Opinion: Trump lied about mail-in voting. Now the GOP is spending millions to fix his mess.

Donald Trump lost in 2020, in part, because he attacked mail-in ballots and the mistrust in the system that messaging created. As a result, there is an ongoing Republican effort to restore confidence in voting by mail this election in the hope of showing voters how viable of an option it is.

Four years ago, voting by mail skyrocketed amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump then bashed mail-in voting as one piece of his push to undermine the results of the presidential election, something that would become a key part of his latest campaign.

“It shouldn’t be mail-in voting,” Trump said prior to the 2020 election. “It should be: You go to a booth and you proudly display yourself. You don’t send it in the mail where people pick up – all sorts of bad things can happen.”

His lies about fraud in voting by mail might have been a large part of why he lost in 2020 and why Republicans underperformed in 2022. Now, a full presidential term later, and the GOP is still looking to repair the damage Trump has done with his lies. This is as early voting has begun nationwide for the November election.

The GOP is looking to undo the damage Trump did

Also not surprising is that 74% of Republicans believe that fraud while voting by mail has been a problem in past elections, compared with just 34% of Democrats.

Voting by mail is the most convenient option for many voters, and GOP groups recognize that convenience can help improve turnout.

This is naturally an expensive endeavor, given that voters were told by their political idol that their vote would not count if submitted through the mail. GOP PACs are spending millions of dollars in battleground states to repair the reputation of mail-in voting among their base.

Other groups, such as Turning Point Action’s eight-figure investment, are more aggressively pursuing voter mobilization efforts in key states.

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"As President Trump has consistently said, voting by mail, voting early, and voting on Election Day are all good options,” said Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, seemingly overwriting what the GOP nominee has actually said on the issue for the past four years.

You don't have to go back further than August to see what the former president has said.

"The elections are so screwed up. We have to get back in, and we have to change it all," Trump said at a rally. "We want to get rid of mail-in voting."

All of this effort being put toward mail-in voting is money that could have been spent elsewhere had Trump not undermined vote by mail in 2020 and then continued to undermine the entire election process.

The rise of mail-in voting and why Republicans should embrace it

Although voting by mail declined in 2022 when compared with the pandemic-stricken 2020 election, 36% of voters still chose this method to cast their ballot. Even though rates declined, there remained a significant divide between Democrats and Republicans voting early.

Until 2020, voting by mail gave no advantage to either party consistently. Four years ago, as a result of Trump’s rhetoric around election security, GOP voters voted by mail at only almost half the rate of their Democrat peers.

Mail-in voting isn’t popular because of partisan differences; it's popular because it's convenient. It allows Americans to vote without needing to travel to a polling place, as well as preventing a pressing personal matter to prevent someone from voting on Election Day.

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One would think that the Republican Party, whose voter base is more rural and often further from polling places, would want to embrace it. These voters are more likely to vote if they have better access to voting, and they voted by mail at higher rates than the typical voters in 2020. Half of rural polling places serve an area of greater than 62 square miles, forcing voters to drive long distances to cast their ballot if they don't vote by mail.

Trump is hurting a portion of his voting base with his election lies.

The GOP keeps paying for Trump's deficiencies

In the 2022 midterm elections, in which Republicans underperformed, super PACs backed by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell were forced to spend hundreds of millions in order to boost problematic candidates, such as Herschel Walker, whom Trump had endorsed. That loss eventually cost the GOP the Senate. All the while, Trump sat back and spent little of his own political bank to fix his own mistakes.

This ties back to a common theme, which is that Trump genuinely does not care about GOP success, only that he remains the figurehead of the party.

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Instead, he repeatedly sabotages his own chances of winning and forces the GOP to solve those problems for him, chasing the thrill of his surprise 2016 victory once again.

Even as recently as this spring, Trump has refused to admit that mail-in voting is a valid way to vote as the Republican Party scrambles to encourage the practice nationwide for his own benefit. The most he’ll concede is that it's better than not voting at all, but the skeptic tone surrounding the practice isn’t encouraging his supporters to believe that their votes will matter.

Trump has a habit of shooting himself in the foot, and the Republican Party has to turn around and pay the hospital bill. Eventually, we might wake up and realize that most of these issues could be avoided if we simply chose a different candidate. In the meantime, we’ll continue to lose and waste money doing so.

Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Republicans believe vote by mail lies. GOP has to change that