Former president Donald Trump wants you to vote early or cast a ballot by mail. He also thinks that mail-in voting is irreparably corrupt and should be banned.
His campaign and the Republican Party want to “promote the use of absentee and mail ballots and early in-person voting.”
They’re also suing states to block mail-in ballots, even in states where most people vote by mail.
The criminally convicted nominee to face Joe Biden in November cannot stop spreading false claims about mail-in voting even as his own campaign pleads with Republican voters to request mail-in ballots – and use the exact same election tools that Trump and his allies have tried to criminalize.
This month, Trump’s campaign and the RNC launched “Swamp the Vote,” which uses contact information from people who signed up to get campaign updates to “generate new absentee or mail ballot registrations and early in-person voting commitments.”
“You need to make a plan, register, and vote any way possible,” Trump said in a statement announcing the plan.
Trump’s campaign has generated months of press about its renewed effort to reverse course and get people to vote early, with his hand-picked Republican National Committee chairs Lara Trump and Michael Whatley – who denied the outcome of the 2020 presidential election – going all-in on early voting and voting by mail.
But within days of the new plan, to a crowd at the far-right Turning Point Action conference, Trump called early voting “sad” and “crazy.”
“They start early. You know, it’s sad, when you have to go months early,” he said on June 15. “It’s crazy. What are they doing with all these votes? What are they doing?”
He falsely claimed to a group of conservative Christian supporters in Washington DC on June 21 that voters “cheat” by dropping off their mail-in ballots in drop boxes, nodding to debunked conspiracy theories that fraudulent ballots are stuffed into them.
“I hope you can put the lockboxes in your churches. You know, these boxes that they cheat with so badly. You should put them in your churches,” he said.
“You gotta get out and vote – just this time,” he added. “In four years. you don’t have to vote, OK? In four years, don’t vote. I don’t care. But we’ll have it all straightened out, so it’ll be much different.”
Four years after losing, he falsely claimed that “the radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020 and we’re not gonna allow them to rig the presidential election in 2024.”
Speaking alongside Republican senators this month, he said voting is “different from the old days” when “we had Election Day and you had paper ballots and you had voter ID.”
“Mail-in voting is totally corrupt,” he told supporters at a rally in Michigan in February. “Get that through your head.”
During an interview with Nigel Farage on GB News in March, he claimed that “anytime the mail is involved, you’re going to have cheating.”
And in an all-caps post on his Truth Social in May, he said that “absentee voting, early voting and Election Day voting are all good options.”
Trump’s false and inflated claims about early voting – which span more than a decade – have sowed enough doubt among his supporters to construct the lie of “stolen” and “rigged” elections.
They are also central to criminal cases against him in Georgia and in federal court in Washington DC, where his persistent lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him fueled violence at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
His claims also animated his campaign’s attempts to reverse election results in states he lost, inspired Republican-led legislation in nearly every state to change how elections are run, and has formed the basis of his 2024 campaign.
“Trump has spent years saying early and mail in voting was ‘fraudulent,’ ‘cheating,’ and ‘crooked.’ Apparently his campaign feels otherwise,” according to James Singer, a spokesperson for President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. “Trump should own up to the lies about voting and elections he’s been telling for years.”
Trump’s campaign has suggested he is merely playing by “the rules of the game” until he is re-elected.
“We have to play by the rules of the game until we can President Trump to push for same-day, election integrity, no-mail in ballots, paper ballots, and mandated voter ID across the country,” campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Fox Business in February. “So if you live in an early-voting state, get out and vote early.”
Just three months later, his campaign filed two lawsuits in Nevada to invalidate mail-in ballots that are received after Election Day, claiming that the state “dilutes” votes and “disproportionately harms Republican candidates and voters.”
Roughly 65 percent of Nevada voters cast their ballots by mail in primary elections this month. Early voting and mail-in voting accounted for nearly 90 percent of the ballots in 2020’s presidential election in the state.
The RNC has filed or joined more than two dozen other lawsuits targeting state election rules across the country this year.
In Arizona, Republican lawmakers want to end most mail-in voting altogether, even though 90 percent of votes cast in 2020 elections were by mail.
“No matter what your political party is, you benefit from early voting and vote by mail,” says Valencia Richardson, legal counsel for voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center.
“Any effort to both undercut the ability to cast your ballot while at the same time insisting that you do so, only serves to confuse voters,” she tells The Independent.
Voting rights advocates and civil rights groups have repeatedly warned against growing legal challenges to voting rules and how votes are counted.
“It’s important to contextualize those attacks on voting attacks,” Richardson says. “It’s not rooted in protecting voters. They’re intended to sow doubt.”
Inconsistent statements from campaigns – like Trump telling people that elections are “rigged” against him while his campaign both encourages people to vote early and sues states to reject ballots – “is wholly unhelpful,” she says.
The Independent has requested comment from Trump’s campaign.
In 2020, nearly half of Republicans believed that any eligible voter should be allowed to vote by mail if they want to, according to polling from the Pew Research Center.
Four years later, only 28 percent of Republicans say that.
Far-right activist Charlie Kirk – who promoted false claims about the 2020 election and sent buses of “patriots” to Washington DC to “fight” for Trump on January 6 – is now trying to convince his army of supporters that they should start voting in ways he baselessly accused of being fraudulent.
His Turning Point Action group is now spending tens of millions of dollars on a “Chase the Vote” campaign to find likely GOP voters who haven’t participated in recent elections and then convince them to vote early.
“I was like, why are we not embracing, you know, this sort of methodology, we might not love it, but losing feels a lot worse,” he told CBS News. “I think that the movement is looking at it the same.”
Trump voters are left with “a binary choice: we keep on doing what we’re doing, which is to try to squeeze, you know, 70 to 80 million votes in a 12-hour period … or we broaden that,” he said.
