One of the oddest arguments against early voting you’ll hear

02/05/2024

I had certainly seen the name Tyler Bowyer before Thursday morning. After all, I’ve written about the Trumpworld figures who have been indicted on charges related to their roles in trying to help him subvert the 2020 election, and Bowyer was added to that list late last month. After Donald Trump lost Arizona in 2020, Bowyer was one of the people submitted as an elector on his behalf, earning Bowyer the right to be a defendant in a state fraud trial.

But Bowyer has another job, too. He’s chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, the campaign arm of the right-wing group Turning Point USA. And it was comments he made in that role that caught my attention.

Axios published an article exploring Trump’s contradictory position on early voting: It’s bad (because, he falsely claims, it facilitates fraud) and it’s good (because his party likes knowing that people have voted so it can focus its energy elsewhere). Trump has taken both positions in recent months, albeit the former far more than the latter. The contradiction is and will remain unresolved because contradictions are not toxic to Trump — they are his oxygen.

In considering how this inconsistency affected his allies, Axios (apparently picking up reporting from the Daily Beast) quoted Bowyer opining on early voting in a podcast he co-hosts. Those outlets picked out the part in bold below from an episode published in mid-March, but the full context of his comments is useful.

“We are huge advocates for day-of [voting],” Bowyer said. “And the reason for this is — and I want to explain it to most people who are listening — you have a scenario where if you vote too early, you’re basically telling Democrats how many votes they need to win, right? And so people believe that enough manipulation is happening up to and on Election Day that it’s giving the Democrats the playbook to win.”

“They’re not wrong. They’re exactly right,” he continued. “If we did all of our voting before Election Day, it makes it difficult. The reality is this is that again, too, at the same time, Democrats have expanded early voting for one reason alone, and that is because it gives them more opportunity to chase down more ballots. So this is why they’re flooding the zone with more ballots.”

I am sorry that it took me so long to hear this quote, because — even by the standard of bizarre claims about election fraud — it is a doozy.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, there were two conflicting theories of how the contest had purportedly been stolen for Joe Biden. (It wasn’t; just bear with me here.) The first was that numerous absentee ballots were submitted fraudulently to Biden’s benefit. The second was that voting machines were adjusted to give him more votes. You can see how these don’t really work together; if you’re cheating with the machines (which is all Georgia uses, for example) why do you need to cheat with the ballots (as Trump and his allies have long claimed occurred, including in Georgia)? One resolution to this conflict that was proposed was that the scale of support for Trump was so big that it forced Democrats to do both.

The core idea here was that there was some point beyond which some fraud mechanism couldn’t be successful. That this cabal of cheaters — so sophisticated as to go uncaught for the past three years and to leave no credible evidence of their efforts — would be stymied if 10,000 votes were cast instead of 1,000. As though the computer chip can’t go high enough or more fake ballots can’t be pulled from a warehouse.

Anyway. If you telegraph to the cheaters beforehand exactly where turnout will land, it seems, they can avoid this particular Achilles’ heel. So several people before the 2022 election offered advice similar to Bowyers: wait until the last minute to vote so that Democrats can’t cheat properly.

What Bowyer in particular ignores, though, is that knowing how many people are likely to vote is a central consideration of political campaigns, one that doesn’t rely on waiting until votes start coming in. I’m sorry to have to bold that, but it’s important.

Winning an election is just a math problem. If your opponent has x votes then you need x+1 votes or more. That’s it. So campaigns work hard to estimate how many people are likely to vote — let’s call it T — and where they will add up the votes to get to x+1.

This is particularly important for two subsets of the campaign team: the pollsters and the people in charge of turnout.

The pollsters need to know T because it allows them to figure out which arguments they’re presenting to voters appeal to which geographies and which demographics in a way that gets to x+1. If you think 10,000 people are going to vote because only city dwellers will cast ballots, your poll data won’t be useful if the actual turnout is 50,000 and heavily rural.

The turnout people, meanwhile, need to turn those targeted people out! Regardless of whether it’s on or before Election Day, they want a good sense of who needs a nudge to cast a ballot so the campaign can optimize where to do their nudging.

Campaigns and parties like early voting because it removes a lot of questions marks from the table and provides more nudging time. Early voting does, as Bowyer said, give Democrats “more opportunity to chase down more ballots.” He seems to be offering his pejoratively, as though this is some form of cheating. But it isn’t. It’s just finding registered voters and encouraging them to vote and — if they do — freeing up time on Election Day to reach out to other voters.

As Bowyer admits in another part of the interview, this is annoying to the right partly because Democrats have long been better at doing this sort of turnout. It is true, as Bowyer complains, that labor unions run these sorts of turnout operations on behalf of Democrats. But this isn’t cheating. It’s increasing turnout! In many cases, in fact, it’s a response to systemic problems that lead to lower Democratic turnout, like limited voting hours or locations that are more difficult for lower-income voters.

A viable, professional political campaign has people who spend a lot of time thinking about how many people will vote and who they are. They are not waiting until early voting starts to discover what those numbers look like.

There is one scenario in which Bowyer’s argument might make sense. Imagine if a Democratic campaign had an estimate of T, the expected size of the electorate, that led them to allot a certain portion of resources to voter-turnout efforts at the tail end of the campaign. As early voting unfolds, they see nothing that suggests their estimate of T is too low and, therefore, they are confident that their allocated resources are sufficient. Then a huge number of people turned out on Election Day, breaking the T estimate.

But there’s a fatal flaw in this plan: Why would the Republican side understand that this would happen if the Democratic side didn’t? Or is the idea that the campaign will be so good at vote turnout that they can make that surge happen? Good luck, given that you’ve given yourself 12 hours to do it.

This doesn’t seem to be what Bowyer is arguing, given that he’s worried about Democratic “manipulation,” which certainly sounds like a comment about alleged last-minute nefariousness. This is someone under indictment for aiding Trump’s 2020 efforts, after all.

It is not up to me to offer advice to political campaigns or political actors. But if your strategy for defeating the opposing campaign relies on assuming they aren’t already thinking a lot about how many people will vote, you’re probably going to lose.