-They lie.
And these mail-in ballots,
these mail-in ballots are a disgrace and they know it.
[crowd booing]
-Ahead of the 2020 election,
Donald Trump was unequivocal about mail-in voting.
-There's a lot of dishonesty going along with mail-in voting.
There is no way you can go through a mail-in vote
without massive cheating.
They're being sold. They're being dumped in rivers.
This is a horrible thing for our country.
-But after multiple disappointing elections,
Trump and Republicans are now touting
early and absentee voting.
-Republicans must compete using every lawful means to win.
That means swamping the left with mail-in votes,
early votes and Election Day votes.
-And in an election that is expected to be close yet again,
the number of people who vote early and absentee
could decide the outcome.
Trump himself voted absentee repeatedly over the years
before demonizing it in 2020.
-President Trump clearly viewed early voting
as a strategic disadvantage to his chances of winning,
and so therefore, he spent the bulk of the year
talking about voter fraud
before most Americans had even cast ballots.
-Two months after Trump lost the White House,
Republicans lost the Senate.
-Rural, white voters stayed home in larger numbers
than other demographic slices,
and so that tells you that there was this very real impact
of the rhetoric criticizing absentee voting, early voting.
-By 2022, some Republicans were still warning voters
against early voting.
-Vote in person.
Don't try to mail a ballot in if you've got early voting,
because it's not going to count.
-If you want honest elections, it's very simple --
same-day voting.
-That November, Democrats again
outperformed historic trends in the midterm elections,
though not all Republicans blame Trump's rhetoric.
-I would argue it's suppression of information.
That's the thing that really matters
when it comes to elections,
not the rhetoric of President Trump
on mail-in balloting.
-Ahead of the 2020 and 2022 elections,
a majority of Republican voters were not confident
that mail votes would be counted accurately.
And in both elections, Democratic voters
voted by mail at a higher rate than Republicans.
-Any person who's ever worked on a campaign
knows that it's effective to bank those votes
through early voting, and it frees up your resources.
-And after the 2022 midterms,
Republicans launched a new effort to do just that.
-To win close elections, we need to close the gap
on pre-election day voting.
That's why we're launching the Bank Your Vote initiative.
-Republicans face two key challenges
headed into the 2024 election -- low confidence
among their supporters in early and absentee voting,
and new state laws that restricted
some ways that voters vote.
-Some states have restricted early voting hours.
Some states have made it more difficult to vote by mail.
The challenge that Republicans face now
is preventing those restrictions from affecting their voters.
-Congressman Byron Donalds is the co-chair of
the new RNC Initiative, Bank Your Vote.
-If you look at any election,
turnout, more than anything else,
is the driver of election success.
What we're really trying to do is get Republican voters
to start returning those ballots early.
-Citizens see these ballots going out and coming in,
and they need to have some assurance
that there are protections and safeguards around that process.
-Derek Lyons is the president
and CEO of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections,
a new Republican-led group that has spearheaded lawsuits
often aimed at tightening election laws,
including around early and absentee voting.
-I think going back a couple of cycles,
one thing we saw in 2020
was sort of a lot of last-minute changes
to the way the elections in this country are run,
massive expansion of mail-in balloting on the fly,
in many instances.
-There was a claim by the Republicans
who passed these laws that these laws
were meant simply to address fraud.
Privately, the same Republicans authoring some of these bills
said, "Look, I've got to do something.
My constituents are clamoring for new restrictions,
because they believe there's widespread fraud."
-It's really people seeking to undermine confidence
in those results who are to blame,
despite the fact that they've never been more safe and secure.
-Al Schmidt helped oversee the 2020 election in Philadelphia
as a Republican city commissioner.
-I was a Republican election commissioner in Philadelphia.
I assure you, there was a lot of attention paid
to making sure that elections were run
in a free and fair and safe and secure way.
-Pennsylvania was one of two states
that congressional Republicans
objected to certifying after the 2020 election,
and Donalds did not rule out objecting again in 2025.
-If there are issues where states were avoiding
election procedures that were passed by the legislature,
ignoring them out of hand,
or if there were some clear subversion that was going on,
members of Congress have a responsibility to speak to that.
-The 2024 presidential election may again
come down to narrow margins, which increases the stakes
for how campaigns utilize early and absentee voting.
-Early voting at first is about
convenience to voters,
but then politicians start thinking,
"Well, maybe there's an advantage for my party in this,"
and that's where we are today.
-The most important thing that people can do
to help strengthen confidence in elections
is to stop lying about them.
People have chosen
the path they've chosen for partisan political reasons,
and it's really confidence in our democracy
that's paid the price.
-And Trump's rhetoric around early and absentee voting
is likely to play a central role again in 2024.
-It's going to be very interesting to see
just how much Trump's rhetoric changes,
and if he's still talking a lot about fraud,
that's definitely going to be, you know, off-message
from what the RNC is trying to do here.
-We want to have elections, by the way,
all paper elections.
We want voter ID,
and we want no mail-in ballots, no mail-in ballots.