The Republican Party must embrace mail-in balloting in order to defeat Democrats in upcoming elections, according to a former Trump administration official.
Former President Donald Trump has been the leading voice against mail-in voting since before the 2020 elections, claiming it is an avenue for fraud. But Kash Patel, former chief of staff to former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, said the GOP underperformed during the midterm elections because it did not pay enough attention to bolstering mail-in voting with its base.
"If we want to get back and change the rules, we have to go big on mail-in ballots," Patel told the Daily Caller at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest conference in Phoenix. "If you want to change the rules later, that's fine, but you can't change if you lose."
In key Senate races the GOP lost, including Herschel Walker's in Georgia and Adam Laxalt's in Nevada, the margins were small enough to where the Democrats' edge with mail-in voting could have been decisive.
"People gotta look at these margins. And I told [Trump] the same thing … We were the party of mail-in ballots. Why? Because we were the party trying to get our military, our men and women in uniform, the ability to vote when they were deployed overseas," Patel said.
A week after the midterm elections, Charlie Kirk, founder and president of TPUSA, said the GOP could learn a thing or two from mail-in voting.
"One of the first lessons we have to take from the midterms is the power of early voting," Kirk tweeted Nov. 15.
In a follow-up tweet, Kirk wrote: "Telling everyone to vote in-person on [Election Day] opens you to traffic jams and machine malfunctions like what happened in Maricopa County [in Arizona]. 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."
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