NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — Lara Trump encouraged Republicans to embrace early voting at the American Conservative Union’s 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference, echoing many in the party who believe that it, coupled with mail-in voting, is critical to winning elections in November.
“We cannot continue to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results,” Trump said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “So we’re going to have to change how we do it.”
For her, this means playing with “the cards that we’re dealt.”
Trump is expected to champion early vote banking and absentee voting in the likely event that she takes on the role of co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, for which her father-in-law, former President Donald Trump, has endorsed her.
But when she urged the CPAC crowd to support large-scale vote banking for Republicans, a number of audience members greeted her with booing.
The former president himself, serving as the de facto Republican Party leader, has been non-committal when it comes to his support for these voting methods.
“If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud,” Donald Trump said during a recent Fox News town hall.
Attendees expressed concern to the Washington Examiner over both early voting and voting by mail during the conference.
One woman, hailing from Connecticut, said, “I’m not really a fan of mail-in because I feel like it’s not safe or secure.” She said she prefers voting in person on Election Day.
Barbara Palmer, a retired attorney from Texas, expressed significant concern over the push for early and mail voting.
“We need to really stop,” she warned.
Palmer recalled hearing the RNC encourage these practices but said, “I don’t know where they’re coming up with that because that is exactly what caused the problems in 2020.”
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell expressed that sentiment onstage Saturday and was met with resounding applause.
Speaking to reporters during the conference, he said, “I’m not going to accept anything ever done with machines ever in any election.”
Instead, Lindell said he believes elections should be conducted with paper ballots. He went so far as to say he would not trust machine results even if they said Trump won.
As for the RNC’s choice to push vote-banking and absentee voting, “They’re 1,000% wrong, and whoever is pushing that with the RNC, nobody should give … any money if they’re gonna push that,” Lindell said.
The prevalence of these voting concerns at CPAC was correlated with the popular belief at the conference that the 2020 election was “stolen” and that President Joe Biden is not legitimate. When former Trump White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon took the stage during the event, he led attendees in a chant of “Trump won.”
While Barbara Burg, a 75-year-old retired electrical engineer from Alaska, said she believes that voting early and by mail does make cheating easier, she said she plans to do it anyway.
“Because the RNC, Sean Hannity, a lot of people are saying vote early,” Burg said. “We’re being gamed, outcheated, and I’m not saying we need to cheat, but we do need to get people out.”
Paper ballots and one-day voting are necessary to secure elections, said Paul Beran, a retired advertising professional from Virginia.
“Any other method offers too many opportunities for fraud,” Beran said.
Lara Trump empathized with these concerns, explaining, “In a perfect world, we would have one-day Election Day. We’d have paper ballots. We’d have voter ID. We’d have all that all across the country.
“But we’re not operating in that time right now,” she stressed.
ACU Chairman Matt Schlapp denied that conservatives were necessarily against early voting, claiming, “I just think we don’t want to contribute to a month’s worth of voting. Because the more you extend voting, the more that they’re going to cheat.”
Despite this, Schlapp did not disagree with Lara Trump’s call to embrace early voting, but he said it is not enough.
“We have to crack down on the ways in which they … fraudulently vote, but sometimes legally, and we have to crack down on that,” Schlapp said.
While Lindell, and some attendees, were staunchly opposed to the electoral strategy, even for the purpose of playing by the current rules, prominent conservative speakers at the conference echoed Trump’s calls.
“Do it,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said of mail and early voting. “Only if you want to win.”
“We have to do it,” Fox News host Mark Levin agreed.
“As a philosophical matter,” he said, “I think it’s outrageous.”
But until Republicans are in a position to change the laws, “If we want to win, we got to get down and dirty with them,” Levin told the Washington Examiner.
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The RNC and other Republican groups spent months calling on voters to cast their ballots early and absentee leading up to the gubernatorial and statewide races in 2023 but ultimately were disappointed by the results.
With new leadership possibly coming to the RNC following Saturday’s South Carolina primary, the method and messengers for encouraging the practices could soon look different.
