The Trump-branded Republican Party is less interested in promoting voting by mail than in legal challenges aimed at voting systems.
In a victory for the extremist wing of the Republican Party, it looks like Donald Trump’s hand-picked leadership team at the Republican National Committee has officially scrapped the GOP’s plan to encourage early voting this election cycle. Instead, the party is taking steps to prioritize legal challenges to voting systems ahead of November.
As part of the layoffs and budget cuts carried out this week by the newly installed leadership team, they are shuttering a program dedicated to mail-in voting, according to The Washington Post. The significance, of course, is that Trump has pushed false claims that mail-in voting is rife with voter fraud since 2020, months before he lost the election to Joe Biden. Ever since the election, Trump has continued to spread conspiracy theories that mail-in voter fraud cost him that race. In reality, there’s ample evidence that allowing people to vote by mail doesn’t have a partisan effect (and if it does, data shows the impact appears to favor Republicans).
It seems to me the point is that mail-in ballots are often added later in election results. The RNC is reallocating their budget to legal challenges. This seems to anticipate two things:
This will be informally reinforced by calls for armed Republicans to “stand watch” (aka voter intimidate) at ballot locations. This will disincentive in-person voting from democrats and increase the chances that mail-in ballots will seem partisan.
GOP will then immediately declare victory and try to delegitimize mail-in ballots as they begin to be counted and are “suspiciously” (intentionally) largely democratic ballots based on the consequences of #1.
Then they’ll try to sue to win by attempting to invalidate all mail-in ballots as “irregular,” which they will be, because the republican party will have attempted to make them irregular.