The Pa. GOP is desperate to fix the perception issue over mail voting

Manning a vote-by-mail booth earlier this month at a gathering of conservatives in Camp Hill, Pa., beleaguered Arnaud Armstrong had a difficult message for his fellow Pennsylvania Republicans.

They can embrace mail voting or they can keep losing elections.

“Enough is enough,” said Armstrong, the executive director of Win Again PAC, a group trying to break Democrats’ “mail-in monopoly” by persuading GOP voters to cast ballots by mail. “The Democrats are on the field scoring points while Republicans are in the locker room waiting for the game to start.”

Armstrong, a speaker at the recent Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, said he’s been trying tirelessly to get out the word that mail ballots need not be feared. But his voice is being drowned out by that of his party’s leader.

“Any time the mail is involved, you’re going to have cheating,” former President Donald Trump falsely claimed during an interview last month. “It’s too bad people don’t say it.”

There’s a growing sense the former president is working against his own cause, helping to suppress the very votes he needs. He did it in 2020 — and he’s still doing it.

This past weekend at his rally in Schnecksville, Trump touted same-day voting and repeated his false claims about his 2020 loss in Pennsylvania, which was driven by President Joe Biden’s stronger performance on mail ballots.

“Remember we won Pennsylvania and we were up like hundreds of thousands of votes and then all of a sudden, wha? We all know what happened,” Trump said.

Despite Trump’s attacks, mail ballots will continue to be widely used in Pennsylvania. More than 876,000 voters statewide have requested mail ballots for the April 23 primary as of Monday, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt told reporters. Voters can request one for the primary until Tuesday at 5 p.m.

Republicans in Pennsylvania aren’t contradicting Trump directly, but they are increasingly trying to sway his potential voters to ignore their fears and embrace the method, which studies consistently show is secure.

In a recent direct appeal on X, formerly Twitter, 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano wrote, “Whatever we think of mail in votes is mute [sic] at this point. If we want to win state and federal elections, then we will need to likewise use mail in ballots. Order yours soon. Time is running out.”

Similarly, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry (R., Pa.) in a speech at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference made it clear he’s not a fan of mail voting, but that Republicans have little choice: “We have to beat them [Democrats] at their own game.”

These messages from prominent Trump allies in the state encouraging Republicans to vote by mail — even begrudgingly — could be crucial in closing the party’s gap.

“If a trusted community leader encourages voting by mail, and votes by mail themselves, it will create a perception of trust for this system,” said Matt Zupon, a member of the Young Republicans group in Mechanicsburg.

To push acceptance of mail voting among Republicans in Pennsylvania, election groups including the Sentinel Action Fund, the Republican State Leadership Committee PAC, and Keystone Renewal PAC announced the launch of an effort to build a mail voting infrastructure last month, estimated to cost around $10 million. The effort will look to entice unlikely voters to vote by mail.

Meanwhile, local organizations such as the Warrington Township Republican Committee will be working to convince those who don’t normally go to the polls to try mail voting, said Joann Baer, committee chairwoman.

“We have to get the word out — face-to-face, through social media, or direct mail,” she said. “It’s time.”

The 2020 election, falling in the midst of the pandemic, was the first presidential contest in Pennsylvania that featured widespread mail voting — though absentee ballots have a long history in the state.

Many Democrats were apprehensive about going to the polls — either because they feared for their health, “or because they believed they were doing something civically responsible by not going into crowded polling places,” said Guy Ciarrocchi, a senior fellow with the conservative, Harrisburg-based Commonwealth Foundation, who wrote a commentary for Politico last year titled, “Mail-in Voting is Killing Us.”

Many Republicans wanted to cast their ballots in person to show they didn’t fear COVID-19, and to fight what many perceived as “overly restrictive, unnecessary mandates,” Ciarrocchi wrote in his article.

The result: Biden received 1,995,691 mail votes to Trump’s 595,438, according to election records.

That huge margin, said Berwood Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall, “was then used by Trump as a way to say something nefarious was going on, particularly in Philadelphia.”

No fraud was found in mail voting. But confusion occurred when Trump’s early election night lead evaporated. Republicans said they couldn’t understand how so formidable an advantage could be overcome without some kind of duplicity influencing events.

That was the “overnight blue shift” at work, Armstrong said.

Voting on Election Day, Republicans had most of their ballots tallied by around 11 p.m. But the Democratic mail votes, which were counted overnight, pushed Biden ahead by daybreak.

“People didn’t know what was happening when they woke up,” Armstrong said. “That created enormous distrust of mail-in voting, particularly in Pennsylvania, where it brought concern.”

But those concerns stem from confusion over the counting process rather than a security issue.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit that aids in the legislative process nationwide, has declared mail voting “safe” and “reliable.” And the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, reported that “multiple analyses have shown that it is more likely that someone will be struck by lightning than commit mail ballot fraud.”

Even research from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has criticized mail voting, found just 12 instances of fraud in mail and absentee ballots in all of Pennsylvania between 1994 and 2022, out of millions of votes cast.

In many other states, mail voting isn’t unusual. And Democrats nationwide don’t necessarily vote by mail more often than Republicans, research by the Brennan Center shows. In fact, it’s often used by key Republican voting blocs.

Convenient mail voting was used more frequently by older voters of both parties in the 2016 presidential election in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin, according to the Brennan Center.

Similarly, the availability of mail voting also appears to have increased turnout in rural areas with distant polling places, according to Secure Democracy USA, a nonpartisan organization that works to build confidence in our elections and improve voter access.

The lagging rate of GOP mail voting in Pennsylvania appears to be Trump-manufactured, said Stephen Medvic, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College.

“Trump sabotages mail-in voting for Republicans by sowing seeds of doubt. It’s a strategic error, but it doesn’t imply there are problems with mail-in voting itself,” he said.

Staff writer Katie Bernard contributed to this article.