Marta Moehring voted the way she prefers in Nebraska’s Republican primary on Tuesday — in person at her polling place in west Omaha.
She didn’t even consider taking advantage of the state’s no-excuse mail voting process. In fact, she would prefer to do away with mail-in voting altogether. She is convinced that fraudulently sent ballots cost the former president donald trump a second term in 2020.
“I don’t trust it in general,” Moehring, 62, said. “I don’t think they are counted correctly.”
But now Republican officials — sometimes even Trump — are encouraging voters like Moehring to vote by mail. The Republican Party has launched an effort to, in the words of one official, “correct the narrative” about voting by mail and make those who were turned off for this for Trump to reconsider for this year’s election.
The push is a marked shift for a party that amplified dark rumors about mail-in ballots to explain Trump’s loss in 2020but it is also seen as a necessary course correction for an election this year that will likely be decided by razor-thin margins in a handful of swing states.
“We have to use these mail-in ballots for people who can’t get there on Election Day,” Rep. Scott Perryone of Trump’s strongest allies in Congress in his effort to annul the 2020 elections, he said at a conservative gathering in his home state of Pennsylvania.
Republicans were once at least as likely as Democrats to vote by mail, but Trump changed the dynamic in 2020. He preemptively began to argue that mail-in voting was bad months before voting began in the presidential race.
This alarmed GOP strategists, who saw voting by mail as an advantage in campaigns because it allows them to “hoard” unreliable votes before Election Day and reduces the risk of a drop in voter turnout due to bad weather or other unpredictable factors at the polls. Trump’s own campaign tried to convince Republicans to vote by mail, but his voters listened to the then president. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats were much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.
The trend continued into 2022 and its costs were clearly illustrated in Arizona.
Three high-profile Republican candidates who echoed Trump’s lies about the unreliability of mail-in ballots encouraged their supporters vote in person on election day. A voting machine breakdown that day at a third of the polling places in the state’s most populous county led to long lines and some would-be voters leaving in frustration.
All three top Republicans lost, including 17,000 fewer votes in the governor’s race and 500 fewer votes in the attorney general race.
This time, Republicans say they won’t take any chances leaving ballots behind. Trump’s handpicked chairman of the Republican National Committee, his daughter-in-law Lara Trumppromised to adopt all kinds of legal election methods to increase turnout that Trump falsely blamed for his 2020 defeat, including so-called “ballot harvesting” — allowing people to drop off mail-in ballots on behalf of other voters.
“In this election cycle, Republicans will beat Democrats at their own game, taking advantage of every legal tactic at our disposal based on the rules of each state,” Lara Trump said in an interview with the Associated Press.
Turning Point Action, a prominent pro-Trump group, is launching a $100 million campaign to reach infrequent voters in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. This will include offering voting by mail as a way to make voting easier, spokesman Andrew Kolvet said.
“We would love for the elections to be conducted as they were before,” Kolvet said. “We can spend our time complaining about this, or we can take action and follow the rules that Democrats, or largely Democrats, used.”
Even Trump himself has begun recommending mail-in voting, though he frequently criticizes it during campaign events and blames it for his 2020 defeat. to take legal action against various aspects of mail-in voting across the country.
However, Trump recorded a short video telling his supporters that “absentee voting, early voting and Election Day voting are all good options.”
A recent effort to publicize mail-in voting took place over the past month Pennsylvania Primary, when the Republican State Legislative Committee joined a committee supporting the party’s Senate candidate and the state Republican Party. The goal, said RSLC political director Max Docksey, was to “correct the narrative among Republican voters about voting by mail.”
The effort was inspired by what the RSLC considered a successful effort to increase mail-in voting among Republicans in the battle for control of the Virginia Legislature in 2023, a fight that ultimately won by Democrats.
The group sent vote-by-mail applications to 1.5 million Republican voters, sent 475,000 text messages encouraging voting by mail and touted the benefits of voting by mail at party meetings.
But at the same time, Pennsylvania Republicans sued force the state’s mail-in ballots to be counted at polling places rather than at county election offices, which have the equipment and space to do the job. lawsuits targeting mail-in voting filed by Republicans nationwide since 2020.
The mixed messages could make it difficult to quickly reverse the decline in mail-in voting among Republicans.
In Pennsylvania, Republican operatives were pleased with their effort, which they said led them to add nearly twice as many voters to the state’s vote-by-mail list as Democrats did during the primary. But the overall share of Pennsylvania mail ballots sent in by Republicans remained roughly the same as in 2020, at just a quarter of total ballots, according to data from the secretary of state’s office.
Bill Bretz, chairman of the Westmoreland County Republican Party in the western part of the state, said he has noticed voters in his conservative area slowly but steadily warming up to voting by mail.
“People understand the consequences of this election,” he said. “There is a lot of support for voting by any method available, and the bogeyman of voting by mail is starting to disappear.”
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Riccardi reported from Denver and Beck from Omaha, Nebraska. Associated Press writers Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Martha Mendoza in Santa Cruz, California, and Leah Willingham in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed to this report.
