Republicans appear to be of two minds about mail voting as we approach the November General Election.

On the one hand, Donald Trump, who has stubbornly, but wrongly, insisted mail voting is rife with fraud that cost him reelection in 2020, has spoken in favor of a Republican National Committee initiative called “Swamp the Vote,” which urges party members to use any means possible, including the mail, to cast their ballots.

On the other hand, the RNC continues to oppose efforts to ensure mail ballots are not rejected for purely technical reasons.

Last week, the committee criticized a legal effort to remove rules empowering Pennsylvania counties to reject mail ballots if voters fail to properly date the outside of the envelope. Liberal groups suing to abolish the date requirement say it serves no purpose, as all mail ballots must be received in county election bureaus by Election Day and the date they were mailed or signed is immaterial.

Such onerous restrictions routinely rob thousands of Pennsylvanians of their votes. Recent reporting by the nonprofit news organizations Spotlight PA and Votebeat concluded Pennsylvania counties rejected nearly 16,000 ballots cast in the April primary for various reasons, including incorrect or missing dates.

Republican resistance to mail voting, regardless of efforts to get GOP voters to at least consider that method, can be chalked up purely to numbers and politics. Roughly three-quarters of mail ballots in Pennsylvania are filed by Democrats, for example, so tighter restrictions on the practice here are most likely to reduce Democratic totals.

And despite persistent claims to the contrary, allegations that mail voting leads to widespread fraud remain unsupported by the evidence. In fact, in recent months, two stories that supposedly provided such evidence have totally fallen apart.

In February, the conservative group Project Veritas and its former leader publicly acknowledged the falsity of claims by a postal worker in Erie that his supervisors illegally backdated mail-in presidential ballots in 2020. The admission came as part of a legal settlement between a postmaster and Project Veritas, which had widely spread those claims.

And late last month, Salem Media Group Inc., the conservative media company behind the film “2000 Mules,” which alleged a nationwide conspiracy to stuff ballot drop boxes in 2020, said it would halt distribution of the widely debunked movie and a related book. Salem issued an apology to a Georgia man who was falsely depicted in the film as illegally putting multiple ballots in a drop box. That retraction also came as part of an out-of-court settlement.

It’s regrettable it has taken so long for Project Veritas and Salem to admit they spread misinformation that has so damaged many Americans’ faith in mail voting and the election system as a whole. Before 2020, 29 states allowed no-excuse mail voting - including five that used mail ballots exclusively - all without controversy. In the 2016 presidential election, one in four voters used ballots that were mailed to them.

Perhaps the softening of the Republican position on mail voting coupled with continued fact-checking of spurious fraud claims will eventually allow us to return to those happy days when mail voting was an uncontroversial option making it easier for Americans to participate in the democratic process.

SCRANTON TIMES-TRIBUNE