get the memo?...this has been going on since June of last year...from the attached article...
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Trump complicates the "Bank Your Vote" campaign
To get Republicans comfortable with those voting methods, the RNC has launched a "Bank Your Vote" campaign. As part of the initiative, the RNC launched websites for all 50 states, as well as websites in different languages aimed at various minority communities. And GOP candidates are being asked to direct their voters to the websites.
This past summer, Trump recorded an ad for the campaign.
But despite endorsing Bank Your Vote, Trump has continued to cast doubt on the legitimacy and security of mail voting in particular.
Just on Monday, in a speech after winning the Iowa caucuses, Trump criticized both mail and early voting.
"You know, we have these elections that last for 62 days," he said. "And if you need some more time, take as much time as you want. And so many bad things happen. We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections."
This is baseless. There's no evidence that mail voting leads to widespread election fraud.
GOP state lawmakers across the U.S. have also continued to propose and pass legislation aimed at restricting access to early and mail voting. That includes states like Texas, which passed new ID laws for mail ballots. Florida and Georgia are among the other states to pass new restrictions on mail voting.
Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs for government accountability group Common Cause, said members of the GOP mostly have themselves to blame for the growing stigma around early in-person and absentee voting.
"Getting voters to unlearn or unhear those messages is, you know, it's tough to undo that damage," Scherb said. "And so I think that's what this Bank the Vote program is trying to essentially do. It's somewhat analogous to getting a jury to unhear extremely damaging information that's presented against the defendant."
Mail voting stigma
Charles Stewart, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies how Americans vote, said there are a slew of reasons why the RNC's campaign might not render the results Republican officials are hoping for. He said skepticism about mail voting in particular is fairly deep-seated among some voters.
"Republicans have always been much more likely to believe that fraud was a problem, that it occurred — and much more likely to believe it's more important to secure the election than it is to pass laws to expand participation," he said. "So, I mean, in some ways it's kind of surprising it took Republicans so long to develop a skepticism about voting by mail."
Stewart said he also isn't sure the RNC is the right messenger for this campaign.
That's because messages about voter fraud and mail voting aren't just coming from political campaigns. He pointed to grassroots organizations across the U.S. warning voters that ballot "harvesting" and mail voting are fraudulent.
"And they're going into mostly rural counties, Republican strongholds, and giving this message," Stewart said. "And so the other set of people that [the RNC] needs to corral are the grassroots activists who are making millions of dollars selling the message of voter fraud. And the problem in reining them in is that they are almost as skeptical of the RNC as they are of the Democratic Party."
Political costs
But Gilbert said it's essential for the RNC to figure out ways to tackle this problem ahead of this year's elections.
For one, she points out the GOP spends a lot more money on voters who wait until the last day — Election Day — to cast a ballot.
"If they get out early, we're not going to spend as much money on them," she said. "So it may be around $5 that we spend on that voter. If they don't get out early, however, if we keep having to chase them, we keep having to phone them to nail down, to reach them, to try to get them out to vote, we're continuing to spend money over and over and over on the same voter."
Gilbert says if more core Republican voters cast their votes early, the party could use its resources on voters who might need more persuading.
"It's all about conserving resources that we can then use to transfer to a different chase," she said. "Yes, we want you to vote early, but why? Because we're able to target others as a result. And that's how we can change election results."
And, Gilbert said, it's very risky for the party to have so many voters planning to vote on one day. "Sometimes things do happen on Election Day and you can't vote," she said.
Just look at Monday's Republican presidential caucuses in Iowa, where there were subzero temperatures throughout the state. This year, roughly 110,000 people showed up to vote at the in-person events. That's compared with the caucuses in 2016, when a record 186,743 Republicans voted.
And in battleground states, just a few votes could make all the difference.
Jay Heck, the executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, said he thinks that Republicans lost recent state Supreme Court elections and a recent gubernatorial election partly because of their voters' aversion to early voting.
"There is, I think, a realization on the part of some of them that they had better begin to do the things that progressives and Democrats are doing to turn out the vote if they want to carry the state for Trump or if they want to win a gubernatorial election in the near future," he said.
Heck also predicts there will be a lot of "tension" within the party over early and mail voting as November gets closer.
"I think there's going to be, if not an outright rupture, at least some pretty serious words back and forth between Republicans who are trying to encourage early voting and then those who just claim that early votes and absentee votes are all fraudulent," he said. "So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out."
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Hard to count all the ways that DJT is destroying the GOP...he lost the 2020 election and used mail-in voting as an excuse, and because he's a raving narcissist, he can't admit he was wrong, and consequently he makes it even harder for the GOP to be successful in elections...
There are good qualified Republicans who understand the need for bipartisanship...the sooner the GOP turns its back on Trump, the more successful we'll all be.
Link: https://www.npr.org/2024/01/18/1224432298/rnc-wants-republicans-embrace-early-voting-trump-rhetoric-makes-it-tough
...that headline is from the Valdosta, GA Times...based on Trump's view there must have been a lot of GOP fraud in Florida and Georgia the 2020 election...problem with inefficient Republican "Ballot Harvesting"?
Link: https://www.valdostadailytimes.com/news/ga_fl_news/in-southern-states-data-shows-republicans-have-a-historically-higher-use-of-mail-in-ballots/article_1d6208b6-0a57-11eb-809b-7bdd0425c41c.html
Thank God for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the Democrats.
(no message)
is the only way the Repubs can win an election. He's like the caveman trying to crack open a clam for the pearl.