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Just 28% of Republicans support allowing any voter to cast a ballot by mail if they want to, compared with 84% of Democrats, according to a February study by the Pew Research Center.
Mindful of this trend, the Republican National Committee this year began a Bank Your Vote program encouraging early voting. In an interview with NBC News last month, Lara Trump, the new co-chair of the committee and Trump’s daughter-in-law, said, “We have to start encouraging Republican voters to do things like voting early, trust mail-in voting.”
Still, Trump has put the party in a difficult position. The new leadership at the RNC, handpicked by Trump and his allies, initially signaled that it would abandon Bank Your Vote before reversing course. Top officials at Turning Point continue to criticize voting by mail, even as they lead their new Chase the Vote effort.
“The threading the needle for us, the game that we have to play, that we have to figure out: How do we get a bunch of people who are deeply concerned about these processes that are being changed and manipulated to participate in those same processes?” Bowyer said in an interview, referring darkly to the unproven conservative theory that Democrats are deliberately changing election rules to benefit themselves. (Bowyer was one of Arizona’s fake electors in the 2020 election, a scheme that the state’s attorney general is now investigating, according to The Washington Post.)
‘Soul Searching’ Over a Republican Disadvantage
Election Day in 2022 was when Kirk realized things needed to change.
Walking into a polling place at a Phoenix church to proudly vote for Kari Lake and other Republicans, Kirk said, he was greeted by a 2-1/2-hour line caused mainly by malfunctioning machines. Other polling sites in the area had similar problems.
Lake ended up losing the race for governor to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, by about 17,000 votes. Roughly 19,000 more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail.
“That kind of started a lot of soul searching between our team,” Kirk said in an interview. “I asked the question, I said, ‘What could we have done better?’”
He added, referring to the weekslong period of early balloting, “We could have played better in Voting Month.”
That would seem to be a significant public shift from Kirk, who wrote an essay for Fox News in July 2020 calling mail voting a Democratic power grab and who repeatedly questioned the security of mail voting in social media posts around the 2020 election.
In the interview, Kirk stood by those sentiments. “There is understandable skepticism about filling in a precious ballot, which we take very seriously, and putting it into the mail,” he said, adding that conservatives were not fans of the Postal Service.
Still, Kirk says, Republicans should be aware that they have a “buffet line of voting options.”
In a memo sent to donors last year, Turning Point Action said it hoped to hire more than 500 full-time “ballot chasers” in Arizona and 350 in Wisconsin. If the group raises its entire goal of $108 million — officials said they had raised “tens of millions” but still had a ways to go —it plans to expand into Georgia and possibly Michigan.
A Mission to Change Republican Voting Habits
Powering the Turning Point effort is a vast data operation led by Matthew Martinez, the data director for Chase the Vote and a former field director for Lake’s campaign.
Martinez has set up shop in one of Turning Point’s cavernous rooms at its Phoenix headquarters, with 4-foot-by-6-foot whiteboards with maps of states, counties and cities speckled with handwritten numbers. He methodically carved up Arizona and Wisconsin by hand into his own precincts, wards and districts,identifying 400 to 600 low-propensity Republican votersin each precinct.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/inside-gop-plan-encourage-early-183028759.html