- Donald Trump said on Truth Social that absentee voting and early voting are “good options” for Republicans.
- The reversal comes after years of President Trump sowing doubts about the voting system, claiming it was rife with fraud.
- One political scientist told BI that while his new position is unlikely to stick, the damage he has done cannot be undone.
In an inexplicable reversal from years of disparaging comments about the voting system, Donald Trump now supports absentee and early voting.
“Absentee voting, early voting, and Election Day voting are all good options,” the former president wrote on Truth Social Friday afternoon. “Republicans must plan, register and vote!”
Representatives for Mr. Trump responded to requests for comment from Business Insider, saying Friday’s remarks “tell it all,” and did not respond to further questions.
The remarks are a stark departure from the rhetoric Trump has espoused for much of the past decade, repeatedly claiming that voting systems are rigged and widespread. The former president even supported a lawsuit seeking to eliminate the practice of voting by mail in seven states.
Although the terms “mail-in voting” and “absentee voting” are often used interchangeably, there are some differences in the procedures for each system. Most states that allow absentee voting require voters to request a ballot before the election, and some states require a reason why they cannot vote in person on Election Day, but some states do not have mail-in voting systems in place. States are actively mailing ballots to registered voters. .
Only eight states allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail-in voting system. Both absentee and mail-in voting systems allow voters to mail their ballots through the U.S. Post Office.
President Trump has previously targeted “mail-in voting,” claiming that widespread use in 2020 would result in “the most fraudulent election in our nation’s history,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
In seeking to prove that Trump illegally tried to overturn the 2020 election results, Special Counsel Jack Smith pointed to social media posts dating back to 2012 in which Trump said: He claimed, without evidence, that voting machines misplaced votes cast for candidate Mitt Romney. To then-candidate Barack Obama, it was evidence that Trump had deliberately spent years “instilling distrust in the results of the presidential election.”
Nicholas Grossman, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois, told Business Insider that President Trump is unlikely to maintain his new position supporting absentee voting and early voting. He added that the “Truth Social” posts sound like the kind of statements Republican officials and campaign staffers would encourage Trump to post to drum up enthusiasm for the upcoming election.
CNN reported that leading Republicans have recently adopted early voting and mail-in voting, and President Trump may be looking to follow suit and achieve the highest turnout in this year’s election.
But Grossman said that even if President Trump had a sudden change of heart, it would be too late to undo the damage he has done by sowing doubts in the election system. Grossman noted that President Trump’s staunchest supporters are unlikely to suddenly trust our election procedures just because Trump changed his message on the subject months before the election. .
“Conspiracy theories have been propagated in part by President Trump, but also by many media outlets over the past decade or so, so the damage is somewhat permanent,” Grossman said in Business. told Insider. “And despite this latest statement, he’s still questioning elections in general. That’s been his long-standing rhetoric at this point, undermining democracy and the United States against democratic institutions in particular.” They are trying to undermine public trust.”
“If Trump loses, he’ll lie just like he did in 2020. And if he wins, he’ll probably still lie — millions of people died illegally in California in 2016. Grossman added, “Even if he had won the election, he would have told lies like that, just like he did when he claimed he had voted and in fact he had voted.” There was no way he wouldn’t, so I expect him to do it again.”
