Republicans encourage mail-in voting even as Trump disparages it

Former President Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July.

Aug. 31, 2024 3 AM PT

Although former President Trump has spent years attacking the integrity of early and mail-in voting, his campaign and the Republican National Committee this week launched what they called a “huge” and “revolutionary” effort to encourage both methods of casting ballots in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

In an email promoting a website called SwampTheVoteUSA.com, RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement: “As President Trump has consistently said, voting by mail, voting early, and voting on Election Day are all good options.”

But the Republican presidential nominee — who falsely says that mail-in voting is plagued by fraud and cost him the White House four years ago — continues to trash the popular method of casting ballots, complicating his own party’s efforts to get out the vote.

In an interview with television host Dr. Phil McGraw that aired Tuesday, the same day Whatley’s statement went out, Trump said voting by mail “shouldn’t be allowed” and falsely claimed that “any time you have a mail-in ballot, there’s going to be massive fraud.”

He criticized California for sending ballots by mail to every registered voter. He also falsely claimed that Republicans automatically lose elections in the Golden State and that many voters receive up to seven ballots apiece.

“If Jesus came down and was the vote counter, I would win California, OK?” he said. “In other words, if we had an honest vote counter, a really honest vote counter, I’d do great with the Hispanics.”

In 2020, Trump lost California, the home state of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, by more than 5 million votes.

Despite the efforts of Trump’s campaign officials and the Republican Party, it is simply too late to rebuild trust in mail-in voting among the former president’s supporters by election day, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who heads the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“They still believe this to their core,” he said of Trump’s falsehoods about mail-in voting being rigged. “Trump is reinforcing this, so an official press release from the RNC or an official website is not going to change that.”

The Swamp the Vote website and other efforts by the Republican Party to encourage different methods of voting, he added, are good — and normal — efforts to increase participation, despite what their candidate is saying.

Vote-by-mail programs, Becker said, date back to at least the Civil War and were embraced by both parties, Becker said. Republicans traditionally favored them even more than Democrats because GOP supporters tended to be older and such voting allowed them to participate in democracy while avoiding standing in line at the polls.

But in 2020, as more states were mailing every voter a ballot because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump denigrated these votes as inherently fraudulent.

According to the Census Bureau, 43% of Americans cast their ballots by mail in the 2020 election, and 26% voted in person before election day.

In Trump’s speech near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, when he encouraged his supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol as Congress was certifying the results of the presidential election, he said that Democrats, “the scam of mail-in ballots ... attempted the most brazen and outrageous election theft.”

In the four years since Trump’s loss, Republicans have largely turned away from mail-in voting.

In a February survey by the Pew Research Center, 28% of Republicans said any voter should be allowed to cast a ballot by mail if they want to — a steep decline from 2020, when 49% of Republicans held that belief.

An overwhelming amount of Democrats — 87% in February and 84% in 2020 — supported all voters having access to mail-in ballots.

Still, GOP leaders and conservative activists are trying to rebuild voters’ confidence in the process..

On Tuesday, the Trump campaign and RNC said “patriots should take advantage of vote by mail, early voting, and Election Day voting — whatever method works best for you.”

It lauded the Swamp the Vote website, through which voters can request ballots by mail, as “the FIRST non-government website giving voters full access to Pennsylvania’s election toolkit,” even though it is “connected to the Pennsylvania Department of State.”

Turning Point Action, the youth group led by right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, is pushing an initiative it calls Chase the Vote, in which it it aims to use a “ballot chasing army” in battleground states to knock on voters’ doors and persuade them to send in their mail-in ballots.

“The Radical Left,” Turning Point’s website says, “is beating us in the ballot game.”

In an appearance at a Turning Point event in June, Trump, referencing Kirk and Whatley, said: “I said to Charlie, and I said to Michael, I said: ‘Listen, we don’t need votes. We got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote. We need to guard the vote. We need to stop the steal. We don’t need votes.’”

He went on to say mail-in ballots are “treacherous” and that ballot drop boxes are “horrible.”