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).
Look, here’s the deal. There are more Republican controlled states than Democrat controlled states. If they intelligently target the voting systems in the available swings states, and manipulate the legal system to purge voter rolls or toss ballots in a more organized fashion than in 2020 we are in serious fucking trouble.
Then there is the threat of armed militia members showing up at polling stations, and you can see where things are going to get crazy in November. I feel bad for anyone that has to put up with that bullshit instead of being able to cast a ballot by mail in 5 minutes, but we are counting on you to help save this country. You are the real heroes, and you deserve maximum respect in my book.
The problem is not that the RNC are actively trying to do these things to take over government undemocratically.
The biggest problem is the whole rest of the country from it’s leadership to its citizens just calmly allowing it all to happen and just slowly sleep walking into fascism without doing very much about it.
Neoliberals have no problem adapting to life under fascist rule.
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.
This is the ticket here. They have had 4 years to build on their last attempt.
They have about 4 months during which they can do this (removals have to be done 90 days prior to an election). And they either have to have documentation supporting that the person is dead or has moved, or that person has to have missed two federal elections, been sent a letter about verifying their info, and the person has to have ignored that letter and missed another federal election (at which point the government is allowed to assume you are dead/moved). If they remove you in practically any other situation it violates the NVRA and it’s probably time for a lawsuit.