‘Safe and legitimate’: Lancaster GOP vies for more mail-ins while Trump undermines their integrity

Lancaster County's Republican Party leaders want as many GOP voters as possible to cast their vote by mail this year.

To alleviate concerns about the security of voting by mail, local party officials have repeatedly described it as "safe and legitimate" in posts on social media, and the county Republican committee held several training events in August to communicate directly to volunteers who do much of the direct outreach to voters.

Republican volunteers are also knocking on doors, phone banking and hand-delivering letters to neighbors' doors to encourage them to apply for a mail-in ballot, according to Vice-Chair Jenna Reath.

But the party is working against a flood of false claims made by former President Donald Trump, who has spent the past four years promoting baseless claims that mail-in voting is insecure and riven with fraud.

Pennsylvania — which Trump lost to President Joe Biden in 2020 by just 81,000 votes — has especially drawn the Republican presidential nominee's ire. In early September, Trump called attention to an unfounded claim, made by a guest interviewed by former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, that one-fifth of Pennsylvania's mail-ins are "fraudulent."

READ: Harris leads Trump among Pa.'s independent and moderate voters, F&M poll finds

"Here we go again! Where is the U.S. Attorney General and FBI to INVESTIGATE? Where is the Pennsylvania Republican Party?" Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. "We will WIN Pennsylvania by a lot, unless the Dems are allowed to !!!"

Unlike some other local Republican organizers around the state, Reath said she didn't think Trump's attacks have harmed efforts to boost Republican mail-in turnout in Lancaster County this year.

She said the committee has actually seen a "bigger boom" in residents who want to volunteer as poll watchers due to his comments.

"I think their concerns exist and I think we have to address them," Reath said.

If someone calls the county committee with questions, volunteers outline Lancaster County's mail-in vetting process and how ballots are secured, Reath said. She noted there are common "misconceptions" about mail-in voting that overlook the safeguards embedded in the system.

Asked if she believes Trump's false and misleading statements perpetuate those misconceptions, Reath said she didn't know enough about his claims to comment.

Adam Bonin, a Philadelphia lawyer who has worked for Democrats on election cases, said Republicans are trying to "speak out of both sides of their mouths" on mail-in ballots. Every Republican who accurately promotes mail-ins as safe and convenient, Bonin said, "gets contradicted by the leader of their party."

He said Trump is sowing doubt in the mail-in process so that he can contest the results of this year's election, as he did in 2020.

"It allows him to invent all sorts of conspiracy theories to feed to his base," Bonin said. "All of which are false."

LNP | LancasterOnline previously reported on how some Pennsylvania-based election integrity groups have met with former pro-Trump attorneys who helped lead the failed effort to overturn the 2020 election.

'Undercutting' turnout

Reath said the top priority of the committee's mail-in training sessions is to increase voter turnout countywide for the GOP. The next session is scheduled for Oct. 2 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the committee's East Hempfield Township headquarters.

"Our role in Lancaster County is not only to keep Lancaster County red but to expand the vote margin in the commonwealth," Reath said. "Any Republican vote we can turn out is not only important to Lancaster, but will be important to our statewide team."

Despite making up a narrow majority of registered voters in Lancaster County, Republicans have only accounted for one-third or less of the mail-in ballots returned in every general election since 2020. Republicans' proportion of mail-in ballots peaked in the 2020 presidential election at 34% but hit a low point in last year's municipal election at 27%.

To bolster those figures, Chris Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, said Republicans should seek unity in their messaging.

"This is a really difficult situation in the sense that you have the most influential individual in Republican ranks undercutting a strategic effort of the party to maximize their turnout," Borick said. "It's really been vexing for lots of Republicans."

Democrats, meanwhile, have made up anywhere from 52% to about 63% of the county's mail-in totals since 2020. Independent and third-party voters have hovered around 10% of those collected in most general elections, peaking at 14% in 2020.

Tom O'Brien, chair of the Lancaster County Democrats, said his organization isn't taking mail-in voting for granted. He said his committee is leading a "very aggressive" registration initiative also promoting mail-ins.

He noted there is a small group of Democrats who distrust the mail-in process, but he said they are rarely concerned about claims of fraud. He said they're more worried the U.S. Postal Service might not deliver their ballots on time, pointing to previous LNP|LancasterOnline reporting on the 2023 municipal election in which 268 mail-in ballots arrived after the deadline despite being sent a week or more in advance.

A September Quinnipiac University poll of 1,331 Pennsylvania voters found that just 15% of Republican respondents think they'll vote by mail this year, less than half the share of Democrats (37%) who said the same.

The mail-in disparity hasn't hurt the Republican Party's hold on Lancaster County in past elections thanks to an effective get-out-the-vote operation.

Lingering feelings

In 2019, nearly every Republican legislator joined most Democrats in passing Act 77, which created no-excuse mail-in voting in Pennsylvania and eliminated straight-ticket voting.

Since the 2020 election, Republicans have broadly argued that the courts misinterpreted the law to favor Democrats by allowing counties to install ballot drop boxes and to notify voters whose ballots will be rejected because of a missing signature or other error.

Many election reform proposals, like Republicans' push for voter I.D. requirements or Democrats' effort to expand the number of days for pre-canvassing mail-in ballots (also supported by many county election officials ), have stalled in the General Assembly.

But those roadblocks in the Legislature haven't stopped some Republicans from contesting various aspects of the state's election laws with lawsuits in the courts.

Earlier this week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court re-established a requirement that all mail-in voters include a proper date on their envelopes for their ballot to be counted. According to VoteBeat , thousands of voters could have their ballots rejected because of the ruling.

Republicans have also filed lawsuits challenging technical aspects of mail-in ballots in several other states that are key to winning the White House this year. The GOP's arguments include, in North Carolina, wanting to reject ballots lacking a sealed inner secrecy envelope, and in Georgia, wanting to throw out any ballots where the voter made an error in writing their birth date on the outer envelope.