Washington’s state Republican Party seems to be dead set on disenfranchising voters and will even use the mayoral race in Los Angeles to help do it.
The playbook is the same: try to convince voters that voting by mail is fraudulent or that it allows noncitizens to vote. The goal is to sow enough doubt in the system to provide cover for the Republican Party to demand federal intervention into state-run elections.
The latest claim of fraud came from Washington’s GOP party after the Republican candidate for Los Angeles mayor dropped to third place during the dayslong ballot counting.
“Mail-in ballots are how blue states cheat and win elections,” the party wrote on X recently.
How disingenuous and disrespectful of the political process; the same process — mail-in ballots — used to elect Democrats and Republicans to office.
But it’s not surprising.
Earlier this year the party’s state chair, state Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, tried to challenge the security of mail-in ballots when 360 unopened ballots that had been mailed to a private mailbox company in Renton were found and turned over to the GOP state office. Those ballots, from elections in 2022-2025, belonged to 56 registered King County voters, 31 of whom had not updated their addresses. The King County Elections Office is in the process of curing the remaining outdated addresses.
It appears Washington’s GOP has joined President Donald Trump’s nationwide cabal of election deniers. Let’s not forget, he’s the same man who, after losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find him” 11,780 votes after his defeat.
Trump and his followers would have the public believe that the 2016 presidential election was not rigged; the 2020 election was rigged; and the 2024 election was not rigged. Notice a pattern?
Why so much pressure from the right to derail the voting system?
Analysts have predicted that this fall Democrats will become the majority in the House, and possibly even take a small lead in the Senate. Although Trump said recently, “I don’t care about the midterms,” his actions say otherwise.
Since taking office in 2025, Trump has made plenty of attempts to disrupt the normal course of voting for this year’s elections.
He issued an executive order that required mail-in ballots to be counted by Election Day and voters to show proof of citizenship to vote. Washington, along with dozens of other states and the District of Columbia, challenged the order in federal court. A judge sided with the plaintiffs. Their argument? Per the Constitution, elections are the responsibility of the states, not the federal government.
Trump unsuccessfully pressured Congress to pass the Safeguarding American Voting Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), that would have required a passport or birth certificate to register to vote.
This spring Trump issued an executive order that would essentially require the U.S. Postal Service to determine who is eligible to vote by refusing to deliver ballots from anyone not on a national list of registered voters he wants to create. That order is being challenged.
And the Supreme Court is expected soon to rule on whether absentee and mail-in ballots mailed before Election Day but received after Election Day can be counted. That case, filed by the Republican National Committee, would affect at least 15 states, including Washington and Oregon.
Despite the executive orders, legal challenges and social media attacks, mail-in voting is still efficient, convenient and safe.
The GOP may have a plan to make voting more difficult for some. But it’s not going to work, at least not in Washington.
