RNC’s Shawn Steel: Republicans Beat Ballot Harvesting and Can Learn to Win with Vote-by-Mail

Shawn Steel, RNC California national committeeman, told Breitbart News on Sunday that Republicans can win elections with ballot harvesting and vote-by-mail.

Steel described Republican victories in California with mail-in voting on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.

Pollak asked, “How do Republicans react to vote-by-mail, because it might become a permanent part of our political landscape? Democrats certainly are not going to part with it after it’s been so successful for them. What do Republicans do to adapt? You’ve found a way to adapt with ballot harvesting in California. Republicans found a way of doing it that [their voters] would respond to. What can Republicans do with vote by mail?”

Steel replied, “A couple of things worked. We had multiple voting centers four days before the election, so people don’t have to stand in line on the last day. The last is, of course, horrible. You’ve got to wait three or four hours, sometimes, and then we also had ballot drop boxes that were official throughout the county.

Steel continued, “So in Orange County we did it a little bit differently so folks still had the chance to actually put it in a secure location and not have to worry about a postal worker interfering with it. Now, I haven’t had bad experiences supposed to workers in California and we dominate. We elected our first governor in California by absentee [and] mail-in [voting], A guy named George Deukmejian in 1982, and it gave us 6 years of Republican governors.”

 

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“Vote-by-mail has always been our friend, and I’m kind of mystified why too many Republicans are upset about it, but Trump set the agenda and said if we if we do this nationwide, bad things will happen,” added Steel. “He was right about that, but we’ve had experience for 30 years in California, and it’s a good tool for us, and so we’re going to get back to vote-by-mail. That’s perfectly fine.”

Vote-by-mail affords advantages in efficiency, ease, and tracking relative to convention in-person voting, Steel stated.

“I did it this year, and actually you can track it online,” Steel remarked. “Literally, the day that you put it in the post office, the day that they receive it, and the day they counted it. It’s all online, at least in Orange County.”

Steel described the expansion of vote-by-mail as a fait accompli.

“This is going to spread,” Steel said. “Don’t fight it. Vote-by-mail has been well established in the West Coast in all three states, Washington, Oregon, California. [We must not] put our head in the sand. But if you want to go with political reality, it’s cheaper, faster, and it’s something that is going to expand the network.”

Steel went on, “More and more people are going to get to vote, and that’s what the Democrats want. Well, if that’s the game, we have to adapt it ourselves and make sure that we get our people used to voting by mail. It’s going to take awhile, because there was so much resistance to it in this election”

Steel concluded, “As long as you know the rules in advance and you have an army of people, you can beat these guys.”