‘But the mistrust of early voting that Mr. Trump planted still permeates the G.O.P., leaving many holdouts among election deniers, who called the acceptance of mail-in ballots misguided.
“They are 100 percent wrong,” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and Trump ally who has been a leading voice in pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, said in a text message. “Same-day voting!”‘
I’m not sure I would view Mike Lindell’s views, standing alone, as representative of a position that “still permeates the G.O.P. (Or Ken Paxton, who is also quoted as calling absentee voting “un-American”; the article leaves it unclear when Paxton said this; the article says Paxton “termed mail-in ballots a ‘threat to democracy’ in a 2020 online commentary”–which really isn’t germane to whether or not this view is losing its grip on Republicans three years later.)
Bottom-line from my perspective: if as this article suggests, the Republican antipathy to early and absentee voting is largely dissipating, that is a good news story from an election administration perspective (whether it’s motivated by a self-interested desire to win elections or otherwise). What would be even better news is, if next year and beyond, this change produces a downstream increase in the public’s trust that election outcomes accurately reflect the will of the electorate.