The present tally of requests is a disappointing early signal for Republicans, who’ve invested in early voting efforts. The blame seemingly falls on the celebration’s personal presidential nominee, who has spent years attacking early voting and selling conspiracy theories round the years-old course of.
“The mail-in voting isn’t working. It’s corrupt,” Trump mentioned at a July rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
At one other rally that month in Johnston, Pennsylvania, Trump mentioned, “We want to go to paper ballots. We want to go to same-day voting. We want to go to citizenship papers. And we want to go to voter ID. It’s very simple. We want to get rid of mail-in voting.”
The voters Republicans want essentially the most have been following Trump’s lead as an alternative of responding to the celebration’s outreach efforts.
Tom Eddy, a Republican Occasion county chair in Erie County, Pennsylvania, informed NBC Information in April, that voters rejected mail-in ballots when he supplied it to them.
“Every one of them said either, ‘No, that’s not the right way to vote,’ or ‘Trump does not agree with it,’” Eddy mentioned.
A Pew ballot from Could confirmed that solely 37% of Republicans help early or absentee voting, a big decline from the 57% who backed the observe in 2018. Democrats had been much more supportive of early voting, with 82% in favor, nearly unchanged from the 83% who backed it six years in the past.
Along with Trump’s rhetoric, conservative media shops like Fox Information have additionally regularly promoted falsehoods about mail-in voting. Following its actions selling election-related conspiracy theories in 2020, Fox struck a $787 million payout settlement to voting companies firm Dominion Voting Techniques.
Fraud related to mail-in voting is extraordinarily uncommon and rhetoric selling claims of mail-in voter fraud are often related to efforts to suppress the vote.
Mixture polling of Pennsylvania has proven Vice President Kamala Harris with a small lead, and an AARP ballot launched Oct. 1, confirmed Harris polling within the state at 50% with seemingly voters, forward of Trump, who had help from 47% of respondents.
