The One Place Where The Trump Campaign Wants More Mail-In Voting

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s devastation in North Carolina, the Trump campaign is advocating for expanded access to the polls in the state, including less strict mail-in voting procedures — a set of policies that, only four years ago,  Trump used to spread conspiracy theories about the results.

The parallels are there. In 2020, states and counties across the country expanded mail-in and absentee voting in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing voters to cast their ballots without risking exposure to the virus.

The situation in 2024 is different in the specifics of the disasters at hand, but the irony is clear: hurricanes swept across the southeast this fall, cleaving trails of destruction and cutting off communities from basic services. In North Carolina, which has the distinction of being both a critical swing state and of being especially hard hit by the storm, flooding devastated much of the mountainous west. 

The Trump campaign responded to the destruction  with a straightforward request to North Carolina’s legislature and to Governor Roy Cooper (D). 

In an Oct. 8 letter, campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita asked for a raft of changes that would increase voting accessibility amid the disaster. The state should allow voters in affected counties to cast their ballot from anywhere in the county, not just their precinct; displaced voters should be allowed to deliver absentee ballots to officials in their new county or to the state; voting center times should be expanded; residency requirements on poll workers should be loosened. 

It was the kind of request for broad-based changes to improve voting access that, had it come four years ago, may well have prompted recriminations and accusation of fraud from the Trump campaign itself. 

The disparity between the position of the Trump campaign responding to the 2020 pandemic, versus the campaign’s response, four years later, to Hurricane Helene, is notable, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, said  in an interview with TPM.. Both disasters, although different in their particulars, required increased access to mail-in voting and safe ways to cast in-person ballots. But in 2020, these changes —  the same sort of changes the campaign is now advocating for —were opposed by Trump, and later became fodder for election conspiracy theories. 

“The Trump campaign in 2020 used those changes to the rules to provide people with access to cast doubt on the integrity of our elections,” he said. “It raises concerns both about whether they’re playing politics with people’s right to vote, which would be a terrible thing, and exposes that they understand the things that they’re saying about fraud in our elections are not true.”

The Trump campaign did not return an emailed request for comment from TPM. 

Trump’s turn in 2020 against mail-in voting was at least partly opportunistic. Even before Election Day, expanded access to mail-in voting and to other, alternate ways of casting a ballot were largely expected to be more heavily used by Democrats. As the pandemic ground on and he fell in the polls, the then-President used COVID mitigation measures to cast doubt on the entire election. 

“This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen,” Trump said of the expanded access in September 2020. 

After he lost the election, Trump and those around him seized on the changes as fodder for their Big Lie agenda: drop boxes for ballots became the focus of conspiracy theories around supposed fraud in the election, while dozens of lawsuits filed by the former President’s campaign and his allies took aim at COVID-prompted changes, arguing they were implemented in a way that violated the law, to try to reverse his loss. 

With some Trump allies going so far as to accuse dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez of masterminding Trump’s loss, and others blaming it on a conspiracy that involved Italian satellites, the focus on changes made to expand voting access during the pandemic quickly became a somewhat more tenable means of arguing in court and to Congress that the election had been stolen. 

In 2024, the Trump campaign’s about-face appears to be similarly opportunistic. 

Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, pointed out how the Trump campaign has, in many ways prior to Hurricane Helene, been working to make it harder to vote. 

“There does seem to be a conflict,” he said. “In one instance it seems to be we’re making voting harder — seems to be more of the theme for Trump and his allies — versus last week, at least behind the scenes, maybe the Trump folks were pushing for more flexibility and looser election laws.”

In response to the devastating flooding, North Carolina lawmakers have made some significant adjustments to the voting practice in the state. A few of them mirror what the Trump campaign sought. Voters will have more time to request an absentee ballot, and will have more options for where to submit them. Requirements on where people can vote, and who can staff polling sites — both requests from the Trump campaign — have been loosened. 

Voting experts agree that the Trump campaign’s request for greater voter accessibility is positive, but it still does not signal a real change in position for the Trump campaign beyond this particular disaster-stricken swing state. 

“Unfortunately, they also continue to push disinformation and conspiracy theories about voting in various different ways in other places around the country,” Morales-Doyle said.