As the key 2024 vote for the White House draws near, a number of leading Republicans are reversing their stance on early voting and mail-in ballots after years of claiming they allowed Democrats to steal elections.
The party’s converts warn that they must change or else they face future political failures, particularly in crucial states with early and postal voting procedures. However, the vast majority of GOP voters continue to be skeptical about the early voting mode.
Recently, the Republican National Committee declared that it had developed a campaign to encourage early voting, both in person and by mail. The campaign, Bank Your Vote, also urges Republicans to utilize “ballot harvesting”—a procedure that permits a third party to gather voters’ completed ballots—where it is permitted.
Even former President Donald J. Trump has stated for months that Republicans had “no choice” but to accept the technique, at least until the party has the authority to change voting rules. Mr. Trump, who often casts his ballots through mail, has in the past made bogus claims that the integrity of the election was jeopardized by chain-of-custody problems with mail-in ballots, furthering the party’s mistrust of postal voting.
Three years after the epidemic started and increased its usage, the popularity of mail-in voting doesn’t appear to be declining at all. Republicans have consistently attacked postal voting since the 2020 election. Some have deemed mail-in ballots “un-American,” including Trump supporter and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who called them a “threat to democracy” in an online article.
However, that might have changed last year, when G.O.P. leaders conceded that resistance to voting by mail was a faulty approach, as per an assessment produced by the Republican National Committee in response to the party’s disappointing performance in the midterm elections of last year.
