GOP Decides It Likes Mail Balloting After All

If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.

In arguably the most dramatic reversal of a party line since the 1939 signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, the Associated Press reports that the Republican party is launching a “Bank Your Vote” campaign to encourage Republican voters “to vote by mail or early in-person, and ballot harvest where permitted.” (Ballot harvesting is when third parties collect absentee ballots from voters’ houses.) This is the same Republican Party whose standard-bearer, Donald Trump, in 2020 called mail-in ballots “a whole big scam” and as recently as November 2022 pledged to restore same-day voting.

Faithful Backbencher readers may recall my suspicion that Trump’s inaccurate rants against mail-in voting cost him the 2020 election. Only about one-third of Trump voters cast their ballots by mail, compared to almost 60 percent of Biden voters. Discouraging his supporters to vote by mail was especially costly with voters over 65, a majority of whom voted by mail. Trump won this demographic, but only by five points, compared to 7 points in 2016.

The GOP has been mulling this change for some time, but it may still find it difficult to persuade the ranks that, in effect, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. (The still above is from the 1984 film version of 1984, which I actually judge superior to the novel, which disappointed me on a recent rereading.) Trump appears to be on board (“Either we ballot harvest where we can, or you can say goodbye to America,” he said in a recent fundraiser) but the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice counts at least 80 bills introduced in 23 states to restrict mail-in balloting, largely in response to Trump’s demagoguery against it. The Committee on House Administration may want to consider taking down its web page calling ballot harvesting a “sinister practice,” and also to withdraw the American Confidence in Elections Act, its model for state-level election reform that would prohibit the District of Columbia from sending mail ballots to voters who don’t request them.