Washington (AFP) - For years, Donald Trump has denigrated mail-in voting as a source of massive election fraud -- yet in a jaw-dropping turnaround the Republican presidential candidate has now become a proponent.

The 77-year-old former president announced the launch this week of "Swamp The Vote USA," a drive to encourage postal ballots, despite blaming them for his defeat in 2020 in an election he still falsely insists was stolen by Joe Biden.

"Republicans must win and we will use every appropriate tool to beat the Democrats because they are destroying our country," Trump said in a statement launching the initiative.

"Whether you vote absentee, by mail, early in-person or on election day, we are going to protect the vote."

It is something of a dramatic about-face for a candidate who has described mail-in voting over the last four years -- without evidence -- as "a whole big scam," "out of control," an opportunity for "massive cheating," and "inaccurate and fraudulent."

After winning the Iowa caucuses in January the mercurial billionaire said elections with mail-in voting were "crooked" and at a February rally in Michigan he called the practice "totally corrupt."

But the whiplash-inducing reversal can likely be put down to pure pragmatism, say analysts.

Around 90 percent of the electorate cast their ballots in-person on election day in 1996, but recent decades have seen a dramatic turn to non-traditional methods of early voting.

Legal defeats

The 2020 cycle, with the Covid-19 pandemic raging, was the first in which more people cast ballots by mail than in-person on election day. 

Democrats outnumbered Republicans using absentee or mail-in ballots by 58 percent to 32 percent, according to polling from the Pew Research Center.

"Tens of millions of American voters prefer early or mail-in voting, including Republicans," Ray Brescia, of Albany Law School, in upstate New York, told AFP.

"The change of strategy is likely tied to the realization that discouraging those forms of voting might have suppressed Trump's own voters in the last election."

The new Republican acceptance of alternative balloting methods first became apparent as Donald Trump Jr. backed early voting in 2022. 

Other converts include longtime Trump ally Kellyanne Conway, who has come around to early voting, and Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley, who pitched mail-in voting at a New York Republican gala in April.

Yet the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have faced accusations of inconsistency, as they continue to fight mail-in voting in court.

Republican groups have recently lost lawsuits in New York, Illinois and North Dakota targeting early voting or the counting of ballots after election day. They are embroiled in further court fights in Nevada and Mississippi.

'Playing the game'

Despite his attacks on the practice, Trump cast mail ballots twice in Florida in 2020 primary elections and used absentee ballots in New York in 2018 and 2017. But he voted in-person in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

His messaging has been as mixed as his voting habits, hinting that he might still harbor private doubts about his new direction.

"Our goal will be one-day voting with paper ballots -- very simple -- and a voter ID. But until then, Republicans must win," he told Wisconsin rally-goers in April, in a grudging concession.

As recently as May, in New Jersey, Trump encouraged voting by mail but also praised local Republican officials for resisting the practice, calling it "largely corrupt."

As Trump's rhetoric has undermined grassroots voting drives, activists in his home state of Florida have stood apart from much of the party by embracing mail-in voting since the 2000 election cycle.

Yet the Republican-run state has seen demand for mail-in ballots drop amid new bureaucratic restrictions against the practice, from 4.3 million requests in 2022 to just two million for the March midterms.

"Trump's willingness to finally embrace playing the game the way that it's played is the most important political issue he's flipped on since becoming president of the United States," Brian Mudd, a conservative talk radio host in Trump's backyard of Palm Beach County, said on Thursday.  

"And if he's to become president once again, this marked change in philosophy will be a reason why."