Republican officials nationwide disagree with Trump’s partisan arguments
On April 8, 2020, Trump asserted on Twitter, “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” A week earlier, Trump attacked vote-by-mail reforms proposed by congressional Democrats, saying, “They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Trump’s attempts to unify Republicans to oppose voting by mail have not yet succeeded. In part this is because voting by mail is not a recent occurrence: Republicans—especially at the state and local levels—have been part of a movement for decades to support mail-in balloting, according to former Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour. As experts have noted, “At its inception, vote-by-mail was championed by Republican and Democratic leaders alike. Washington’s former Republican secretary of state, Sam Reed, was for years the nation’s most prominent advocate for the reform.”