Trump, Republicans Try to Roll Back Mail-In Voting System for 2024 Election

After years of claiming that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud, some Republicans — including former President Donald Trump — are working to roll back the system ahead of next year’s presidential and congressional elections.

Trump, now on his third run for the White House, told attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month that it’s time to “change our thinking” about early voting and mail-in voting.

In speeches and fundraising emails, he touts his campaign’s plans to encourage “vote harvesting,” the practice of allowing third parties to collect and deliver other voters’ ballots.

His party “has no choice” but to beat “the Democrats at their own game,” he said.

That’s a total reversal for a politician who last November issued a statement in all caps on his Truth Social account claiming, in part, “you can never have free and fair elections with mail-in ballots – never, never, never.”

The change in tone and message reflects the view among party strategists that Trump’s relentless and false allegations about 2020 voter fraud and the GOP’s harsh rhetoric about a form of voting widely used in key states such as Arizona , contributed to the party’s disappointing mid-term result.

They worry it could jeopardize the GOP’s hopes of winning the White House and other offices next year.

“It’s a problem created by Republicans among Republicans,” said Paul Bentz, a GOP pollster in Phoenix.

The majority of GOP voters in Arizona still vote early, he said, but a “sizable portion has shifted their behavior back to voting in person on Election Day.”

Trump, he said, “has effectively clamped down on a portion of his own support base.”

Republican officials across the country are now struggling to figure out how to change voter attitudes before the 2024 election cycle begins to accelerate.

A Republican National Committee review of the midterm elections is expected to focus, in part, on ways to encourage early voting among GOP loyalists.

In Pennsylvania, a presidential battleground state that saw Democrats make gains in the midterms, GOP officials recently launched several committees to explore ways to regain their mail-in voting advantage.

“Any party that votes for 50 days will beat the party that voted for 13 hours. It’s that simple,” Andy Reilly, a member of the Pennsylvania Republican National Committee, told the CNN .

He sits on some of the GOP’s new statewide committees focused on encouraging mail-in voting.

Pre-race crisis: Trump says he may be arrested

The former president said Saturday that he expects to be arrested in connection with the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation next week and has called for protests as a result.

In a social media post on Saturday, Trump, referring to himself, said that the “leading Republican candidate and former President of the United States will be arrested on Tuesday of next week.”

“Protest, bring our nation back,” he wrote.

While Trump has not provided details on why he expects to be indicted, his legal team expects it to happen soon and is preparing behind the scenes for next steps. The former president is expected to report to Manhattan following the formal indictments and has expressed interest in delivering a speech afterward, although it remains to be seen if he will.

Trump privately complained that he believes he will only be indicted because he thinks Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “hates him,” according to a source familiar with what Trump said.

Influencing the leading skeptic

Ahead of the midterm elections, some Republicans expressed concern that Trump’s continued rhetoric about mail-in voting and election security would discourage Republicans from turning out and cause them to lose the election.

Several allies warned Trump that Democrats had an infrastructure in place and that trash-talking mail-in voting would put Republicans at a disadvantage, but he doubled down on his allegations of rigged elections and mass fraud.

In the end, the GOP underperformed in the midterm elections – it failed to upset the US Senate, winning only a narrow majority in the US House of Representatives and unseating only one Democratic governor.

“What we need is for our voters to vote early,” said the RNC president, Ronna McDaniel a Trump ally, during an interview with Fox News last December, on the same day that the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock was re-elected in Georgia, consolidating his party’s position in the Senate majority.

“I have said this several times. There were many in 2020 saying, ‘Don’t vote by mail, don’t vote beforehand. And we have to stop that.”

In the months following the midterm elections, Trump’s allies and advisers said the former president remained obsessed with his allegations about the stolen election but was persuaded to change his public rhetoric.

“He doesn’t believe the 2022 losses have anything to do with the election denial talk, no matter how many people tell him,” a source close to Trump told the Times. CNN . “It’s because he still listens to people who say the base cares about it.”

Since the midterms, close advisers have studied state laws and presented Trump with research on how Democrats were working within the system and using mail-in voting and third-party ballot collection to their advantage, as well as a blueprint showing that Republicans were able to do the same to help them win the 2024 election.

“The message [para Trump] was: ‘If we don’t do it like this, we will never win,’ he told CNN a Trump ally familiar with the conversation.

Notably, Trump has also clamped down on his lengthy public speeches about the 2020 election — something his advisers have been begging him to do since before the midterms. His rivals also put the issue of voting at the forefront.

The former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley the first Republican to challenge Trump for the GOP nomination, has publicly urged the party to adopt early and remote voting.

Speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition after the midterm elections, she argued that Republicans “were in our hands” in the election, while Democrats accumulated early votes.

In remarks at the same event, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – who is expected to enter the GOP presidential primaries later this year – urged his party to seek “vote harvesting” in states where it is permitted.

Bentz the Arizona pollster, said that failing to cast votes early puts Republicans at a strategic disadvantage because it forces them to “nurture” their likely voters during Election Day to ensure they vote — rather than employing those resources to attract infrequent voters. or conquer the undecided.

It’s a risky tactic if bad weather or other problems arise on Election Day.

Several Republican candidates in Arizona last year complained that their voters were disenfranchised after problems arose with printers at several polling places on the final day of voting in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county and home to Phoenix.

Local officials said the Election Day problems did not stop anyone from voting legally, and judges have so far rejected attempts to overturn last year’s results.

Later this month, the Arizona Supreme Court must decide whether to accept a last-minute election challenge from the 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate, kari lake who lost to Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs by approximately 17,000 votes out of over 2.5 million cast.

party division

More than half of the states – including major presidential battlegrounds like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia – allow the voter requests and votes remotely/by mail without the need for an excuse or reason, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But Democrats have surpassed Republicans in using this method.

In 2020 — when opportunities to vote remotely grew during the height of the pandemic — nearly 60% of Democrats voted by mail, compared with just 32% of Republicans, according to polling data analyzed by Charles Stewart, a political scientist and director of the MIT Electoral Data and Science Laboratory.

Both parties recorded similar rates of mail-in voting in 2016 and 2012.

In Pennsylvania, where Democrats kept the governor’s office and flipped a Republican seat in the US Senate last year, the Democrats’ mail advantage in the midterm elections was stark.

the republican candidate, doctor Mehmet Oz , edged out Democrat John Fetterman in the Election Day poll. But Fetterman, the winner, received more than 960,000 mail-in votes to about 234,000 for Oz, state records show.

Stewart of MIT, said that some Republicans left “a very powerful set of tools on the table” for some time by not encouraging mail-in voting.

At the same time, a chorus of grassroots conservative activists demanded single-day in-person voting and other changes to election procedures, echoing distrust of the system expressed by Trump and others who say the 2020 election was stolen.

“The whole narrative associated with voting in person has so completely infiltrated the Republican Party that it’s going to take a long time for Republicans to change their minds at this point,” Stewart said.

Some of the most ardent critics of mail-in voting have begun to come forward – albeit reluctantly. Among them: Doug McLinko, a local Republican official in Pennsylvania, who was the lead plaintiff in one of the GOP lawsuits that unsuccessfully sought to overturn the state’s 2019 law establishing no-excuse mail-in voting.

McLinko, who helps oversee local elections as part of the Bradford County Commission in northeastern Pennsylvania, said he believed most voters should vote in person on Election Day, which he said demonstrates a true commitment to democracy. .

“People shouldn’t be able to lie in bed, eat Tostitos and vote by mail,” he told CNN .

“I’m not an idiot. We’re going to have to learn how to do it,” McLinko said of mail-in voting. “…Let’s go head-to-head and try to get all the ballots through the mail.”