Republicans Should Not Bet On Ballot Harvesting

We understand the impulse among some Republicans to throw up their hands in frustration when it comes to ballot harvesting. They advocate rapidly deploying their own ballot-harvesting operations in advance of the 2024 election...

Given the current political and legal landscape, it is hard to imagine “emergency” election measures taken in response to Covid-19 in 2020 ever being rolled back, as they have suddenly brought into reality an objective that Democrats have been working toward for decades...

Democrats currently execute a ballot-harvesting game vastly more complex, sophisticated, expensive, and labor-intensive than most Republicans even remotely understand...

In our recent work, we describe the sprawling, lavishly funded network of 501(c)(3) organizations and charitable foundations that are dedicated to changing election laws and norms in ways that favor Democratic candidates. 

The Democrats’ powerful election-industrial complex consists of two types of institutions: national types devoted to election strategy and policy, and local types, including public-sector unions, devoted to fielding and deploying boots-on-the-ground election activists...

Public-sector unions comprise a vast potential workforce to aid in solidifying the grip of Democrats on the election process in their states through the sheer manpower they can deploy for vote canvassing, voter registration, assistance in early voting, and ballot harvesting...

Even if Republicans somehow managed to gain the financial resources to fund their own ballot-harvesting operations, it would take many years to recruit sufficient numbers of conservatives and develop the leadership to effectively mount a counter to the Democrats’ election activism ground game...

Moreover, Democratic ballot harvesters are guided by sophisticated statistical models and data mining schemes devised by an army of highly skilled, Ph.D.-level data analysts....