As another election approaches, the Illinois Republican Party and its allies are facing a conundrum — urging followers to cast ballots by mail while trying not to alienate followers of former President Donald Trump, who continues to insist that mail-in votes are “automatically corrupt.”
Though most elections on Tuesday are officially nonpartisan, Republicans and allied groups are actively backing candidates in municipal, school and library board and other races.
The state GOP is pushing the use of mail-in ballots at the same time it is promoting “election integrity” training featuring a 2020 election denier. But the party’s chairman has acknowledged the GOP faces an “uphill battle” if it doesn’t jump in on voting by mail, even as the party hedges its language to appease the GOP core where Trump continues to hold strong sway.
For decades, Democrats have made absentee voting, and more recently, no-excuse voting by mail, a large part of their get-out-the-vote repertoire with great success. Republicans, even before Trump became a powerful force in GOP politics, preferred in-person voting, usually on the traditional election day.
Mail-in voting has increased steadily in Illinois, jumping from about 9% of the total ballots cast in 2018 to one-third of the ballots in the pandemic 2020 general election, according to the State Board of Elections. In last November’s midterm, balloting by mail represented more than 19% of the total ballots cast.
Three years ago, the Cook County Republican Party, represented by a legal group founded by and associated with the right-leaning Illinois Policy Institute, went to federal court in an unsuccessful attempt to block expanded early-voting measures enacted by Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Democratic lawmakers during the pandemic.
That law, which automatically sent vote-by-mail applications for the 2020 general election to residents who voted in previous elections, was “a partisan voting scheme that will open the door to voter fraud” and “designed to directly disenfranchise voters disfavored by Pritzker, to dilute the votes of those disfavored by Pritzker, and to violate the secrecy of voting in Illinois,” the Cook County GOP and its lawyers alleged in the lawsuit.
Now, vote-by-mail is backed by the state GOP as a necessary addition to boost Republican turnout and the Illinois Policy Institute has engaged in a campaign to encourage its use.
That comes as Trump — an announced 2024 presidential candidate who now stands indicted by a New York grand jury investigating payments of hush money to an adult film star — continues to disparage mail-in voting while repeating his false contention that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to election fraud.
”Mail-in ballots are automatically corrupt,” Trump said late last month in a conversation with Sean Hannity on Fox News that aired only days before the indictment was announced. ”If you have mail-in ballots, you’re going to have very dishonest elections.”
Acknowledging the divergent views within his own party, Illinois GOP Chair Don Tracy told members in a March 10 email that voting by mail was “the elephant in the room” before imploring them to use it to cast their ballots.
”Democrats utilize vote by mail at a much higher rate than Republicans. Democrats have won many close elections on the strength of their vote by mail programs. Quite simply, Republicans will have an uphill battle in every election moving forward if we do not start utilizing vote by mail to our advantage,” Tracy said.
With Illinois now authorizing voters to permanently receive vote-by-mail ballots, rather than having to apply with each election, Tracy said failure of Republicans to take advantage of it “will disproportionately impact the results of our municipal elections, especially our local school boards.”
”We are acutely aware of problems with the vote-by-mail process. However, the harsh reality is that until we have the numbers in the legislature to change it, we have to play to win under the existing rules and we must increase Republican voter turnout by greater use of vote by mail,” he said.
Tracy said there are “genuine concerns” about mail-in ballots to “undermine fair and honest elections,” but didn’t elaborate. At the same time, he made the stark acknowledgment that “there is relatively little increased risk of fraudulent abuse of your ballot when you vote by mail as opposed to voting in person.”
The Illinois Policy Institute, whose allied Liberty Justice Center sought to block the pandemic-driven expansion of vote-by-mail in 2020, has sent permanent mail-in ballot applications to voters, and followed up with text messages to check if they were received. The drive is part of the institute’s effort to back its favored local candidates, which followed a recruitment campaign for school boards.
The institute has gone so far as to promote a website debunking “myths” about voting by mail, including one that was a theme of the unsuccessful federal lawsuit:
”MYTH: Encouraging more convenient voting options such as voting by mail is a plot from the political left.
“FALSE: Many Republican-dominated states have expanded the use of vote-at-home options, including Utah, a decidedly ‘red’ state, which has become the fourth full vote-at-home state.”
Individual Republicans have also sought to make the transition from espousing Trump’s viewpoint to embracing vote-by-mail.
Jeanne Ives, a conservative former GOP state lawmaker from Wheaton who lost bids for governor and Congress, sent out an email to supporters of her bid for a U.S. House seat in April 2020 that contended Democrats were using COVID-19 as an excuse to expand vote-by-mail “to advance their radical agenda” and warned “we cannot compromise the integrity of our elections.”
But by July 1, Ives appeared in a video on social media standing in front of a post office to offer instructions to supporters on how to get and cast a mail ballot.
As Tracy, the head of the Illinois GOP, encourages mail-in voting in his weekly “Chairman’s Memo” email to followers, he also is promoting a May 20 “Statewide Election Integrity Summit” in Orland Park that includes Carol Davis, a supporter of Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, as a featured speaker.
Davis, chair of the Illinois Conservative Union, has contended that vote-by-mail ballots are susceptible to fraud and are part of a “Democratic plot” to do away with in-person voting.
Despite the mixed Republican messaging, the top GOP leaders in the legislature have backed vote-by-mail.
House GOP leader Tony McCombie of Savanna acknowledged Republicans were “behind and we should’ve been embracing this for quite some time.”
”There’s some fearmongering out there, of course, but, you know, I’m not going to play along with those games,” she said.
Senate GOP leader John Curran of Downers Grove said, “There are competing messages. But we’ve been clear and consistent here in Illinois. (Under) the laws of this state, we encourage the use of mail-in ballots.”
”Voting by mail,” Curran said, is “a way to encourage more people to vote and give people greater opportunity to vote. We want everyone voting. So, all in all, it’s a good thing.”
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jgorner@chicagotribune.com
