Mail-in voting is as old as the Civil War, but of course, back then, you needed an excuse to avoid Election Day furor. As liberal states and progressive organizations began a concerted effort to push state legislatures to allow no-excuse mail-in voting, so did efforts to create robust voter contact operations that would allow Democrats to make frequent contact with mail-in voters to ensure that their ballot is banked into the system in a process called “ballot chasing.” The result was a huge advantage over Republicans in pre-Election Day voting. In 2022, Republicans captured a mere 33.8 percent of early votes, the percentage drops when you look at strictly mail-in ballots.

Twenty-eight states and Washington D.C. allow absentee voting without an excuse, and with about 25 percent of voters in the 2016 Presidential Election voting by mail, Democrats and their donors reacted to the evolving election landscape they lobbied for. They poured in a hundred million dollars on dozens of programs specifically designed to identify mail-in voters, make contact with them, and confirm their ballot through Election Day. They’ve dispersed through a litany of organizations with a focus on demographics, with the DNC controlling the data operation at the top.

Despite the actions of their rival and the world becoming a more mobile place, Republicans never adjusted their election strategy and stuck to a message of encouraging Election Day voting and have suffered for it.

If you don’t know what ballot chasing is, you’re not alone; there’s a good chance a lot of Republican Party officials, strategists, and activists don’t either.

What is Ballot Chasing?

“Ballot chasing as it’s referred to today is actually vote by mail chasing,” Cliff Maloney, CEO of Citizens Alliance, who’s launched a ballot chase initiative in Pennsylvania, told RedState. “It’s separate from traditional GOTV efforts because here you create a targeting universe of likely low tendency, mail-in voters and some registered independents and reach them with your message in a variety of ways before finally confirming they’ve sent their mail-in vote,” he added.

Maloney launched The Pennsylvania Chase in December to do exactly that. Ballot chasing is distinct from “ballot harvesting,” which is allowed in some states and entails actually turning in ballots on behalf of other people. It’s also not “ballot curing” (an after-election practice of tracking down challenged ballots and getting your voters to fix errors), which is most confused with “ballot chasing” as we know it today.  

Ballot chasing is a data-driven operation that requires knowledge of who the permanent mail-in voters, independents, and low-propensity voters are and how to contact them. 

Judging by investments into the exercise by left-wing groups, it’s an expensive mission.

Democrats were chasing mail-in ballots long before the pandemic but the overhaul in elections created by social distancing guidelines prompted Dems to strengthen their endeavor.  

In 2020, while Republicans were spinning their wheels with lawsuits preventing mail-in voting and dissuading their voters from requesting absentee ballots altogether, Democrat Super PAC Priorities USA spent $24 million to mobilize a national mail-in vote effort. Organizations like Fair Fight, founded by Stacey Abrams, rolled out training in over a dozen swing states, and the investment didn’t stop there. Mark Zuckerberg himself spent over $400M dispersed to nonprofits throughout the country in an effort to coordinate election data sharing that was ultimately used to turn out mail-in votes for Biden.

Ballot chasing is such an essential part of the national Democrat strategy that the National Democratic Training Committee PAC website has a script and resources for any left-wing organization that wants to participate in the effort. 

Republicans Fall Behind

That Republicans at large might not know what ballot chasing is isn’t merely a punchline. Once organizations like Turning Point Action announced initiatives such as Chase The Vote to ballot chase in the key swing states of Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, they were criticized by some on the right, such as radio host Erick Erickson. Despite it only being a chunk of what the left has spent to develop ballot chase infrastructure, he said, “Any donor who thinks an organization needs $108 million for a three-state grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign is being taken advantage of.”

Jon Seaton, an RNC-aligned consultant with ties to former Senator John McCain, perplexingly said he “cannot fathom” that much money being spent on get-out-the-vote efforts. “There’s not even enough doors” to knock on, said Seaton in an Associated Press article that labeled him an “expert” and eerily reads like a paid-for press release by a cash-strapped national party increasingly agitated by being lectured by TPUSA-aligned figures.

For some, Turning Point Action has operated as a de facto Republican Party HQ in lieu of a Republican National Committee that remains terrified of engaging grassroots activists over a perceived lack of effort from the RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel.

Conservative activist Scott Pressler, most known for cleaning up public streets and traveling around the country registering voters, has literally tweeted at McDaniel every day for nearly 300 days to coordinate efforts with the national party.

He’s yet to receive a response.

Today is day #292 of my asking the @GOPChairwoman for a response.

— #ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) February 1, 2024

Maloney’s Pennsylvania Chase and Pressler’s get-out-the-vote activism have both been embraced by Turning Point Action, and Pressler says if McDaniel finally reached out to synchronize efforts, he wouldn’t hold her previous disregard for him against her.

“I think transparency and accountability are important, but despite the silence, I believe in leading by example, and I’m singularly focused on working toward making a competent Republican-led government a reality,” Pressler told RedState.

Recently, McDaniel and the RNC announced their “Bank Your Vote” initiative, which they touted as an all-out effort to remedy their mail ballot return deficit.

There’s just one big problem: The RNC’s operation simply calls for voters to visit BankYourVote.com to confirm once they’ve sent in their ballot. 

People who are likely to visit an RNC site are people already likely to vote, so this initiative does virtually nothing to trim the deficit and encourage low frequency voters to participate.

Turning Point Action has ballot chase alliances with smaller like-minded organizations in ten battleground states, but it remains to be seen what coordination, if any, they or smaller groups will receive from the RNC.

“Pennsylvania isn’t waiting around for Ronna,” Maloney says. “No more excuses, we'll raise the money, we’ll knock the doors, we’ll chase the ballots.”