The Trump voter fraud paradox
Two ways his rhetoric is hoisting him on his own petard
Friends,
After making more than three years of unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, Trump is now warning of an even bigger theft in 2024.
But the tactic will backfire if enough potential Trump voters decide there’s no point in voting because the game is already rigged against them.
What’s Trump’s answer to this paradox? “We want a landslide,” Trump said at a recent rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. “We have to win so that it’s too big to rig.”
Trump has begun using the “too big to rig” phrase at campaign rallies in recent weeks to get his supporters to turn out in even larger numbers.
Yet it’s far from clear the “too big to rig” tactic will generate enough Trump votes to compensate for all the Trump voters who will stay home because Trump has made them so cynical about voter fraud that they assume there’s no point in voting.
I’m not at all upset about this. In fact, I applaud it. I want Trump to do whatever he can possibly do to make his followers cynical about voting.
A similar paradox is haunting Trump’s repeated argument that Republican-controlled states could better secure their elections by insisting on single-day, in-person voting, with identification checks.
But early voting and mail-in ballots appeal to a growing portion of the electorate — Republicans as well as Democrats. In fact, older people trend more Republican, and they’re the ones particularly attracted to early and mail-in voting.
In 2020, Republicans fell far behind Democrats on those sorts of turnout initiatives, largely because Trump derided them as ripe for fraud. Some 60 percent of Democratic voters chose to vote by mail, while only 32 percent of Republicans did so, according to a 2021 report from the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
Yet Trump is still at it. “If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud,” he said last month in a town hall hosted by Fox News.
Just as Trump’s repeated claims of election fraud may discourage Republican voters from participating in the 2024 election, his repeated insistence that early and mail-in voting invites fraud could have a similar negative effect.
So let’s hope Trump keeps at it.
Remember, everything he and the Republicans (sic) say is a projection. The only voter fraud are Republican state officials suppressing the vote and gerrymandering the voter rolls. The entire NYC current trial is about election tampering not hush money. Projections!
I think I rank as old - I'm 91 - and I've vote by mail since 1992. At first because I was angry with the elections office in the California County where I lived at the time. They moved the voting place from 2 miles from where I lived to 15 miles away.
Once started however, I liked the simplicity, I can sit comfortably, with the voter guide in front of me for the many propositions and mark my ballot leisurely. I usually mail my ballot the next day. Early on we had to pay postage and we hoped our ballot was received and counted.
Now in California, every registered voter receives a ballot in the mail, at least 30 days before election day. Postage is free. And we have Ballot Trax - an online system that tells us when the ballot was mailed to us, when it was received at the County office, AND when it has been counted.
Oh, and I'm liberal progressive. The first thing I did after being sworn in as a Naturalized citizen, was register to vote as a Democrat in February 1967. I also converted both my first and second husbands from Republican to Democrat. All my children were Democrats. And my living grandchildren are Democrats. All my grandchildren vote, because Grandma says so.