In a major reversal from his stance four years ago, former President Donald Trump and his campaign are making a push for absentee ballot and early voting.
Trump flips his 2020 stance, launches absentee ballot and early voting push https://t.co/MRWuaLAiI8
— Fox News (@FoxNews) June 5, 2024
On Tuesday, Trump’s 2024 campaign and the Republican National Committee announced they were launching a “Swamp The Vote USA” effort.
In a statement highlighting the importance of the effort, Trump stated, “Republicans must win and we will use every appropriate tool to beat the Democrats because they are destroying our country.”
Trump repeatedly condemned early in-person voting and mail-in balloting in the 2020 election, claiming that they paved the way for a massive election fraud that helped President Joe Biden become president.
But now, the Republican presidential candidate assured voters that their votes will be protected whether they “vote absentee, by mail, early in-person or on election day.”
“We make sure your ballot is secure and your voice is heard. We must swamp the radical Democrats with massive turnout. The way to win is to swamp them, if we swamp them with votes they can’t cheat. You need to make a plan, register, and vote any way possible. We have got to get your vote,” he said.
According to the Trump campaign, “Swamp The Vote USA is the successor to the RNC’s Bank Your Vote program,” which was launched a year ago under the Republican National Committee under previous chair Ronna McDaniel.
The new effort is championed as part of Trump Force 47, the recently announced campaign and the RNC’s neighbor-to-neighbor grassroots organizing program focused on “mobilizing highly-targeted voters in critical precincts across the battleground states and districts.”
Trump Force 47 will use “personalized voter contacts to generate new absentee or mail ballot registrations and early in-person voting commitments,” the campaign’s statement read.
In addition to standing against early voting in 2020, Trump has also spoken against it in recent months, including March and April. He also called it “largely corrupt” at a rally in New Jersey last month.
His reversal was caught by the Biden campaign, which did not miss the opportunity to blast him as a liar.
“Donald Trump told his supporters as recently as February that mail-in voting was ‘totally corrupt’ – last September he proposed eliminating mail-in-voting altogether. Trump has spent years saying early and mail in voting was ‘fraudulent,’ ‘cheating,’ and ‘crooked.’ Apparently his campaign feels otherwise. Trump should own up to the lies about voting and elections he’s been telling for years,” campaign spokesperson James Singer said to Fox News.