The RNC’s “Bank Your Vote” campaign seeks to maximize pre-Election Day turnout by educating and encouraging Republicans to vote early, either in-person or by mail, to beat Democrats in 2024. It represents a need for a culture shift on mail voting, according to some Republican leaders.
Meanwhile in Utah, where Trump won 58 percent of the vote and where more than half of all registered voters are Republican, voting by mail has become the primary method of ballot-casting.
That’s likely because the state enacted an expansive mail voting system well before the issue became politically charged, Henderson said. A 2012 state law allowed individual counties to opt in to a system in which every registered voter would be mailed a ballot each election. By 2019, every county in the state had opted in. Ninety-three percent of voters cast their ballots by mail in the 2022 general election, up from 91 percent in 2020, according to Henderson’s office.
“We had all of our systems in place. So I think that was the key,” Henderson said in an interview this month, days before ballots were mailed to voters in the 2nd District for a Sept. 5 special primary to fill Republican Rep. Chris Stewart’s seat. “They’d done it before and so they were okay continuing to do it. They want to vote by mail.”
‘No consistency’
The RNC has stopped well short of embracing mail voting as good policy. Instead, Republican leaders have endorsed it as a necessary evil to win elections.
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