Prominent Republican organizers are endorsing legal ballot harvesting and otherwise taking advantage of looser election laws after conceding that shunning such tactics puts the party at a disadvantage.
Republicans have been reexamining their strategies after a widely expected “red wave” largely didn’t materialize during the midterm elections, save for some exceptions.
Some have blamed Republicans’ reluctance to embrace mail-in voting and ballot harvesting operations. While Republicans seem to remain concerned that mail-in voting is more susceptible to fraud, it appears they’ve come to acknowledge that they can’t do without the turnout boost that they believe ballot harvesting has provided to their opponents.
The following day, Republican grassroots organizer Scott Presler voiced a similar sentiment.
“Fight fire with a blowtorch.”
Kirk casts ballot harvesting as necessary to level the playing field with Democrats.
“We have to embrace early voting and ballot harvesting where it’s legal if we’re going to keep up. I may not like it, but we have to live in reality, not some fantasy land of how we wish elections were run,” he told The Epoch Times in writing.
He noted that Republicans garnered millions more votes nationally in the midterms, but still saw their candidates fail in key races, which he blamed on Democrats’ deploying “their vote-capturing machine in key precincts and districts.”
Reflections on the results, he said, shifted sentiment among the GOP base.
“We’re all waking up,” he said. “The Republican Party has a lot of work to do, but the grassroots is awake.”
Presler, too, sees the Republican base warming up to ballot harvesting.
“I’ve always felt that way, that I’m a Republican, but I act like a Democrat. I’m not afraid to use the tools of the Democrats in order to elect Republicans into office,” he told The Epoch Times.
“And I think finally, the base which was very against early voting and against ballot harvesting, I think that people are finally onboard, conservatives, that they’re willing to invest in ballot harvesting.”
Presler said his first step will be to grasp the ballot harvesting rules in all 50 states. Half the states allow voters to pick anybody of their choosing to deliver their filled-out absentee ballot. The other half either restricts who may deliver the ballot—only family members for example—or don’t specify who may deliver ballots.
Presler plans in February to restart his national tour to train Republicans how to register voters and run for office.
“Now, I’m going to also include ballot harvesting where it is legal,” he said.
Kirk promised more details to follow on his plan.
“We need data and voter information to be the centerpiece of this new strategy,” he said. “Churches, race tracks, football games are now voter drives.”
He acknowledged that widespread mail-in voting remains “a major concern” as an opportunity for cheating, but pointed to Florida as an example of how the issue can be balanced.
Florida allows third-party ballot delivery as well as extensive early voting, yet the state managed to handle the issue in a way that seems to instill enough confidence in GOP voters to trust the system, propelling the reelection of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as well as flipping several congressional seats.
The midterm results indicate that even in states where Republicans strongly disagree with the local mail-in voting rules, they can still succeed.
Changing the rules can be step two, he indicated.
“We can’t change these bad laws until we have power and the only way to get power is to win elections,” he said.
Ballot harvesting rose in prominence particularly ahead of the 2020 election, as election authorities in many states expanded mail-in voting citing concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic.
While voters may feel more confident in their ballot if they feed it into the tabulation machine themselves on Election Day, it also comes with disadvantages, Presler noted.
“I spoke to people that waited until Election Day and they said that they had problems and I was unable to help them,” he said. “Had they voted early, had they voted by mail, then their votes would have been either locked in or they would have had time to fix the problems. If they waited until the last minute, I’m unable to help them.”
At least 20 percent of polling places in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, experienced problems with tabulation equipment on Election Day. Voters were told to leave their filled-out ballots in designated boxes to be counted later or go vote at another polling place. Some who opted for the second option were then told at the other location that they couldn’t vote there, some Arizona Republicans have said. The Arizona Attorney General’s Election Integrity Unit is now investigating the matter.
“Telling everyone to vote in-person on ED opens you to traffic jams and machine malfunctions like what happened in Maricopa County. If and when that happens, there’s no rewinding time to change your strategy. You’re at the mercy of the courts and voters’ own schedules,” Kirk said.
As for people with concerns that absentee votes may not be counted properly, Presler suggested that they get involved with the process.
“If a person is worried about corruption within the system, then my encouragement is for that person to become an Election Day worker,” Presler said.
Another alternative would be to run for a county clerk, the office responsible for administering elections at the local level.
The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee didn’t respond to requests for comment by press time.
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