The New Yorker:

Donald Trump has spent years arguing that mail-in voting is fraudulent and corrupt. Now the Republican National Committee, which sees mail-in voting as essential, must persuade his base to embrace it.

By Antonia Hitchens

Last week, while Trump sat in a courtroom in downtown Manhattan, and Biden campaigned in Scranton by bringing reporters to see his childhood home, several dozen members of Pennsylvania’s Bucks County G.O.P. met for a hot-dog party at the American Legion post in Doylestown. Scott Presler, a maga activist and former leader of Gays for Trump, who has been travelling the country registering voters—and encouraging them to vote early—pulled his waist-length brown hair into a ponytail and took the microphone from a local plumber who was singing rock covers at the front of the room. “I use this term loosely, loosely, but Joe Biden ‘won’ by eighty thousand votes in Pennsylvania in 2020,” Presler said, making air quotes with his fingers. “There’s no do-over in this country. If we only vote on one day in 2024, Joe Biden will be President.”

The crowd sipped canned wine and hard seltzer. “There are more than eighty thousand truckers in Pennsylvania,” Presler went on. “They’re hard at work on Election Day, hauling rigs so our stores have food. If they have mail-in ballots, we have the election.”

The theme of the evening’s festivities was “secure early voting.” Belief in election fraud has taken over much of the Republican mainstream; so has a skepticism of all forms of early voting, particularly mail-in voting. “Any time the mail is involved, you’re going to have cheating,” Trump said recently, in conversation with Nigel Farage. After Election Day in 2020, while votes were still being counted in Pennsylvania, Trump sent Rudy Giuliani to Philadelphia to insist that remaining mail-in ballots be thrown out; the Trump campaign later filed a lawsuit to either invalidate those ballots or prevent the state from certifying the election. (“Get rid of the ballots,” Trump had suggested, at a press briefing in September.) Presler’s rebuttal to this line of thinking: “What if we have everybody vote on one day, and I’m a Democrat, and I want to cause shenanigans? What if all of a sudden we run out of paper ballots on November 5, 2024? Democrats will have already voted, mail-in voted, early voted, done legal ballot chasing, and we’ll be out of luck.”

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