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:
the idea that mail-in ballots are corrupt will continue to be pushed. The “proof” will be how many more democrats there are in the mail-in ballots, partially due to the RNC attempting to minimize GOP mail-in ballots.
live votes will be tallied first on election day, ideally showing a GOP win based on the idea that GOP all vote in person. They declare victory and then try to delegitimize mail-in ballots as they “suspiciously” are majorally democratic ballots.
Then they’ll try to sue to win.