The GOP Is Engaged in an Eleventh-Hour Effort to Change Mail-In Voting Rules

Part of the Series

Voting Wrongs

With the election less than one month away, the Republican Party is engaged in an unprecedented 11th-hour effort to change the way mail-in votes are processed.

Last year in Mississippi, the party filed suit against a state law allowing ballots that are postmarked by Election Day to arrive — and be counted — up to five days after the election. The case was dismissed, but the GOP appealed. On September 24, the court of appeals began hearing their arguments. If the lawsuit wins, it will impact the 17 other states around the country, plus Washington, D.C., that also allow for mail-in ballots to arrive in the days following the election. Voting advocacy groups fear this would disproportionately impact Democratic vote counts, since Democrats are more likely than Republicans to mail in their ballots.

A similar lawsuit was filed earlier this year in the state of Nevada, where voters rely heavily on vote-by-mail, and where the election is likely to come down to the wire. And although the courts ended up tossing that suit and allowing these late-arriving ballots to be counted, the GOP has appealed the ruling.

In another swing state, Arizona, where for more than 30 years a large percentage of the electorate has cast votes by mail, state legislators tried earlier this year to pass legislation that would have blocked many residents’ access to mail-in voting. The push did not succeed, but it was indicative of the lengths to which the modern GOP is willing to go to make it harder for ordinary people to vote.

In swing states such as Pennsylvania, the GOP is pushing courts to force states not to count mail-in ballots that arrive in time but for which the voter forgot to write the date on the outside of the sealed envelope.

The GOP has also looked, with mixed success, for ways in other swing states to exclude mail-in ballot forms on which witnesses haven’t entered their full addresses or on which birth dates haven’t been filled in, as well as ballots whose inner-secrecy envelopes aren’t fully sealed, and so on. In most instances, according to voting rights groups, these challenges have little to do with the actual integrity of the vote and everything to do with using technicalities to disenfranchise voters.

The GOP’s animosity toward vote-by-mail systems dates to the pandemic election of 2020. Despite Trump repeatedly casting doubt on the integrity of the election process, close to half of votes cast were mail-in-ballots, according to data generated by MIT researchers. In the years since then, despite some within Trump’s orbit urging him to embrace mail-in voting and to encourage his supporters to use this tool of democracy, the MAGA movement has remained broadly hostile to the method of voting.

Earlier this year, Trump seemed to come to a brief détente with the mail-in voting process, even urging his supporters to use it. But the truce didn’t last. Recently, he began attacking the U.S. Postal Service and — despite the postmaster general being a Trump appointee who, in 2020, some Democrats accused of deliberately slowing down delivery of ballots — has lambasted it for its inefficiency and for “maybe purposely” losing mail-in ballots. And last month, Trump claimed, again without providing any proof, that one in five mail-in votes in Pennsylvania were fraudulent.

These challenges have little to do with the actual integrity of the vote and everything to do with using technicalities to disenfranchise voters.

The Brennan Center for Justice reports that 43 states, including the crucial swing state of Michigan, now allow election workers to start tabulating mail-in ballots before Election Day. It is a change that members of the Trump team also oppose; they want to require that the ballots have been received by closing time on Election Day, but at the same time, they don’t want those votes counted early — and they want to reserve the right to demand that states release vote tallies quickly on Election Day (as Trump demanded in 2020), despite the fact that those mail-in ballots won’t have been completely tallied yet. As in 2020, the goal seems to be to present an illusion that Trump has built up an insurmountable lead, and then to challenge concentrations of Democratic votes in the mail-in vote totals that are subsequently tallied.

This blizzard of misleading claims and often contradictory demands on election workers could cumulatively sow doubt in the minds of Trump supporters if he ends up losing another presidential election and would likely seed the ground for a full court legal and political effort to overturn the results.

Shamefully, the GOP is going along with this nonsense, already becoming a party to roughly 120 lawsuits around the country challenging the vote-by-mail process and other aspects of local and state voting and vote-count systems.

In 2020, according to an analysis by The Washington Post, more than 150,000 legally cast mail-in ballots were held up in U.S. Postal Service sorting facilities after Election Day. Had the GOP’s efforts to prevent those votes from being counted borne fruit, it’s certainly possible that in some key states the results would have been different.

Fast forward four years, and the GOP’s efforts could, if successful, tip the scales against the Democrats. The GOP is throwing spaghetti at the wall with these lawsuits, knowing that most will go nowhere, but hoping that enough will gain traction to cause an unholy mess in at least some swing states.

And Trump? He continues to rail against his perceived enemies in the ranks of election workers, and at supposed deep state conspiracists whom he baselessly accuses of using vote-by-mail as a tool to deprive him of what he sees as his inevitable victory. He has talked of prosecuting and imprisoning elections officials and has told his followers that fraudsters will “move” votes from one candidate to another.

There’s a month left until the election. A more mainstream candidate would, at this point, be attempting to bolster his or her own political selling points. Trump, by contrast, is seeking to further corrode faith in the democratic infrastructure itself. It’s impossible to overstate just how dangerous these moves are in a heavily armed country where a growing percentage of the population tell pollsters that political violence is justifiable in certain circumstances and where a growing proportion of the GOP base no longer has confidence in the validity of election outcomes.