Trump hated mail-in votes. DeSantis hates ballot-harvesting. But GOP is embracing both | Opinion

Republicans have attacked mail-in voting since 2020, lobbing baseless claims that the practice is rife with fraud. Yet, suddenly, mail voting is back in fashion among GOP leaders.

So, too, is “ballot harvesting,” when a third party collects and delivers ballots to the elections office. Just last year in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature made ballot harvesting a third-degree felony. Yet DeSantis, now running for president, said in Iowa this month that, though he remains opposed, he’ll be using that method to gather votes in states where it’s legal.

Funny how a lackluster midterm election for the GOP, plus a fight for the Republican presidential nomination, can change things.

Republicans want to shift their message as part of a national Republican vote-getting strategy for 2024 called “Bank Your Vote.” It’s a push to give the GOP wins across the country and remove any advantage for Democrats, who actually like voting by mail. Announced by Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel this month, the plan will focus on “in-person early voting, absentee voting and ballot harvesting where legal” — though, in a strange contortion of words, Republicans said they also will “fight against bad ballot-harvesting laws.”

Flip-flopping

The Republican opposition to voting early is well known. But the closest McDaniel came to acknowledging it — perhaps because much of it came from former President Donald Trump — was when she noted that it’s “a challenge if you have people in your ecosystem saying, ‘Don’t vote early or don’t vote by mail.’”

She insisted Republicans are now “singing out of the same songbook.” That remains to be seen.

Trump, who repeatedly has declared that people should vote in-person and on Election Day to make sure their votes are counted, is on board with the GOP change in strategy, in some respects, anyway. In recent months, he said Republicans have “no choice” except to participate in ballot harvesting. But he also said this month in Georgia — where Trump pressured the secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” during the 2020 election — that mail-in ballots “will always be dishonest.”

This is the same Trump who also repeatedly voted by mail and voted using a third party to deliver his ballot.

DeSantis, meanwhile, told voters in Iowa earlier this month in a video posted on Twitter by a Washington Post reporter, that he’ll definitely be employing ballot harvesting to gather votes in the national contest because, “I’m not going to fight with one hand tied behind my back.” That’s a reference to the Republican idea that Democrats embrace ballot harvesting.

But don’t miss the contradiction here: DeSantis and the GOP are calling for ballot-harvesting because it will help them, while also calling for it to be illegal.

DeSantis also is responsible for a new elections law in Florida that stops automatic renewal of applications for vote-by-mail ballots. The renewals were canceled right after the midterms. DeSantis called the law, which also included other voting restrictions, an “election integrity” measure. No doubt it was mere coincidence that Democrats requested far more mail ballots than Republicans in 2022.

Narrative changes

All of this alarm about the integrity of the vote sounds especially overblown when cast against a backdrop of Florida’s elections, which have been executed with very few issues for years. DeSantis bragged that the voting process in 2020 — when he delivered Florida to Trump — should be an example to the rest of the country: “The way Florida did it, I think, inspires confidence. I think that’s how elections should be run.”

So now the GOP, both nationally and in Florida, is trying to have it both ways: They need to rewrite the script on mail-in voting for their followers — but Trump, who remains the biggest figure in the party, continues to undermine the idea. They’re opposed to ballot harvesting and have outlawed it in many places — but they’re planning to take advantage of it in states that allow it. And they want voters to “bank” their votes through early voting, rather than waiting until Election Day, even though Republicans have often suggested early voting isn’t to be trusted.

It’s a muddled message at best. It leaves Republicans open to the charge of hypocrisy from some of their own voters. And, in a fight for the GOP nomination that includes both Trump and DeSantis, it sets up a split in the party that is just a taste of things to come.