methods of voting in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
In the email promotion of an invitation to a website. SwampTheVoteUSA.com, “As President Trump has consistently said, voting by mail, voting early and voting on Election Day are all good options,” Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Wheatley said in a statement.
But the Republican presidential nominee, who falsely claims mail-in voting was rigged and cost him the White House four years ago, continues to trash the popular method of casting ballots and complicate his party’s get-out-the-vote efforts.
In an interview with television host Dr. Phil McGraw, who broadcast on tuesday On the same day Utley’s statement was released, Trump said mail-in voting “should not be allowed” and falsely claimed that “every time you vote by mail, there will be massive fraud.”
He criticized California for sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters. He also falsely claimed that Republicans automatically lose elections in the Golden State, with many voters receiving as many as seven votes.
“If Jesus comes down and goes against the vote, I will win California, OK?” he said. “In other words, if we had an honest vote counter, a really honest vote counter, I would do very well with Hispanics.”
And 2020, Trump Lost California the country of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, by more than 5 million votes.
David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who runs the nonpartisan Presidential Election Center, said despite efforts by Trump campaign and Republican officials to restore confidence in mail-in voting among the former president’s supporters until Election Day, it was too late to vote by mail. Election Innovation and Research
“They still believe it,” he said of Trump’s lie about mail-in voting fraud. “Trump reinforces that, so no official RNC press release or official website is going to change that.”
The Swamp the Vote website and other GOP efforts to encourage different voting methods, he added, are efforts to increase turnout, despite what his candidate says is okay and normal.
Vote-by-mail programs, Becker said, date back at least to the Civil War and were adopted by both parties, Becker said.
Republicans traditionally supported them even more than Democrats, because Republican supporters tended to be older and such voting allowed them to participate in democracy while at the same time abstaining from voting.
But in 2020, as more states sent ballots to all voters because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump denounced the ballots as fraudulent.
according census bureau, 43% of Americans voted by mail in the 2020 election and 26% voted in person before Election Day.
In Trump’s speech On January 6, 2021, in front of the White House, as he encouraged his supporters to march on the US Capitol as Congress confirmed the results of his election defeat, he said that through “electoral fraud” the “Democrats” had attempted “the most blatant and terrible electoral theft.”
In the four years since Trump’s defeat, Republicans have largely abandoned mail-in voting.
in a February survey According to the Pew Research Center, 28% of Republicans said all voters should be allowed to vote by mail if they wanted to, a sharp drop from 2020, when 49% of Republicans believed that way.
A large majority of Democrats (87% in February and 84% in 2020) supported giving all voters access to mail-in voting.
Still, Republican leaders and conservative activists are trying restore voter confidence in the process.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee said Tuesday that “patriots should take advantage of voting by mail, voting early, and voting on Election Day, whatever method works best for you.”
He praised Swamp the Vote, a website through which voters can request mail-in ballots, as “the FIRST non-governmental website to provide voters with full access to Pennsylvania’s electoral roll,” even though it is “affiliated with the Pennsylvania Department of State.”
Action Point Turning, a youth group led byRight-wing activist Charlie Kirk is running an initiative called Chase the Vote, which aims to use a “vote-chasing army” in battleground states to knock on voters’ doors and get them to mail in their ballots.
“The radical left,” says the Turning Point website, “is beating us in the elections.”
Apparently at the tipping point. event in june “I told Charlie and Michael, I said, ‘Listen, we don’t need votes,’” Trump said, citing Kirk and Whatley. “We got the most votes. We have to watch the vote. We have to protect the vote. We have to stop stealing. We don’t need votes.’”
He went on to say that mail-in ballots are “treacherous” and that drop boxes are “terrible.”
