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).
Nonetheless, the Post reported that the “Bank Your Vote” program, which was designed to encourage Republicans to vote early, is over with:
A nationwide network of community outreach centers, once a fixture of the party’s efforts to attract minority voters, will be shuttered or refocused on get-out-the-vote efforts. The much heralded “Bank Your Vote” program, aimed at getting Republicans to vote early, will shift to a “Grow The Vote” program focused more on expanding the party’s outreach to less likely Trump voters.
Former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel was a staunch supporter of the “Bank Your Vote” program, which may be one of the many reasons she was ousted. The “Grow the Vote” program appears to be a way for Republicans to continue their mission of getting “low information, low propensity voters” — specifically those who don’t typically vote — to the polls this November. (It’s like Republicans have just rediscovered voter outreach or…
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