Trump says mail-in voting is ‘cheating’. MAGA activists are pushing it anyway

MAGA activists are trying to flip Pennsylvania for Trump by encouraging Republicans to vote by mail — despite the messaging of the former president, Richard Hall reports from Indiana, Pennsylvania

American conservative activist Scott Ryan Presler addresses the conservative Turning Point People's Convention on June 16, 2024 at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan (AFP/Getty)

Donald Trump has spent years spreading baseless conspiracies about the supposed dangers of mail-in voting. He has called it “cheating” and “fraud” and even blamed his 2020 election loss on the long-standing democratic practice.

But a grassroots campaign spearheaded by MAGA activists is now working to sign up thousands of Republican voters to vote by mail anyway — and their efforts have won the support of Eric and Lara Trump.

Scott Presler, a controversial campaigner with a following of millions across his various social media accounts, has been crisscrossing the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania on a mission to encourage Trump supporters to sign up for mail-in ballots.

“Democrats vote for 50 days, Republicans vote for 12 hours. If we are going to be competitive in this election, then we must use an ‘all of the above’ approach to voting,” Presler told The Independent at a stall outside a Trump rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, inside the arena, Trump was pushing a contradictory message to his most ardent supporters.

​​“Now we have this stupid stuff where you can vote 45 days early… I wonder what the hell happens during that 45?” the former president said to a crowd of thousands at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, before repeating his usual baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

That same day, Trump appeared on television slamming vote-by-mail as fraudulent, just as he did throughout 2020.

“Anytime you have mail-in voting, you’re going to have fraud and some people don’t like me saying it, but I say it,” he told Fox News.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the campus of Indiana University in Indiana, Pennsylvania, USA, 23 September 2024. (EPA)

Heading into the final stretch of the election campaign, the Republican Party is trying to have it both ways. It equivocates or ignores Trump’s baseless claims about the integrity of early voting and mail-in ballots, while simultaneously encouraging its supporters to use both.

Presler’s push is based on the belief that Trump and various Republican state candidates missed out on wins in 2020 and 2022 because they did not embrace all kinds of voting. He claimed there were “shenanigans” with mail-in ballots in 2020, but his reasons for pushing them this year are primarily down to issues with Election Day voting in the midterms.

“On Election Day in Arizona, machines set printing errors. In Lucerne County, Pennsylvania, they ran out of paper on Election Day and in Nevada it snowed on Election Day,” he said.

“A lot of elections that came down to thousands of votes could have been won, had we done lawful ballot-harvesting, had we engaged in early in-person voting, had we engaged in mail-in voting,” he added.

Both candidates’ paths to the White House run through Pennsylvania. The election forecasting model FiveThirtyEight predicts it is the likeliest “tipping point” — the state that will put a candidate over the top.

Presler founded his political action committee, Early Vote Action, after Republicans lost those close races in 2022.  He aims not just to change how Republicans vote, but to run up the numbers in this pivotal state of Pennsylvania.

He shares stories and updates about his voter registration efforts each day on social media, where he has earned a degree of fame in MAGAworld. As he worked his stall outside the Trump rally in Indiana, he was repeatedly interrupted by Trump supporters who recognized him and asked for selfies. He has appeared on Fox News and Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

Presler has been crisscrossing Pennsylvania to encourage Republicans to vote by mail, even as Donald Trump continues to claim they are fraudulent. (Richard Hall / The Independent)

“Lara Trump has given me shoutouts on Fox News. Eric Trump, her husband, just quote-tweeted one of my posts and gave me some beautiful praise,” he said. “I think people respect our work ethic and that we are truly persistent.”

Presler first gained a following as the organizer of nationwide "March Against Sharia” protests in 2017 and was involved with planning “Stop the Steal” rallies following the 2020 election that cast doubt on the integrity of the results. He was on the grounds of the US Capitol during the attack by Trump supporters on January 6, and described it as “the largest civil rights protest in American history.”

His team has been hitting rallies, colleges, county fairs and car parks across Pennsylvania this year.

The day after Trump’s rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, his volunteers pitched a tent in a prime spot at the Bloomsburg Fair, the largest agricultural fair in the state.

Kelly Stedge, a volunteer with Early Vote Action at the fair, somehow managed to square the competing narratives about supposedly fraudulent mail-in voting and the effort to get more Republican voters to cast their ballot that way. She called mail-in voting “very concerning,” but encourages people to fill in their ballots and hand them in at their county voter registration office.

“A lot of conservatives say the same thing: they want to vote in person and they want to vote on paper. So there’s two check marks right there,” she says.

Presler claims his team registered 120 mail-in ballot requests in one day at the fair.

“Now, let’s really put that into context for a second. We did 120 in one day, in a state that was decided by 80,000 votes. That’s pretty significant,” he said.

Kelly Stedge, a volunteer with Early Vote Action, describes mail-in ballots as “very concerning,” but is involved in the effort to encourage Republicans to vote by mail. (Richard Hall / The Independent)

The cause has been picked up by some local Trump campaigners in Pennsylvania, too. At the Republican Party’s campaign office in Scranton, volunteer Linda Bonczkiewicz said they are setting up more and more mail-in ballots for voters.

“I believe Trump won in 2020,” she said, and the victory was taken from him “with all the mail-ins and the corruption.”

“He was shot down, shot down, shot down, shot down,” she added.

“They cheated with the ballots,” she continued, before quickly adding: “Not that we’re cheating, but we’re going for early vote, early ballot, and a paper trail that you can follow.”

Mail-in voting was used relatively evenly by Republicans and Democrats before the pandemic, but 2020 brought with it a new narrative. Because of lockdowns and efforts to stop disease spread, more Americans voted by mail in 2020 than ever before. While voting rules differ state-by-state, nearly half introduced changes to grant easier access to mail-in voting, which in many was previously only available for specific reasons.

When it became clear that far more Democrats would make use of voting by mail in 2020 — and when polls showed the election might not go his way — Trump launched an all-out campaign to question its legitimacy. He suggested the 2020 election should be postponed, claiming mail-in voting would result in the “most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” without evidence to back up his claims.

Trump even went so far as to block emergency funding for the Post Office to deal with the sharp rise in mail it would have to deal with during the unprecedented pandemic-era election.

Chester County, Pa. election workers process mail-in and absentee ballots at West Chester University in West Chester on Nov. 4, 2020 (Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots in 2020 set the stage for his desperate last stand in Philadelphia in the days after the election. Election Day votes, the method overwhelmingly used by Republicans, are counted first in Pennsylvania. That meant Trump took an early lead on Election Day, creating a so-called “red mirage,” which allowed him to cry foul when his lead evaporated as Democratic mail-in ballots were counted.

He sent his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to the city to spread baseless conspiracies while election workers diligently counted the votes. That effort ended with an ignominious and infamous press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

This time around, Republican messaging has been mixed. While Trump has continued to cast doubt on early voting and mail-in ballots, the party launched a campaign called “Bank Your Vote” last year encouraging the use of both. Trump recorded an ad for the campaign and urged his supporters to use mail-in ballots in one of his messages.

Lara Trump, chair of the Republican National Committee, said in an interview with The Associated Press in May that the party would embrace all voting methods.

“In this election cycle, Republicans will beat Democrats at their own game, by leveraging every legal tactic at our disposal based on the rules of each state,” she said.

Richard Hasen, professor of law and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, said Trump may be following a similar playbook to his 2020 attacks on the election.

“They want to have it both ways. They know that getting people to vote early —in person or by mail — is a sure way to boost turnout.  On the other hand, Trump has many reasons to attack vote-by-mail as rife with fraud, even though it isn’t,” he told The Independent.

“Such attacks can delegitimize Democratic victories and perhaps lay the groundwork for trying to subvert the election,” he added.

Presler, meanwhile, says he has temporarily moved to Pennsylvania and will likely be on the road every day until the election.

“I hope to be able to deliver Pennsylvania for Donald J. Trump,” he said.

When asked how his mail-in ballot campaign can exist alongside Trump’s claims of fraud, he replied: “This is about winning. I will do whatever it takes, legally and lawfully, in order to win.”