Trump wants Republicans to vote early. In California, it's a message the GOP has been pushing for years

A voter casts his ballot for the 2024 presidential primary election at the voting center located at the Orange Public Library in Orange on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (Photo by Mark Rightmire, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Former President Donald Trump gave Republican voters instructions this fall: Vote early.

The Trump campaign recently launched what it calls “Operation Swamp the Vote,” which encourages Republicans to vote early or cast mail-in ballots, check their registration status and encourage other Trump supporters to vote as well. It’s a reversal for the former president, who has long decried mail-in voting as “corrupt.”

For California Republicans, this plan may sound a little familiar.

For several cycles, the California Republican Party has implored voters to cast their ballots as soon as possible.

In California, registered voters receive their ballots in the mail about a month before Election Day. Voters can fill them out as soon as they receive them and return them by mail, by slipping them into a ballot box slot, or by dropping them off in person at a polling center.

“We may not agree with every way Democrats have made it legal here in California, but until we elect more Republicans, we need to make sure we’re playing by the same rules,” said CAGOP President Jessica Millan Patterson.

“If we let the Democrats get the upper hand on us for three-quarters of the game, it’s going to be very difficult to make up for all that in one day,” she said.

An advantage for early voters: the party will know who it needs to target and encourage to vote.

“Part of this will benefit voters,” Patterson said. “You won’t get any more mail from me. You won’t get any more phone calls. You won’t get any more door knocks … all the ways we try to get voters to vote, you won’t get that, and you can go about your business knowing that your vote is recorded.”

But for the party, it is also a question of economy.

“When we spend time and resources on getting a voter out who is likely to vote but hasn’t voted yet, we can’t move on to new universes, to people who are less likely to vote,” said Patterson, who was elected to lead CAGOP in 2019.

She cited Rep. Greg Wallis, who won his seat in the 47th District in Riverside and San Bernardino counties by just 85 votes.

Republicans who voted early in this race allowed the party to target those who might not have had voters otherwise, she said.

CAGOP has embraced early voting for several years now — the party also adopted ballot harvesting in the last election, where people can cast a ballot for someone else, under certain conditions — and Patterson said this year’s primary was a success.

According to CAGOP figures, more than 300,000 Republicans (or about 14% of all Republicans who voted) returned their ballots earlier this year than usual. And more than 200,000 (or 8% of Republicans who voted) had never returned their ballots early but had done so during the primaries, Patterson said.

“We see that the work we do is paying off,” she said.

Still, it hasn’t been easy to convince Republicans to hand over their ballots early or to someone else, party leaders said.

“The natural reaction was, ‘No, I’m not giving you my ballot,’” said Randall Avila, executive director of the Orange County Republican Party.

The former president’s change of position on early voting helped ease concerns among some, Avila said, but the party has also worked over the past two cycles to build trust in neighborhoods.

OCGOP, for example, assigns volunteers to act as “neighborhood captains” in their own neighborhoods. They go door to door and talk to voters, their neighbors and their friends about the upcoming election.

It’s much easier to hand in your ballot or receive voting information from someone you trust, Avila said.

This year, OCGOP is primarily targeting former Republican voters who changed their registration to nonvoters or libertarians, bringing them back under the GOP umbrella. And they want to encourage voters who don’t vote every election cycle to do so this year “by whatever method they want to use,” Avila said.

While pushing Republicans to vote early this year, Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has continued to peddle lies about his 2020 election defeat.

He also pledged to introduce same-day voting, voter ID requirements and paper ballots for future elections if he wins a second term in the White House.

“We’re going to do it right. We’re going to have a good, safe, beautiful election,” Trump said.

Numerous investigations conducted after the 2020 election found very few instances of voter fraud, but not on a scale that could have impacted the outcome of that election.

Trump, however, was convicted in May of 34 counts related to a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by paying a porn actress to silence her.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.