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By Sharon Bernstein | Reuters
SACRAMENTO – California Republicans will launch a campaign on Friday to convince Tories to trust the state’s postal voting system, hoping to increase voter turnout to remove Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, said party officials.
The party will broadcast videos on its digital platforms showing Republican Party officials sending out their ballots and urging their supporters to vote early in the September 14 election, according to images seen by Reuters and interviews with party leaders.
Polls show Republicans are highly motivated to vote in the election to recall Newsom, a liberal Democrat who has been criticized for his policies on COVID-19, immigration and crime. But they made the first ballots half as numerous as Democrats, who are more than twice as numerous as Republicans in California.
In addition to postal voting, voters can return their ballots to drop boxes or vote in person on September 14. Many Republicans would have to wait until election day.
Privately, Republican leaders have admitted that false allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election by former President Donald Trump and others largely created the reluctance towards postal voting.
The state party’s new campaign will recognize concerns about the integrity of the elections while seeking to convince Republican voters that they can trust the system, party leaders said. U.S. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy will be featured in an upcoming video urging people to vote.
“It’s a strategy of trust but verification,” Republican Party of California President Jessica Millan Patterson said in an interview. “We want to make sure that they have confidence in the electoral process, and we want to make sure that they know that there are different ways to vote.”
Patterson said she plans to send out her ballot.
The first two videos focus on the party’s electoral integrity plan, which involves increasing the number of poll observers, hiring election lawyers and asking voters to report any irregularities. Then the speakers rotate to urge voters to vote.
Another video, which will be released next week, shows Harmeet Dhillon, a senior state party official, voting by mail and later receiving a text message informing him that it has been received, a party official said. was not allowed to speak in public.
Republicans in the state find themselves in “a very strange and ironic situation,” said Raphael Sonenshein, director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles.
“Republicans face the problem that postal voting was one of the main targets of the argument that something went wrong in 2020,” he said.
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