DENVER — President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign on Thursday called on top Republicans to drop lawsuits seeking to restrict aspects of mail-in voting as Donald Trump begins to embrace the method.
Trump has falsely claimed for years that voting by mail was rife with fraud, but his 2024 campaign this month began a program to encourage voting by mail when it suits people. It is part of Republicans’ effort to expand mail-in voting among their followers.
At the same time, the Republican National Committee, recently under the former president’s control, has done just that sued or joined in lawsuits trying to limit certain aspects of voting by mail. That includes laws in some states, including Nevada, that allow late-arriving ballots to be counted by mail as long as they are mailed before Election Day.
“If Donald Trump wants to finally acknowledge that voting by mail is a great option for voters to take advantage of this November, he should demand that the RNC and its MAGA allies drop all these lawsuits across the country,” says Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez. , said in a statement, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
Republicans said there is no contradiction between supporting mail-in voting and pushing to make voting more secure. In their Nevada challenges, they argued that the state’s procedures for counting ballots received after Election Day opened the door to potential fraud.
“Democrats are concerned with a very simple concept: We support voting by mail, but we also support safeguards to make voting by mail safe,” said Danielle Alvarez, spokeswoman for the RNC and the Trump campaign. “It’s really not hard: the left must stop attacking the foundation of our election system and accept that Americans disagree with their extreme efforts to make voting less secure.”
The Biden campaign noted that in the weeks before Trump announced a “Swamp the Vote” campaign to encourage mail-in voting, the RNC filed two lawsuits attacking that method in Nevada, a crucial swing state. One challenged Nevada’s — or any state’s — ability to do that accept ballots that arrive after Election Day; the second focused on Nevada’s acceptance of ballots without a postmark until three days after Election Day.
The lawsuit follows an RNC case being tried Mississippi ban of accepting ballots after Election Day, as well as in several other cases in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump’s lies about mail-in ballots were a focal point of his false claims that voter fraud cost him the 2020 election, a lie that helped spark the election January 6, 2021, attack at the US Capitol. Republicans have done just that ever since new restrictions added to mail ballots in different states.
Trump has also taken direct control of the RNC by appointing his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chairman together with a Republican from North Carolina who reiterated the former president’s position false claims of fraud in 2020.
Before Trump’s attacks, Republican voters were casting ballots at a pace similar to Democrats, but since 2020 they have fallen sharply behind. Many Republican operatives have done that expressed frustration to Trump’s criticism of seeing it as an advantage for campaigns to allow supporters to vote early.
That’s part of what pushed Trump to embrace voting by mail, even though it was a contradictory effort. He…still does falsely claims that voting fraud cost him re-election against Democrat Joe Biden.
