Once again, Donald Trump is trying to have it both ways: falsely claiming that Democrats will commit election fraud while also telling his own supporters to go … vote in the election. But unlike in 2020, Trump is now encouraging people to vote by mail, a voting method he has long criticized.
“Christians must register to VOTE now,” Trump posted on X on Monday, including a link to a website called Swamp the Vote, which is paid for by the Republican National Committee. The page includes a video of Trump telling viewers they “must use every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats. … Whether you vote early, absentee, by mail, or in person, we are going to protect the vote.”
This vote-by-mail push comes despite Trump’s lies about mail-in voting. Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, he called mail-in voting a “disaster” and falsely accused it of being “substantially fraudulent.”
However, Trump also pushed vote-by-mail in a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, telling Pennsylvanians the deadlines to request and return mail-in ballots in their state.
“The way you win is to swamp them,” Trump said in the video. “If we swamp them, they can’t cheat. It just doesn’t work out.”
So which is it? Is he saying that voting is rigged or that it’s secure? (Of course, in reality, it is secure, with no sign of widespread voter fraud.)
This year, Trump and the Republican Party are hedging their bets, priming their base for supposed “fraud” (i.e., Trump losing) amid polls that show a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. And so far? The base seems to be buying it. Republicans are more likely to trust Trump about election results than they are the government or news outlets, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts.
Worse, according to data from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, 19% of Republicans believe that if Trump loses, he should declare the results invalid and “do whatever it takes” to get into office. And while 12% of Democrats troublingly say the same thing about what Harris should do, only one of the two candidates has a history of trying to overturn election results to hold onto power.
The charged rhetoric and actions of Trump and his allies is what really threatens our elections. creating the chaos that is making our election system unstable. Election workers and officials have faced an onslaught of right-wing misinformation, harassment, and violence. It’s gotten so bad that this year election workers are preparing for Election Day with bulletproof glass and panic buttons, according to the Associated Press.
Recently, Republican voter-suppression efforts in Georgia largely failed, removing from the voting rolls only about 1% of the 63,000 voters they challenged this summer and fall. And on Friday, in an appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ show, far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia also claimed—without evidence, naturally—that a voter in Whitfield County, Georgia, had their vote changed by a Dominion Voting Systems machine. (Yes, the same Dominion that Fox News had to pay nearly $800 million after the network aired false claims about the company committing voter fraud.)
“This is exactly the kind of fraud we saw in 2020 and it cannot be tolerated,” Taylor Greene said in a post on X on Friday.
Meanwhile, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he’d seen no evidence of fraud and went so far as directly debunking Greene’s lie.
“What happened with Whitfield County was the lady thought she had pressed a certain, you know, selection, and then when she printed out the ballot, she … saw that, and so then she made them aware of it, and it got corrected,” Raffensperger said. “And then it got blown out of proportion by people that like to use, you know, Twitter and other forms of social media.”
Raffensperger also addressed Trump’s nonsensical claim that paper ballots aren’t widely used, telling a podcaster in September that one way to “solve” (nonexistent) voter fraud was to “go to paper ballots.”
“In Georgia, 100% of all the votes cast will be on a paper ballot,” Raffensperger said on CBS. “But actually, nationwide, it’s going to be over 96 to 97% of all voting in America will be on paper ballots.”
But of course, the persistent false claims of fraud serve to mobilize the MAGA base, which thrives on misinformation and fear.
