The Florida Republican Party spent years trying to get their voters to take part in early voting and vote by mail, until Donald Trump came along.
"I think that mail-in voting is a terrible thing," Trump said publicly. In the days that followed, he claimed without evidence that voting by mail would hurt Republican candidates and that it would probably lead to fraud. “There is no way you can go through a mail-in vote without massive cheating,” he said in August 2020.
Now Republicans are trying to bring the practice back, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
After huge election flops in 2020 and 2022, "Republicans close to Trump" want to build the program that Trump tried to bring down.
In a prospectus from Turning Point Action, the far-right group claims “THE LEFT BEAT US AT THE BALLOT GAME!” They're pitching donors to help raise $108 million to build “the LARGEST and MOST IMPACTFUL BALLOT CHASING OPERATION THE MOVEMENT HAS EVER SEEN,” the report said.
The ones looking to build the program worked directly for Trump or in organizations in five different groups that are pushing to generate a vote-by-mail operation.
"The groups have little experience in such work, and the jockeying is generating concern among some Republicans," the Post explained. "It is unclear how many Republican donors will give to such measures and whether many GOP voters who have been skeptical of mail-in voting will participate."
Republicans have even tried to ban "ballot harvesting," which allows individuals to pick up ballots and turn them in on the voter's behalf without the need for a stamp. It's still legal in some states.
During the COVID crisis in 2020, 69 percent of the voters voted by mail.
Democrats are a lot better at these operations, the report explained, whereas Republicans do better at in-person voting. So, moving to push for mail voting is a dramatic shift for the GOP.
The Post cited the RNC spokesperson explaining that they intend to create state websites so that everyone can look at the rules and gather the necessary information to vote. She said that they also intend to have "focus groups and message testing on how best to communicate with Republican voters on pre-Election Day voting, equipping Republican leadership and candidates to deliver a unified message nationwide.”
They intend to call it "Bank the Vote."
The only barrier will be getting Donald Trump on board and managing to change opinions established by Trump's anti-mail campaign in 2020.