Trump is embracing mail-in voting which is why Republicans are going to lose big in 2024

We can't do it like they do it

“Radical Democrats,” Trump said this week, “have used ballot harvesting to cancel out YOUR vote and walk away with elections that they NEVER should have won. But I’m doing something HUGE to fight back.” What’s he doing to fight back? “Our path forward is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots in every state we can.” Oh okay, it’s good to know Republicans are going to be curb-stomped in 2024. I prefer to have that sort of thing on the table and solidified as far in advance as possible.

We can’t “master the Democrats’ own game” of mail-in voting. You know why? Because it’s their game! They invented it. They made the rules and those are the rules we’ll be playing by. Whoever makes the rules almost always wins the game. Have you ever tried to win a make-believe game created by a toddler? You would think it would be easy but it’s next to impossible; they’re relentless and clever and the rules they make up are designed to steamroll you. Democrats designed the mail-in voting game in the same spirit of cheerful obduracy. Do you think when they created this system they said, “Now let’s make sure Republicans can use it just like we can?” Of course not, they’d be fools to do it that way. They designed it to bring about easy Democratic victories and to stymie Republican attempts at victory. And that’s just how it will go down if Republicans try and use it to their own advantages.

Beyond that, the Democratic machine just better at this sort of thing. They’re better and more adapt and more clever at dirty play like this. It’s just the way it is. They’ve had a profoundly sophisticated nationwide mechanism in place for decades to help them out: An army of tens of thousands of small organizations, local municipal workers, willing volunteers, vendors, businesses. They have a mainstream media that is comprehensively devoted to helping Democrats win elections. They have a massive portion of the population—and not just the Democratic voters—that have been thoroughly trained to see all Democratic machinations as legitimate and all Republican ones as suspicious and disreputable. They have a huge portion of the courts on their sides, ensuring that any suits brought against them for malfeasance are either decided favorably or (and this is more common) thrown out altogether.

All of this is how they are able to so effectively run a shoddy, laughably unsecure mail-in voting operation and get away with it. They’ve spent years building this up. Republicans have none of this and we can’t hope to match even a fraction of it in just a year and a half.

GOP voters are reluctant to do mail-in voting anyway and sufficient numbers of them are not going to start doing it because Donald Trump tells them to. Trump forgets that part of the fear of mail-in voting is that the people running it will not only add in votes favorable to Democrats but will also toss out the ones favorable to Republicans. However baseless this fear may or may not be, how exactly do you think you’re going to convince a huge portion of the population, in just 18 months’ time, that those concerns have been unfounded? “Don’t worry, it’s safe, we, uh, have some guys on the inside that will make sure your ballot gets counted?” Yeah that’ll do the trick.

The rule here is that which obtains in most war games: The only winning move is not to play. Rather than “harvesting ballots in every state we can,” just make ballot collection flat-out illegal. Outlaw drop boxes. Make mail-in voting mostly illegal except in highly extreme and unusual circumstances. Mandate that elections take place on Election Day: Fourteen hours, in-person, paper ballot, ID check required, boom, done. Democrats and media will claim that such a system is “tyranny” and “fascism” or whatever, but they hold elections this way in huge portions of the rest of the world, including most of Western Europe. Read about France’s medieval-sounding voting system here. It’s normal. And it’s not hard to imagine instituting such rules in the U.S., at least in state houses where Republicans hold control. Do this and you’ll see our elections put back on even keel, with Democrats no longer possessing a ghoulish advantage at the polls. Or we could try and “master the game” of “radical Democrats” and, you know, lose. Hmmmm.