REVERSAL: Why Team Trump now approves of ballot harvesting and dropboxes
In 2020, Donald Trump railed against voting by mail, ballot dropboxes, and any voting method that didn’t involve appearing in person on election day.
Now that this position has helped Trump lose an election, and election denial has proven unfruitful for his party, they’re testing out a new position: pro-harvesting, and in favor of dropboxes, as long as they can choose the locations.
In an email to supporters, Trump’s PAC recently expressed support for ballot harvesting, reiterating his unsupported claim that Democrats are using the method to illegally collect votes, and declaring that if Republicans want to win, they’ll have to use the same tactic.
Ironically, the few scattered actual cases of voter fraud that have been caught are overwhelmingly right-wing, such as the Republican candidate’s wife who was charged with 52 felonies for filling out other people’s ballots for her husband.
While missives from a PAC aren’t necessarily penned by the candidate himself, Donald Trump Jr., in a podcast chat with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, confirmed that his father wants the GOP to embrace ballot harvesting and place dropboxes in places he feels will be favorable to conservative candidates.
Naturally, these include churches and Trump rallies.
The pair both claimed they’d prefer “single-day, paper ballots, [and] voter ID,” but agreed that their party has to win first, in order to have the power to take over how elections are carried out.
In the meantime, they told listeners, the GOP will have to fight to gain that control.
“We want dropboxes at church, we want them at Trump rallies, we want them everywhere. We’re going to put them everywhere, so, yeah, we will be doing all those mail-in ballots, going and collecting as many as we can,” said Congresswoman Greene.
You can witness their exchange below.
In his fundraising email last week, Trump declared that mail-in ballots “will always be corrupt,” but declared that the way for his party to win is “to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Earlier this month, Trump promoted the idea on his social media, reposting a message from alt-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, which also advocated for placing ballot collection boxes in churches.
Trump has been called out repeatedly for railing against mailed ballots while voting by mail himself.
Steph Bazzle covers politics and theocracy, always aiming for a world free from extremism and authoritarianism. Follow Steph on Twitter @imjustasteph.
