WSJ: Donald Trump Changes Tune on Mail-in Voting, Ballot Collection

T. Belman.  After years of fighting against electoral fraud in the courts, without much success, and election reform in the State legislatures, again, without success, Trump is left with no alternative.  And remember, these tactics are not mutually exclusive. He must do. both,

Col Macgregor in one of his videos, said about election fraud that  its not like you can pass federal law and correct the situation because according to the constitution, each state must set its own rules, That, compounded by RINOS, is the problem

After years of attacks on early voting, Trump follows other Republicans in suggesting party should embrace tactic

By Alex Leary and Eliza Collins, WSJ  15.2.23

Donald Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting helped chip away at GOP faith in early voting, polls show. PHOTO: GAELEN MORSE/REUTERS

After years of assailing early voting, Donald Trump is having a change of heart.

The 2024 presidential candidate remains critical of various forms of early voting, advisers say, but his campaign is nonetheless mounting an effort to pursue such votes after Democrats excelled at doing so in recent elections. His team is studying state laws governing absentee and mail-in voting as well as ballot collection, called “ballot harvesting” by critics, in which third parties gather and turn in votes, people familiar with the effort said.

It amounts to a significant shift for Mr. Trump and comes as GOP rivals, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, say the party squandered chances in recent elections by focusing too much on Election Day turnout.<

Mr. Trump highlighted the move in a fundraising email this week, saying, “The radical Democrats have used ballot harvesting to cancel out YOUR vote and walk away with elections that they NEVER should have won. But I’m doing something HUGE to fight back.”

What does the former president’s change of heart about ballot collection by third parties reveal to you? Join the conversation below.

The email added, “Our path forward is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots in every state we can. But that also means we need to start laying the foundation for victory RIGHT NOW.”

In December, Mr. Trump told Breitbart News that the GOP has no choice but to “live with the system that stinks,” while maintaining “a mail-in ballot will always be corrupt” and that Republicans should seek to change laws.

His criticism of mail-in voting, before and since his 2020 loss, helped chip away at GOP faith in early voting, polls show, and party strategists say that has contributed to election defeats, including in gubernatorial and Senate races in Arizona and Pennsylvania last November.

In 2020, roughly 60% of Democrats nationally voted by mail, compared with 30% of Republicans, after being about equal in 2016, according to Charles Stewart III, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

Fraud has happened with ballot collection and mail-in voting, “but usually it’s local and in small numbers,” Mr. Stewart told the Journal in December.

As the Trump campaign reorients, so too are some GOP officials in 2024 battleground states. In Michigan, for instance, the leading candidate for state Republican chair has called for “the biggest ballot-harvesting program this state has ever seen.”

Many national Republicans also say the party needs to use whatever legal avenues are available to chase votes and not be so reliant on Election Day. The Republican National Committee is studying the issue as part of its post-midterm election analysis.

“We simply have to beat them at this,” Blake Masters, the Arizona GOP candidate who lost to Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in a closely watched battleground race, said on Twitter in November.

Mr. Masters and other major statewide GOP candidates had pushed Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud and urged voters to show up in person on Election Day. Now Mr. Masters is part of an RNC panel reviewing the 2022 performance.

“If you want to win races, you have to play by the rules that are given to you. You can cry all you want about what the rules are, but if you want to change them you’ve got to win elections,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, who has made a focus of her tenure as the chairwoman of the California Republican Party bolstering the party’s ballot-collection efforts.

June 27, 2023 | 5 Comments »

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5 Comments / 5 Comments

  1. EvRe,

    Finally, we no longer have free and fair elections in the US. The winner is the one who is the best at fraud.

    This is true. Oregon voted Republican most of the time, until we adopted universal mail-in vothing. Since then, we have, mysteriously, consistently voted Democrat. Our voter rolls are ludicrously out of whack, but my county clerk refuses to accept corrections (I found several errors personally). The Republican problem here is at the top, and efforts to remedy it are at the grass roots.

    It appears that the CIA, who are world leaders at election interference and government overthrows, have decided to treat these once United States as foreign, enemy governments. We appeal to God in this matter; He’s the only one who can help us.

  2. The supposed election expert, Charles Stewart III “fraud….is local and in small numbers” got neither of those right. Fraud is both local and non-local and it is in huge numbers. Huge as in industrial sized numbers.

    We know that democrats add thousands of fake ballots to the voter rolls the day before the election and remove them the day after. We know that this occurs locally. We also know that as long as computers are used, there will always be the possibility of remote hacking of voting roll data bases from afar, with huge changes of vote counts possible.

    The RNC has refused the offer of FREE fractal computing help to pinpoint fake ballots in REAL TIME during the vote counting. That means the RNC is just as involved in fraud as the DNC.

    Finally, we no longer have free and fair elections in the US. The winner is the one who is the best at fraud. We know that the democrats now own the US government, so if conservatives are found to commit fraud at the ballot box, you can bet they will be sent to the gulag while China Joe and his buddies enjoy sipping their drinks from any of his four mansions.

  3. Glad I could help, Reuveni.

    This is a war against the Devil, who does not follow Queensbury rules. The victory will go to the one who gets back up one more time than he’s gone down — even if he has to use a walker to do so 🙂

  4. @Michael S, thanks for this info. I must have been hiding under the same stone.
    I wonder what the D response will be when the number of returned ballots is double or more than the number of eligible voters.

  5. Trump “changes tune????”

    What rock has WSJ been hiding under? President Trump has been saying this ever since the end of the mid-terms.