It kind of seems to me like conservatives are getting desperate after the midterms and are embracing some kooky ideas
I am seeing a lot of this going around after the GOP arguably crashed and burned during the 2022 midterms:
…and I got to say, this is kind of incredible to me. The idea that Republicans can and should effect some sort of decisive election rout on early voting and mail-in voting is, well, it seems like a bad idea. I think a lot of people are upset after the midterms and are looking for solutions and I have to say I do not think this is it.
I mean, yes, stipulated, the late Democratic voting apparatus is a pretty effective election machine. They lock in literally millions of votes well before Election Day; millions of voters, the majority of them Democrats, cast their ballot weeks or months ahead of the actual election and then forget about it. For the party whose voters embrace that sort of thing, it’s a tremendous advantage: You can basically write off a huge portion of the electorate months ahead of the rest of it. I mean, if someone casts a vote for you three months before the election, you don’t have to beg him for it anymore and you don’t have to worry he’s going to vote for the other guy if you screw up in between now and the election. It’s a very effective system and it’s almost certainly why John Fetterman is a senator today; hundreds of thousands of people had already voted for him before his one and only debate when it turned out he largely couldn’t speak in complete, coherent sentences.
But why shouldn’t Republicans get in on this action? Well, for a variety of reasons that honestly seem pretty obvious to me. This is a sub-par way to run elections, for one. Call me crazy, but “Democrats have figured out a way to degrade and diminish our elections and by golly we should do that too!” seems weak and pathetic. For another, this kind of operation almost certainly won’t translate well to the Republican base, at least not enough to make a difference. Republicans overwhelmingly prefer to vote in-person on Election Day. It’s safer, more secure, more traditional, more communal. Voting by mail seems to appeal to a large portion of the Democratic base: It feels more modern, maybe slightly more tech-y; during the pandemic it was presented as the “safer” option and that impulse has probably carried over; Democrats tend to care less about election security overall and so they will be less discomfited by an obviously less-secure election procedure. I think if you try and force this paradigm onto the Republican electorate you’re just going to set a bunch of money on fire and it’s not going to work.
Obviously the more viable option is for Republican-controlled statehouses to sharply restrict mail-in/absentee voting. This should actually be a relatively easy feat to accomplish, or at least certainly more so than trying to cram a Republican voting base into a system tailor-built for Democrats. Republicans should not have to make too hard of a case to get this done. I mean, look, we’ve had two major elections now with greatly expanded vote-by-mail options, and the sorry results of it are disgraceful and embarrassing and just patently insecure. Huge municipalities in the most advanced nation in the world are still counting votes from the midterm elections a week ago; election results swing wildly from one candidate to another over that time. This is the kind of stuff you see in third-world countries and immediately think, “Oh, that vote’s rigged.” It’s perfectly reasonable to have severe doubts about an election’s integrity when you see a state that takes seven days to count its votes even though it has millions and millions of dollars of high-tech election equipment, thousands of election workers, literal months of lead time. In no way at all is it wrong to look at this inexplicable SNAFU and have immediate and enduring doubts about the results.
All of which is to say that Republicans should be able to rein this in, at least if they just stay on-message enough. “Look, we’ve tried mass mail-in voting. It’s obviously a disaster. Multiple major U.S. governments can’t count their votes within a week after the polls close. People have to wait for days and days to find out if their candidate won; voting totals can literally flip overnight with massive ballot dumps that seem to come out of nowhere. This obviously and understandably raises major doubts about the integrity and security of our elections. This is bad for our country and completely unacceptable.” Abolish no-reason mail voting, sharply tighten the rules around the mail voting that’s allowed, ensure most ballots are cast strictly on Election Day: Boom, done. It’s basically what they do in France and they have election results the next morning—in a nation of 50 million voters. It’s entirely possible and doable.
The alternative is to try and affect a clumsy, surely-doomed-to-fail pivot to a Republican absentee voting model. The proposal itself is bad enough to be laughable. The GOP can be smart about this if they want or they can try and play the Democratic game and just lose completely, again and again. Knowing the GOP, my money’s on the latter, but I suppose they may have to lose at least one more major election to figure it out.