(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) The New York Times published a lengthy feature on conservative group Turning Point USA’s plan to “chase the ballots,” and encourage voters to take advantage of the early and mail-in voting programs put in place in the 2020 election.
The stated goal of the Phoenix-based TPUSA is to get citizens who usually do not participate in elections to vote, not to turn Election Day voters into early voters.
“It’s better to participate, even in that way, than not participate at all,” said Charlie Kirk, founder of the organization. “That’s our argument.”
Kirk and his team changed from being fervently against mail-in voting to considering it as a way to gain an even footing with the Democrats after the 2022 gubernatorial election in Arizona.
In his attempt to vote for GOP candidate Kari Lake, Kirk said he went to the polls only to wait in a two-and-a-half-hour line caused by malfunctioning machines.
Lake lost the race to Democrat Secretary of State Katie Hobbs by about 17,000 votes. In 2022, about 19,000 more Democrats voted by mail than Republicans.
Since then, Kirk and TPUSA changed their tune on mail-in voting, claiming that Republicans should be made aware and take advantage of their “buffet line of voting options.”
The group started the effort in Arizona and Wisconsin, and announced potential plans to expand into Georgia and Michigan.
This is a vast departure from the Republican’s former strategy, and may cause some whiplash among the voter base, in which many suspect that Democrats and other corrupt election officials are not legitimately tallying early votes but using the ruse to encourage illegitimate ballot harvesting and vote fraud after the election has ended.
Kirk, presumptive 2024 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and several other conservative pundits and commentators spent much of the aftermath of the 2020 election decrying early voting as a fraudulent system.
As recently as last month, Trump said “if you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud” in a Fox News town hall with hostess Laura Ingraham.
TPUSA planned to train hundreds of people to attempt to sway non-committal citizens, and took in millions in donations in order to expand their operation across the nation.
