Will GOP Ever Resolve Mail-In Ballot Issue?

Kari Lake is launching Arizona's largest ballot chasing operation ever, because not doing so would mean Republicans were continuing to play checkers while Democrats played chess. Turning Point along with Scott Pressler announced a similar $5 million Wisconsin effort and earlier President Trump urged conservatives to start getting people to mail in ballots this year.

This is a welcome change. As early as May 2020 we sounded the alarm that Republicans in states like Pennsylvania who had ALWAYS voted early by mail were being told not to do so and this would make it very hard for Trump and other Republicans to win.

The results were predictable, as detailed in this study. The number of Americans who voted by mail continued the increase from 8% in 1996 to 46% in 2020. Basically mail-in voting had become the first half of a football game, and Election Day voting is now the second half of the game.

In Pennsylvania President Trump won Election Day voting, or the second half, 65% to 34%. It was not enough as Joe Biden won the early mail-in vote 76% to 23%. In fact, Texas was the only of 15 competitive states in which Trump won the early mail-in vote.

The demographics that traditionally voted early by mail (rural voters, the elderly, work-a-holics) prior to being discouraged from doing so in 2020 lean more toward conservative candidates.

It’s really this simple: If conservatives want to keep up electorally, they do not need to embrace and love the current rules, but they do need to use the rules while they are in place rather than starting the second half of every football game (Election Day) trailing by several touchdowns.

An Election Day-only strategy can work just like the New England Patriots proved you can win if you fall behind 28-3 in the Super Bowl with their 34-28 victory. But the team that wins the first half of the game has won 43 Super Bowls and lost 10. (Four were tied at halftime.)

Now, this doesn’t mean we have no-excuse, free-for-all mail-in balloting as some states do. We noted in another Newsmax column that even liberal New York voters defeated no-excuse absentee voting.

Rather we need to insist that mail-in voting use the Utah model: require steps like a tight signature match for mial-in votes just like a tight voter ID law stops fraud in same-day voting.

As a deep-red, heavily rural state with sparse towns and cities spread throughout, Utah has spent the last decade developing its mail-in system to where, according to a Hinckley Institute poll, nearly 90% of voters in the state are "confident" to "very confident" in the integrity and accuracy of their election operations.

Utah showed that you do this with a steady rollout (not using COVID as an excuse to mail ballots to all names in a database like Nevada did), with it starting on a county-by-county basis, thorough research on best practices, and extremely tight safeguards and rules such as requiring signed affidavits and that ballots must be turned in prior to Election Day, as well as employing manual signature verification and ballot tracking programs.

Compare this to neighboring Nevada, where multiple ballots with the same signature have been accepted and long-gone relatives were raised from the dead to cast their ballot.

To provide more detail on the conservative statements urging mail-in vote efforts mentioned above:

1. Turning Point USA recently announced that, alongside activist Scott Pressler, they will be investing $5 million into mail-in voting ballot-chasing efforts in Wisconsin.
2. Former-gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake recently announced new ballot-chasing efforts in Arizona despite her past calls against mail-in voting, saying, “If it’s just a ballot that matters, then we can chase ballots, too. … We’ve (conservatives) been playing checkers, they’ve (liberals) been playing chess."
3. Former President Donald Trump has echoed similar remarks, saying in a recent fundraising email, “Our path forward is to MASTER the liberals’ own game of chasing ballots in every state we can. But that also means we need to start laying the foundation for victory RIGHT NOW.”

Not only will this shift produce results in the future, but it is already producing results now. While on leave from Take Back Our Republic Action, my team and I were able to elect the first Republican mayor in Shreveport, Louisiana, in this century thanks to not only our grassroots efforts but also our extensive mail-in voting ballot-chasing operation.

Because of this, we were able to win the early vote even in a 57% Black city to achieve this historic upset.

As Albert Einstein simply put it, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” It’s time to play chess.