While 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 “massive” and “revolutionary” effort to encourage both methods of voting 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 candidate — who falsely claims that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and cost him the White House four years ago — continues to criticize the popular method of casting ballots, complicating his own party's efforts to get people out to vote.
In an interview with television host Dr. Phil McGraw that aired Tuesday, the same day Whatley's statement came out, Trump said mail-in voting “should not be allowed” and falsely claimed that “every time there's a mail-in ballot, there's going to 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 and that many voters receive as many as seven ballots each.
“If Jesus came 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 would do very well with Hispanics.”
In 2020, Trump lost California, the home state of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, by more than 5 million votes.
Despite efforts by Trump campaign and Republican officials, it is simply too late to rebuild confidence in mail-in voting among the former president's supporters before 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,” he said of Trump’s falsehoods about mail-in voting fraud. “Trump is reinforcing this, so an official RNC press release or an official website is not going to change that.”
The Swamp the Vote website and other GOP efforts to encourage different voting methods, he added, are good — and normal — efforts to increase turnout, regardless of what their candidate says.
Becker said mail-in voting programs date back at least to the Civil War and were adopted by both parties. Republicans traditionally favored them even more than Democrats because GOP supporters tended to be older and such voting allowed them to participate in democracy and avoid waiting in lines at the polls.
But in 2020, as more states mailed a ballot to every voter because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump denigrated those votes as inherently fraudulent.
According to the Census Bureau, 43% of Americans cast ballots by mail in the 2020 election and 26% voted in person before Election Day.
In Trump’s speech outside the White House on January 6, 2021, as he encouraged his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol as Congress was certifying the presidential election results, he said the Democrats’ “mail-in ballot scam… attempted the most blatant and outrageous election theft.”
In the four years since Trump's defeat, Republicans have largely moved away from mail-in voting.
In a February survey by the Pew Research Center, 28% of Republicans said any voter should be able to cast a ballot by mail if they want to, a sharp drop from 2020, when 49% of Republicans held that belief.
An overwhelming number 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 to rebuild voter confidence in the process.
On Tuesday, the Trump campaign and the RNC said that “patriots should take advantage of voting by mail, early voting, and Election Day voting — whatever method works best for you.”
He praised the Swamp the Vote website, through which voters can request mail-in ballots, as “the FIRST non-governmental website to offer voters full access to Pennsylvania's suite of election tools,” 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 called Chase the Vote, in which it aims to use a “vote-chasing army” in battleground states to knock on voters' doors and persuade them to mail in their ballots.
“The radical left,” says Turning Point’s website, “is beating us in the election.”
At an appearance at a Turning Point event in June, Trump, referencing Kirk and Whatley, said: “I told Charlie and I told Michael, ‘Listen, we don’t need votes. We have more votes than anybody ever has. We need to police the vote. We need to protect the vote. We need to stop the steal. We don’t need votes. ’”
He went on to say that mail-in ballots are “treacherous” and that ballot boxes are “horrible.”
