Marta Moehring voted in Nebraska’s Republican primary on Tuesday the way she would have preferred – in person at her polling place in West Omaha.
She didn’t even consider using the state’s no-excuse absentee voting process. In fact, she would prefer to eliminate mail-in voting altogether. She believes fraudulent mail-in ballots cost former President Donald Trump a second term in 2020.
“I generally don’t trust it,” said the 62-year-old Möhring. “I don’t think they’re being counted properly.”
But now Republican officials — sometimes even Trump — are encouraging voters like Möhring to cast their votes by mail. The GOP has launched an attempt to, in the words of one official, “correct the narrative” on mail-in voting and get those turned off by Trump to reconsider for this year’s election.
The push is a notable shift for a party that has amplified gloomy rumors about mail-in ballots to explain Trump’s defeat in 2020, but it is also seen as a necessary course correction for an election this year that is likely to be decided by a razor-thin majority Handful of swing states.
“We need to use these mail-in ballots immediately for the people who can’t be there on Election Day,” Rep. Scott Perry, one of Trump’s strongest allies in Congress in his push to overturn the 2020 election, said at a news conference at his conservative convention Home state of Pennsylvania.
Republicans used to vote by mail at least as often as Democrats, but Trump changed the animated in 2020. Months before the presidential election began, he began preemptively arguing that mail voting was bad.
That worried GOP strategists, who viewed mail-in voting as a campaign advantage because it allows them to “bank” unreliable votes before Election Day and reduces the risk of a dip in turnout due to bad weather or other unpredictable factors in the election. 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 significantly more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.
The trend continued into 2022 and the costs were clearly evident in Arizona.
Three Republican frontrunners, repeating Trump’s lies about the unreliability of mail-in ballots, encouraged their supporters to vote in person on Election Day. Voting machine breakdowns occurred at a third of polling stations in the state’s most populous county that day, leading to huge lines and leaving some would-be voters frustrated.
The top three Republicans all lost, falling compact by 17,000 votes in the governor’s race and 500 votes compact in the attorney general race.
This time, Republicans say they won’t risk leaving ballots behind. Trump’s hand-picked chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, has vowed to employ all possible legal voting methods to boost voter turnout, which Trump has falsely blamed for his 2020 defeat, including so-called “ballot harvesting” – the election People cast mail-in ballots on behalf of other voters.
“This election cycle, Republicans will beat Democrats at their own game, using every legal tactic at our disposal based on each state’s rules,” 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 sporadic voters in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. This includes offering postal voting as a way to make voting easier, said spokesman Andrew Kolvet.
“We would be happy if the elections took place as before,” said Kolvet. “We can spend our time complaining about it, or we can shift gears and play by the rules that Democrats, or mostly Democrats, have applied.”
Even Trump himself has begun to recommend mail-in voting, although he often criticizes it at campaign events and blames it for his defeat in 2020. The RNC also continues to file lawsuits across the country challenging various aspects of mail-in voting.
Still, Trump recorded a compact video telling his supporters that “mail-in voting, early voting and voting on Election Day are all good options.”
A recent push to publicize mail-in voting came during Pennsylvania’s primary election last month, when the Republican State Legislative Committee joined forces with a committee supporting the party’s Senate candidate and the state GOP. The goal, said RSLC political director Max Docksey, is to “correct Republican voters’ narrative on mail-in voting.”
The effort was inspired by what the RSLC viewed as a successful attempt to enhance mail-in voting among Republicans in the fight for control of the Virginia Legislature in 2023, a battle that Democrats ultimately won.
The group mailed absentee ballot applications to 1.5 million GOP voters, sent 475,000 text messages encouraging absentee voting and touted the benefits of voting by mail at party meetings.
But at the same time, Pennsylvania Republicans have sued to force the state’s mail-in ballots to be counted at polling places rather than county election offices, which have the equipment and space to do the job. This is one of many lawsuits brought by Republicans against mail-in voting across the country since 2020.
The conflicting messages could make it challenging to quickly reverse the decline in mail voting among Republicans.
In Pennsylvania, Republican activists were pleased with their effort, which they said resulted in them putting nearly twice as many voters on the state’s mail-in ballot list as Democrats did during the primary. However, according to the State Department, the overall share of mail-in ballots sent by Republicans in Pennsylvania remained about the same as in 2020, at just a quarter of the total ballots.
Bill Bretz, chairman of the Westmoreland County Republican Party in the western part of the state, said he has seen voters in his conservative area slowly but steadily adjust to voting by mail.
“People understand the consequences of this election,” he said. “There is a lot of support for voting using all available methods, and the specter of mail-in voting is starting to fade.”
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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.
