By
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 something.)
But the end of the "Bank Your Vote" program isn’t the only sign the GOP is doubling down on its standard-bearer’s antidemocratic tendencies. The Post also reported:
[RNC Chief Operating Officer Chris] LaCivita is installing Christina Bobb — a former OAN reporter who has espoused false claims that the 2020 election was stolen — as senior counsel for election integrity. Bobb is the author of a book called “Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024” and promoted the audit of Arizona elections.
This appears to be a realization of the far right’s goal of focusing the Republican Party on election-related “lawfare,” that is legal challenges designed to restrict ballot access and undercut election systems in ways that make it harder to vote. Back in 2022, I reported that this vision was behind right-wing lawyer Harmeet Dhillon’s long-shot bid to become RNC chair. Dhillon insisted that the RNC needed to hire an army of lawyers to lob legal challenges ahead of the 2024 elections.
Nothing screams “We can’t win a majority of voters fairly” like prioritizing legal attacks on voting rights. But that’s precisely what the Trump-branded RNC is preparing to do. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and the current RNC co-chair, claimed “massive resources” will go to its so-called election integrity division.
All the more reason for Democrats to be on the lookout for antidemocratic election schemes this fall.