Trump Ally Says Key to Republicans Winning Elections Is to Stop College Kids From Voting

Earlier this month, Kellyanne Conway, the longtime Republican adviser to Donald Trump, warned that “the left” is poised to become a “turnout machine with young people,” thanks to its policies on abortion, guns, and climate change. (Unlike Republicans, Democrats believe abortions should be legal, guns should be restricted, and that the government should actually do something about climate change.) Since adopting policies that are actually popular with voters is apparently out of the question, this obviously leaves the GOP in a tricky position re: winning elections. The solution, according to one top strategist and lawyer? Restricting young people from voting.

In a presentation delivered at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in Nashville on Saturday, Cleta Mitchell, who tried her hardest to help Donald Trump overturn the election in 2020, said that Republicans must work together to limit voting on college campuses, according to The Washington Post. “What are these college campus locations?” she asked, according to audio of the event obtained by the Post. “What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”

If you’re wondering if it’s a crime to make it easier for registered people to vote, the answer is no, though you wouldn’t know it from Mitchell’s presentation. According to the Post, one of her slides read: “The Left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side…theirs. Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake.” Her presentation reportedly focused on campus voting in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia, and Wisconsin, all of which, as the Post notes, “are home to enormous public universities with large in-state student populations.” Mitchell also apparently went after the preregistration of students, which allows 17-year-olds to register to vote leading up to their 18th birthday, so they can cast their ballot as soon as they are eligible. At one point, touching on other restrictions on voting she’d like to put in place, Mitchell reportedly said she is optimistic that Republicans in Virginia will take control of the state Senate this year and eliminate early voting there. “Forty-five days!” she decried in an apparent reference to Virginia’s early voting period. “Do you know how hard it is to have observers be able to watch for that long a period?”

Republicans, of course, have long claimed that early voting and allowing college kids to use their school IDs to cast their ballot has led to widespread voter fraud, the problem there being that they’ve yet to come up with any (real) evidence to bolster their claim.

Speaking of evidence or lack thereof, Mitchell is best known for her work trying to help Trump overturn the last presidential election, and was on the infamous phone call in which he demanded Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger magically “find” him the exact number of votes he needed to beat Joe Biden in the state. (That phone call, as well as Trump and company’s broader attempt to steal the election in Georgia, is currently under criminal investigation by Fulton County district attorney, and could reportedly result in a second indictment for Trump.) After Mitchell resigned from her law firm, she wrote in a letter to family and friends: “Those who deny the existence of voter and election fraud are not in touch with facts and reality.” She later founded the ironically named “Election Integrity Network.”

Mitchell did not respond to the Post’s request for comment