The Trump-branded Republican Party is less interested in promoting voting by mail than in legal challenges aimed at voting systems.
In a victory for the extremist wing of the Republican Party, it looks like Donald Trump’s hand-picked leadership team at the Republican National Committee has officially scrapped the GOP’s plan to encourage early voting this election cycle. Instead, the party is taking steps to prioritize legal challenges to voting systems ahead of November.
As part of the layoffs and budget cuts carried out this week by the newly installed leadership team, they are shuttering a program dedicated to mail-in voting, according to The Washington Post. The significance, of course, is that Trump has pushed false claims that mail-in voting is rife with voter fraud since 2020, months before he lost the election to Joe Biden. Ever since the election, Trump has continued to spread conspiracy theories that mail-in voter fraud cost him that race. In reality, there’s ample evidence that allowing people to vote by mail doesn’t have a partisan effect (and if it does, data shows the impact appears to favor Republicans).
They have about 4 months during which they can do this (removals have to be done 90 days prior to an election). And they either have to have documentation supporting that the person is dead or has moved, or that person has to have missed two federal elections, been sent a letter about verifying their info, and the person has to have ignored that letter and missed another federal election (at which point the government is allowed to assume you are dead/moved). If they remove you in practically any other situation it violates the NVRA and it’s probably time for a lawsuit.