Trump Asks Republicans to Vote Early, Promotes Ballot Harvesting During Iowa Town Hall

Former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump prepares to deliver remarks at a Nevada Republican volunteer recruiting event in Las Vegas, Nev., on July 8, 2023. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Former president Donald Trump encouraged supporters to take part in early voting as well as “legal” ballot harvesting for the 2024 elections during his conversation with Fox News’s Sean Hannity at a town hall meeting in Iowa on Tuesday.

Ballot harvesting refers to the practice of political agents collecting ballots from homes of absentee voters and depositing them, mostly en masse, at a polling station or election office. “Republicans have been reluctant and resistant toward early voting, mail-in voting,” Mr. Hannity said.

“They have also been resistant toward legal ballot harvesting, which Democrats have mastered, which is why they can hide in their basement and run hundreds of millions of dollars in ads and never answer a press question, shake a hand or kiss a baby or do a town hall. Do you now encourage and embrace early voting, voting by mail, and legal ballot harvesting?”

Mr. Trump responded, “I do,” adding, “They also create phony ballots and that’s a real problem. That’s my opinion.”

Regarding early voting, Mr. Trump said that mail ballots were prone to getting lost. “They’ve sent it early and all of a sudden where are they?”

Unlike the previous election cycle, Republicans have been increasingly recognizing ballot harvesting as a legitimate election strategy to garner more votes. However, there is apprehension within GOP ranks regarding deploying the strategy on a large scale. The rules of the practice also vary between different states.

A significant event that thrust ballot harvesting into public prominence was conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary “2000 Mules,” which featured individuals allegedly hired by nonprofits to collect ballots illegally and deposit them in drop boxes during the 2020 presidential election.

The filmmakers drew on cellphone location data paired with video surveillance to track the so-called mules as they gathered ballots from different people and deposited them in multiple drop boxes, raising suspicion. “The mules are instructed to do three votes over here or five votes over there, 10 votes over here, they spread it around so as not to raise eyebrows and not to raise suspicion,” D’Souza said on EpochTV’s “Crossroads.”

Ballot Harvesting Numbers

A significant proportion of voters cast their votes through mail ballots, thus boosting the power of ballot harvesting to sway election results. A Pew Research study from November 2020 showed that 46 percent of voters had cast their votes by mail-in or absentee ballots in the 2020 presidential election. Just over half the respondents voted in person.

While 32 percent of Trump supporters voted through absentee or mail-in ballots, this was much higher in the case of Joe Biden, as 58 percent of his supporters used mail-in ballots.

Voting ballots move forward in the audit process at the Orange County Registrars office in Santa Ana, Calif., on June 9, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

In a Jan. 13 opinion piece in The Hill, Paul E. Peterson, a professor of government at Harvard University, points out that rules like ballot harvesting “fit the Democratic Party agenda.” In 1996, nine out of 10 voters cast their ballots in person on Election Day, which fell to six out of 10 in 2016, he said.

While 27 states eased mail-in procedures in 2021, 20 states relaxed registration procedures, Mr. Peterson stated. Eight states have even passed laws allowing convicted felons to cast votes.

In April 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau released polling data showing that 69 percent of voters in the 2020 presidential race had voted either by mail or voted early, which made it the “highest rate of nontraditional voting for a presidential election.” In 2016, only 40 percent of voters had used mail-in ballots during the presidential election.

GOP Embraces Ballot Harvesting

Though Republicans have long been critical of ballot harvesting, many are revamping their opinions. Mr. Trump, who is running in the 2024 presidential race, is one of them.

In a post on Truth Social in November 2022, Mr. Trump had insisted that “you can never have fair & free elections with mail-in ballots.” Trump’s attitude towards ballot harvesting flipped a few months later in February.

In fundraising emails sent out by the Trump campaign that month, the former president made it clear that he was embracing ballot harvesting.

“The radical Democrats have used ballot harvesting to cancel out YOUR vote and walk away with elections that they NEVER should have won. But I’m doing something HUGE to fight back,” an email said.

A ballot drop box at the Orange County Registrar of Voters in Santa Ana, Calif., on March 5, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

The “path forward” will be to “MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots in every state we can. But that also means we need to start laying the foundation for victory RIGHT NOW.”

In May 2021, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, another GOP candidate for the 2024 presidency, signed a bill that effectively banned ballot harvesting.

But during a campaign in Iowa on June 1, DeSantis admitted that he was “going to do ballot harvesting” since he did not intend to “fight with one hand tied behind my back.”

The GOP’s nationwide election plan emphasizes “in-person early voting, absentee voting, and ballot harvesting where legal,” Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told reporters last month, while adding that the party will “fight against bad ballot harvesting laws,” according to the Associated Press.

“Do I think it’s the most secure way of voting? No,” she said. “But if it’s the law, we’re going to have to do it just like the Democrats are.”