IS TRUMP TELLING REPUBLICANS TO COMMIT VOTER FRAUD?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump "is having a change of heart" on mail voting:

His team is studying state laws governing absentee and mail-in voting as well as ballot collection, called “ballot harvesting” by critics, in which third parties gather and turn in votes....

Mr. Trump highlighted the move in a fundraising email this week, saying, “The radical Democrats have used ballot harvesting to cancel out YOUR vote and walk away with elections that they NEVER should have won. But I’m doing something HUGE to fight back.”

The email added, “Our path forward is to MASTER the Democrats’ own game of harvesting ballots in every state we can. But that also means we need to start laying the foundation for victory RIGHT NOW.”

In December, Mr. Trump told Breitbart News that the GOP has no choice but to “live with the system that stinks,” while maintaining “a mail-in ballot will always be corrupt” and that Republicans should seek to change laws.

Trump is describing methods of voting that Democrats and independents, as well as a smaller number of Republicans, use legally and honestly -- but he's addressing a crowd that thinks Democrats use them to cheat. His audience believes that Democratic "mules" stuff dropboxes with ballots cast in the name of illegally registered voters, or dead people who should have been dropped from the rolls years ago, or legitimate voters who have no idea that votes for Democrats are being cast in their names.

Quite a few Republicans have been caught committing voter fraud in recent years, some of whom claim that Democratic election fraud is widespread. The percentage of GOP voters who believe that Democrats cheat in every contested election is large. So many Republicans are likely to believe that the only way they can win is to cheat themselves.

We know that Trump cares only about winning -- preserving democracy isn't important to him. So he'd be happy to win in 2024 as a result of election fraud, as long as the fraudsters get away with it.

So yes, I think he's telling GOP voters to cheat. And I think that's how they're interpreting the message. I don't how many of them will try to cheat, and I don't know how many will manage to cheat waithout getting caught. But I think we can safely predict a serious uptick in attempted ballot box stuffing by Republicans in 2024.