They lie and these mail in ballots.
These mail in ballots are a disgrace and they know
it.
Ahead of the 2020 election,
Donald Trump was unequivocal about mail in voting.
There's a lot of dishonesty going along with mail in
voting.
There is no way you can go through a mail
in vote without massive cheating.
They're being sold. They're being dumped in rivers.
This is a horrible thing for our country.
But after multiple disappointing elections,
Trump and Republicans are now touting early and absentee voting.
Republicans must compete using every lawful means to win.
That means swapping the left with mail in votes,
early votes and Election Day votes.
And in an election, it is expected to be close
yet again.
The number of people who vote early and absentee could
decide the outcome.
Trump himself voted absentee repeatedly over the years before demonizing
it in 2020.
President Trump clearly viewed early voting as a strategic disadvantage
to his chances of winning,
and so therefore he spent the bulk of the year
talking about voter fraud before most Americans had even cast
ballots.
2 months after Trump lost the White House,
Republicans lost the Senate. Rural white voters stayed home in
larger numbers than other demographic slices.
And so that tells you that there was this very
real impact of the rhetoric criticizing absentee voting,
Early voting. By 2022, some Republicans were still warning voters
against early voting.
Vote in person. Don't don't try to mail a ballot
in if you've got early voting,
because it's not going to come if you want honest
elections.
Very simple. Same day voting that November.
Democrats again outperformed historic trends in the midterm elections.
Though not all Republicans blame Trump's rhetoric,
I would argue it's suppression of information.
That's the thing that really matters when it comes to
elections,
not the rhetoric of President Trump.
On mail in balloting ahead of the 2020 and
2022 elections, a majority of Republican voters were not confident
that mail votes would be counted accurately.
And in both elections, Democratic voters voted by mail at
a higher rate than Republicans.
Any person who's ever worked on a campaign knows that
it's effective to bank those votes through early voting and
it frees up your resources.
And after the 2022 midterms,
Republicans launched a new effort to do just that.
To win close elections, we need to close the gap
on pre Election Day voting.
That's why we're launching the Bank Your Vote initiative.
Republicans face two key challenges headed into the
2024 election low confidence among their supporters in early and
absentee voting and new state laws that restricted some ways
that voters vote.
Some states have restricted early voting hours.
Some states have made it more difficult to vote by
mail.
The challenge that Republicans face now is preventing those restrictions
from affecting their voters.
Congressman Byron Donald's is the Co chair of the new
RNC initiative Bank.
Your Vote, if you look at any election turn out
more than anything else,
is the driver of election success.
What we're really trying to do is get Republican voters
to start returning those ballots early.
Citizens see these ballots going out and coming in and
they need to have some assurance that there are protections
and safeguards around that process.
Derek Lyons is the President and CEO of Restoring Integrity
and Trust in Elections,
a new Republican LED group that has spearheaded lawsuits often
aimed at tightening election laws,
including around early and absentee voting.
I think going back a couple of cycles,
one thing we saw in 2020 was sort of a
lot of last minute changes to the way the elections
in this country are run.
Massive expansion of mail in balloting on the fly.
In many instances there was a claim by the Republicans
who passed these laws that these these laws were meant
simply to address
fraud. Privately, the same Republicans
authoring some of these bills said,
look, I've got to do something.
My constituents are clamoring for
new restrictions because they believe there's widespread fraud.
It's really people seeking to
undermine confidence in those results who are to blame,
despite the fact that they've never been more safe and
secure.
Al Schmidt helped oversee the 2020 election in Philadelphia as
a Republican city commissioner.
I was a Republican election commissioner in Philadelphia.
I assure you there was a lot of attention paid
to making sure that elections were run in a free
and fair and safe and secure way.
Pennsylvania was one of two states that congressional Republicans objected
to certifying after the 2020 election,
and Donald's did not rule out objecting again in
2025. If there are issues where states were of avoiding
election procedures that were passed by the legislature,
ignoring them out of hand,
or if there was some clear subversion that was going
on,
members of Congress have a responsibility to speak to that.
The 2024 presidential election may again come down to narrow
margins,
which increases the stakes for how campaigns utilize early and
absentee voting.
Early voting at first is about
convenience to voters, but then politicians start thinking,
well, maybe there's an advantage for my party in this.
And it's that's where we are today.
The most important thing that people can do
to help strengthen
confidence in elections is to stop lying about them.
People have chosen
the path they've chosen for partisan political reasons,
and it's really confidence under in our democracy that's paid
the price.
And Trump's rhetoric around early in absentee voting is likely
to play a central role again in
2024. It's going to be very interesting to see just
how much Trump's rhetoric changes.
And if he's still talking a lot about fraud,
that's definitely going to be,
you know, off message from what
the RNC is trying to do here.
We want to have elections,
by the way, all paper elections.
We want voter ID, and we want no mail in
ballots,
no mail in ballots.