Although former President Trump has spent years attacking the integrity of early and mail-in voting, his campaign and the Republican National Committee this week launched what they called a “huge” and “revolutionary” effort to encourage both methods of casting ballots in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

In an email promoting a website called SwampTheVoteUSA.com, RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement: “As President Trump has consistently said, voting by mail, voting early, and voting on Election Day are all good options.”

But the Republican presidential nominee — who falsely says that mail-in voting is plagued by fraud and cost him the White House four years ago — continues to trash the popular method of casting ballots, complicating his own party’s efforts to get out the vote.

In an interview with television host Dr. Phil McGraw that aired Tuesday, the same day Whatley’s statement went out, Trump said voting by mail “shouldn’t be allowed” and falsely claimed that “any time you have a mail-in ballot, there’s going to be massive fraud.”

He criticized California for sending ballots by mail to every registered voter. He also falsely claimed that Republicans automatically lose elections in the Golden State and that many voters receive up to seven ballots apiece.

“If Jesus came down and was the vote counter, I would win California, OK?” he said. “In other words, if we had an honest vote counter, a really honest vote counter, I’d do great with the Hispanics.”

In 2020, Trump lost California, the home state of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, by more than 5 million votes.

Despite the efforts of Trump’s campaign officials and the Republican Party, it is simply too late to rebuild trust in mail-in voting among the former president’s supporters by election day, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who heads the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“They still believe this to their core,” he said of Trump’s falsehoods about mail-in voting being rigged. “Trump is reinforcing this, so an official press release from the RNC or an official website is not going to change that.”

The Swamp the Vote website and other efforts by the Republican Party to encourage different methods of voting, he added, are good — and normal — efforts to increase participation, despite what their candidate is saying.

Vote-by-mail programs, Becker said, date back to at least the Civil War and were embraced by both parties, Becker said.

Republicans traditionally favored them even more than Democrats because GOP supporters tended to be older and such voting allowed them to participate in democracy while avoiding standing in line at the polls.

But in 2020, as more states were mailing every voter a ballot because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump denigrated these votes as inherently fraudulent.

According to the Census Bureau, 43% of Americans cast their ballots by mail in the 2020 election, and 26% voted in person before election day.

In Trump’s speech near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, when he encouraged his supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol as Congress was certifying the results of his election defeat, he said that through “the scam of mail-in ballots,” Democrats “attempted the most brazen and outrageous election theft.”

In the four years since Trump’s loss, Republicans have largely turned away from mail-in voting.

In a February survey by the Pew Research Center, 28% of Republicans said any voter should be allowed to cast a ballot by mail if they want to — a steep decline from 2020, when 49% of Republicans held that belief.

An overwhelming proportion of Democrats — 87% in February and 84% in 2020 — supported all voters having access to mail-in ballots.

Still, GOP leaders and conservative activists are trying to rebuild voters’ confidence in the process.

On Tuesday, the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee said “patriots should take advantage of vote by mail, early voting, and Election Day voting — whatever method works best for you.”

It lauded the Swamp the Vote website, through which voters can request ballots by mail, as “the FIRST non-government website giving voters full access to Pennsylvania’s election toolkit,” even though it is “connected to the Pennsylvania Department of State.”

Turning Point Action, the youth group led byright-wing activist Charlie Kirk, is pushing an initiative it calls Chase the Vote, in which it aims to use a “ballot chasing army” in battleground states to knock on voters’ doors and persuade them to send in their mail-in ballots.

“The Radical Left,” Turning Point’s website says, “is beating us in the ballot game.”

In an appearance at a Turning Point event in June, Trump, referencing Kirk and Whatley, said: “I said to Charlie, and I said to Michael, I said: ‘Listen, we don’t need votes. We got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote. We need to guard the vote. We need to stop the steal. We don’t need votes.’”

He went on to say mail-in ballots are “treacherous” and that ballot drop boxes are “horrible.”

Black activists at the California assembly threatened a “direct impact” on Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign after state Democratic lawmakers held off on two bills that would have greenlighted slavery reparations. 

Last week, the California legislature approved proposals allowing for the return of land or compensation to families whose property was unjustly seized by the government, and issuing a formal apology for laws and practices that have harmed Black people. But none of those bills would provide widespread direct payments to African Americans. After hours of heated debate and protests on Saturday, state lawmakers left out two bills – Senate Bills 1403 and 1331 – that would have created a fund and an agency to oversee reparation measures. 

“The speaker needs to bring the bills up now, now, now. These are their bills. They have their names on the bills. They’re killing their own bills because they’re scared of the governor,” one Black man, a member of the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, said in the rotunda on the last day of the legislative year on Saturday. “Now listen, they’re gonna see this, and they’re gonna get mad at us. They killing their own bills, and then they’re gonna get mad at us. They’re killing their own bills because they’re scared of the governor. We don’t care. Bring the G– d— bills up now, now, now.” 

“We need to send a message to the governor,” a Black woman who is part of the same group chimed in, according to video shared on X. “The governor needs to understand the world is watching California and this is gonna have a direct impact on your friend Kamala Harris who is running for president. This is going to have a direct impact, so pull up the bills now, vote on them and sign them. We’ve been waiting for over 400 years.”

“We have the votes,” the man added.

CALIFORNIA REPUBLICAN LAWMAKER REACTS TO ‘CRAZY’ BILL THAT WOULD GIVE UNDOCUMENTED FIRST-TIME HOMEBUYERS MONEY

State Sen. Steven Bradford, who authored the measures, said the bills failed to move forward out of fear that Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom would veto them.

“We’re at the finish line, and we, as the Black Caucus, owe it to the descendants of chattel slavery, to Black Californians and Black Americans, to move this legislation forward,” Bradford said, urging his colleagues to reconsider Saturday afternoon, according to the Associated Press. 

“We owe it to our ancestors,” Bradford added, according to the Sacramento Bee. “And I think we disappointed them in a way.”

California Legislative Black Caucus Chair Assemblymember Lori Wilson said Saturday that the Black Caucus pulled the bills, adding the proposals need more work.

“We knew from the very beginning that it was an uphill battle…. And we also knew from the very beginning that it would be a multiyear effort,” Wilson told reporters.

Members of Coalition for a Just and Equitable California protest in the rotunda on the last day of the legislative year Saturday, Aug. 31, 2024, in Sacramento, Calif.  (AP Photo/Tran Nguyen)

Newsom has not weighed in on most of the bills, but he signed a $297.9 billion budget in June that included up to $12 million for reparations legislation. However, the budget did not specify what proposals the money would be used for, and his administration has signaled its opposition to some of them. Newsom has until Sept. 30 to decide whether to sign the bills that passed.

SAN FRANCISCO TO BEGIN ‘EQUITY AUDIT’ OF CONTROVERSIAL STATUES: CONCENTRATION OF ‘WHITE SUPREMACY’

Democratic Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who is Black, called his bill to issue a formal apology for discrimination “a labor of love.” His uncle was part of a group of Black students who in the 1950s were escorted by federal troops past an angry white mob into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional. The students became known as the “Little Rock Nine.”

Members of Coalition for a Just and Equitable California demand lawmakers take up a vote on two reparations bill in the rotunda on the last day of the legislative year Saturday, Aug. 31, 2024, in Sacramento, Calif. (AP Photo/Tran Nguyen)

“I think my grandmother, my grandfather, would be extremely proud for what we are going to do today,” Jones-Sawyer said ahead of the vote on the legislation that was passed. “Because that is why they struggled in 1957, so that I’d be able to — and we’d be able to — move forward our people.”

Newsom approved a law in 2020 creating a first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations proposals. New York and Illinois have since followed suit with similar legislation. The California group released a final report last year with more than 100 recommendations for lawmakers.

Newsom signed a law earlier this summer requiring school districts that receive state funding for a career education program to collect data on the performance of participating students by race and gender. The legislation, part of a reparations package backed by the California Legislative Black Caucus, aims to help address gaps in student outcomes.   

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

By now, two months before the presidential election, we voters ought to have seen a verdict in the federal criminal case against the three-time Republican nominee accused of conspiring to overturn the result of the previous contest. (That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)

But there is no verdict against defendant Donald Trump, U.S. history’s biggest sore loser, thanks to the Supreme Court. Its right-wing super-majority — half of whom were selected by Trump, and two of whom should have recused themselves — dallied for half the year before issuing a surreal ruling in July granting the former president, and all future presidents, broad immunity from criminal liability for official acts, even for purportedly official acts intended to dynamite democracy’s foundation: free and fair elections.

So much for no person being above the law.

Thanks to special counsel Jack Smith, however, voters at least have a revised indictment against Trump in the Jan. 6 case. On Tuesday a new grand jury charged him with the same four conspiracy and obstruction crimes alleged in last year’s indictment, stripped of supporting material that might run afoul of the Supreme Court’s new tests for what is or isn’t an official act.

It’s far too late for a trial, and hence a verdict, before Nov. 5. And Trump’s team almost certainly will argue all the way back to the high court that Smith’s “superseding indictment” violates the justices’ immunity ruling.

Yet if nothing else, the retooled indictment is a useful refresher for those who’ve forgotten about, or become inured to, Trump’s antidemocratic outrages, the ones that made him the first American president to resist the peaceful transfer of power.

And more than that, the charges are a reminder about just why Trump wants to be president again: to avoid criminal liability and possibly prison. If reelected, he could thwart the rule of law, not uphold it as the oath of office demands. Trump could — would — make the Jan. 6 case go away, along with the separate federal charges against him for keeping classified documents. While he’s at it, he has promised to pardon hundreds of charged and convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists, whom he grossly calls government “hostages.” He could also pardon himself, of course, for his alleged federal crimes (but not state charges).

After the grand jury action last week, former Justice Department official and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann helpfully tweeted, “For those counting, FIVE separate grand juries (scores of citizens) have now found probable cause that Trump committed multiple felonies.”

Yes, for all of Trump’s daily lies that he’s being railroaded by “the Biden-Harris Regime” and its “weaponized” Justice Department, the facts are that many average Americans have heard evidence and decided against Trump. They’ve done so not only in those five grand juries, but also in several state trial juries that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide hush money payments to a porn star from voters before the 2016 election.

With that last judgment, Trump achieved another contemptible first: No other president has been convicted of felonies. Sentencing in the hush money case, in New York, was delayed until Sept. 18, thanks to the confusion spawned by the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and Trump has asked for a further delay — past election day, natch. Judge Juan M. Merchan should proceed with the sentencing. Sure, Trump would cry foul. But all we’ve seen to date is excessive legal deference toward the lawless former president, his incessant whining about witch hunts notwithstanding.

Which brings us back to Smith’s overhauled Jan. 6 indictment, and its welcome reminder of Trump’s unprecedented power grab. The 36 pages are a maddening must-read for undecided voters, a ticktock of his falsehoods and scheming from the 2020 election through the violence of Jan. 6, 2021. Yet nearly four years later, instead of being held responsible, Trump is a candidate for reelection.

Smith strained to steer clear of Trump’s supposedly official acts, in keeping with the Supreme Court’s warped ruling. Out, for example, are accounts of his vile efforts to force Justice Department aides to lie about election fraud, as a pretext for lawsuits; they were his executive branch employees. But campaign advisors should be fair game for the prosecutors, and the indictment still recounts Trump’s refusals to accept their assertions and proof that he’d lost, that there was no fraud. Trump instead kept his aides spreading lies — “conspiracy s— beamed down from the mothership,” one wrote in an email cited in the indictment — and working on illegal slates of alternative state electors.

The document retains some details of Trump’s belittling pressure on Vice President Mike Pence. “You’re too honest,” the liar in chief once erupted, exasperated that Pence wouldn’t agree to throw out the electoral votes of pro-Biden battleground states during Congress’ Jan. 6 certification. And it includes Trump’s private and public haranguing of state officials to do his illegal bidding; they’re not feds, and presidents have no official role in states’ vote-counting.

Alas, for now all we have, still, are the charges, no trial and no verdict. But that fact defines the stakes for the 2024 election: A vote for Trump is a vote against his accountability. It’s really that simple.

@jackiekcalmes