DENVER – President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign on Thursday called on top Republicans to drop litigation seeking to restrict aspects of mail-in voting now that Donald Trump has begun adopting the method.
For years, Trump falsely claimed that voting by mail was rife with fraud, but his 2024 campaign this month began a program to encourage voting by mail if it’s convenient for people. That’s it part of Republicans’ attempt to increase mail-in voting among his supporters.
At the same time, the Republican National Committee, recently under the control of the former president, sued or joined legal actions seeking to limit certain aspects of voting by mail. This includes laws in some states, including Nevada, that allow late-arriving mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are mailed by Election Day.
“If Donald Trump is serious about finally recognizing that voting by mail is a great option for voters to utilize in November, he should demand that the RNC and its MAGA allies withdraw every single one of these lawsuits nationwide,” said the Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez. , she said in a statement, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
Republicans said there is no contradiction between supporting voting by mail and suing to make it more secure. In their challenges in Nevada, they argued that the state’s procedures for counting mail ballots received after Election Day opened the door to potential fraud.
“Democrats are making fools of themselves about 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 not really difficult: the left should stop attacking the foundations of our electoral system and accept that Americans don’t agree with their extreme attempts to make voting less safe.”
The Biden campaign noted that in the weeks before Trump announced a “Swamp the Vote” campaign to encourage voting by mail, the RNC filed two lawsuits attacking that method in Nevada, a swing state. One challenged Nevada’s – and any state’s – ability to accept ballots that arrive after Election Day; the second targeted Nevada’s acceptance of mail-in ballots without a postmark for up to three days after Election Day.
The litigation follows an RNC case that seeks ban Mississippi from accepting mail ballots after Election Day, as well as several other cases in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
from Trump lies about mail-in ballots were a centerpiece of his False claims that electoral fraud cost him the 2020 elections, a falsehood that helped spur the January 6, 2021, attack at the US Capitol. Since then, Republicans added new restrictions to send mail-in ballots in multiple states.
Trump also took direct control of the RNC, appointing his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as its co-president together with a Republican from North Carolina which echoed the statement of the former president False claims of fraud in 2020.
Before Trump’s attacks, GOP voters voted by mail at rates comparable to Democrats, but since 2020 they have fallen sharply behind. Many Republican agents expressed frustration against criticism of Trump because it is seen as an advantage for campaigns to get supporters to vote early.
That’s part of what led Trump to embrace mail-in voting, although it was a mixed effort. He still falsely claims that electoral fraud cost him re-election against Democrat Joe Biden.
