“In August 2025, President Trump vowed on social media to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” claiming, without proof, that “ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST” if Americans cast their votes by mail.
Yet when the time came for Trump to cast his own vote in Tuesday’s special election in Palm Beach County, Fla., he chose to do it … by mail.
Just like he did in 2020.
The president hasn’t abandoned his outspoken opposition to mail-in voting — at least not for other people. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” he said during an appearance in Memphis on Monday. “I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all.””
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In the 2024 general election, about 30% of all ballots were cast by mail. That’s 48 million votes. In the 2020 election — which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic — the number was even higher: nearly 66 million votes. Since 2000, more than 250 million votes have been cast via mailed-out ballots in all 50 states.
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For decades, mail-in voting wasn’t seen as controversial — let alone partisan. In fact, Republicans were even more enthusiastic about the practice than Democrats.
Why? Because they saw it as a safe and efficient way to make voting easier for rural and older voters — a key part of their base.
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As polls began to show Trump trailing his Democratic challenger Joe Biden by a sizable margin, the incumbent seized on mail-in voting as a preemptive explanation for any unfavorable election outcome. “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” Trump wrote online that July. “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” He described mail-in voting as the “biggest risk” to his reelection, and both his campaign and the GOP unsuccessfully sued to stop it.
Trump’s rhetoric effectively polarized the practice. Democrats (who were already more prone to avoid pandemic-era gatherings) embraced it; Republicans resisted. As a result, 58% of Democrats wound up voting by mail that year; only 29% of Republicans did the same.
Trump lost to Biden by more than 7 million votes, but he’s been blaming election “fraud” — including supposedly fraudulent mail ballots — ever since.
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In 2020, the president was particularly upset when he seemed to be “winning” early on election night — only to see Biden catch up and surpass him as the evening wore on. But that effect — known as a “red mirage” or a “blue shift” — is easily explained by the fact that if Republicans tend to vote in person and Democrats tend to vote by mail, Republican votes will tend to be counted before Democratic votes.
At times, Trump has also tried to distinguish between absentee voting and universal vote-by-mail. But the same multistep security and verification methods apply to both processes, and states that rely on universal vote-by-mail haven’t experienced more misconduct because of it. One election expert dismissed as “nonsensical” any “distinction” between the two forms of voting “in terms of the potential for fraud.”
In truth, fraudulent mail voting is vanishingly rare. According to a Nov. 2025 analysis by the Brookings Institution — which relied on an election fraud database compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group — there were only between six and 46 cases of mail voting fraud in each general election from 2016 to 2022.
That means just 0.000043% of mail ballots — four out of every 10 million cast — have been found to be fraudulent during the Trump era.
In general, all of Trump’s allegations of widespread, result-altering election fraud — claims he has been making since he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 — have been conclusively debunked, both in court and by GOP election officials.
Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen, and then he tried to steal that election himself, and is now trying to steal future elections. US democracy is under threat.
If you are disenfranchising millions of Americans to stop a few dozen potential illegal voters, then your goals are to make it harder to vote, rather than to secure the election, unless you are just ignorant of the facts.
Kansas tried a documentary proof of citizenship law in 2011 and it blocked 31,000 citizens from voting–12% of first time registrants.
The founders intentionally did not give the president the power to regulate elections because they feared something like a king or a dictator. Yet, Trump is claiming such powers.
“In every form, the SAVE Act would require American citizens to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Our research shows that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents. Roughly half of Americans don’t even have a passport. Millions lack access to a paper copy of their birth certificate. The SAVE Act would disenfranchise Americans of all ages and races, but younger voters and voters of color would suffer disproportionately. Likewise, millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports would face extra steps just to make their voices heard.
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The SAVE Act solves nothing. All available evidence, including from the Trump administration itself, indicates that only American citizens vote and the exceptions are vanishingly rare. States that have combed through their voter rolls looking for illegally cast votes — like Louisiana and Utah did recently — have repeatedly confirmed that fact.”
“In effect, the SAVE Act introduces a documentation requirement for a law that has existed for decades: the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 explicitly prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
To do so, the SAVE Act amends the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by introducing a requirement for individuals to provide proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.
Registration and voting attempts by noncitizens are routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities, and there is no evidence that attempts at voting by noncitizens have ever been significant enough to impact any election’s outcome. In fact, there is ample evidence to indicate that registration and voting by noncitizens is few and far between.
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According to the U.S. Department of State, examples of primary citizenship evidence include a birth certificate, a U.S. passport, a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, a Certificate of Citizenship, or a Naturalization Certificate. (While Real IDs are often assumed to be a reliable proxy for citizenship, they do not definitively establish citizenship.)
Although at least one of these documents are in theory available to most citizens, not all voters have them readily available.
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9% of all eligible voters do not have, or do not have easy access to, documentary proof of citizenship.
52% of registered voters do not have an unexpired passport with their current legal name.
11% of registered voters do not have access to their birth certificate.
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Additionally, birth certificates often lack information that matches a person’s current identity. For instance, someone who has changed their name through marriage or court order may need to present a third document (such as a marriage certificate) to join their proof of citizenship (e.g., birth certificate) with their proof of identity (e.g., driver’s license), further decreasing the likelihood that a voter will have the appropriate documentation on hand to successfully register.
Even if voters were to provide documentary proof of citizenship, verifying the authenticity of those documents is an inherently complex task, one that election officials and motor vehicle departments often do not have the resources or training to perform.
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Front-end verification risks burdening eligible voters who lack ready access to proof of citizenship, while back-end verification hinges on the accuracy, completeness, and interoperability of government databases. Between the two approaches, we encourage policymakers to prioritize back-end verification over front-end verification because it places the responsibility on government officials rather than voters to prove citizenship.
Under a back-end approach, it’s essential that states give voters identified as potential noncitizens ample opportunity to prove their citizenship, given that many government databases are outdated or otherwise incorrect. Instead of automatic cancellation after a short notice period, BPC recommends election officials place voters flagged as potential noncitizens into a “challenged” or “pending verification” status. Under this approach, a voter would remain registered but be required to affirm their citizenship before they can vote again.”
“As Georgia’s top elections official, Raffensperger rebuked efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results, turning him into a target of attack from Trump and his allies for years. That has created a deep tear between the Georgia secretary of state and Republicans in his state, many of whom continue to echo the president’s false claims of widespread fraud.
Now, Raffensperger is running for governor — and Trump just made 2020 the top issue in the GOP primary again.”
“President Donald Trump is ratcheting up pressure on Republicans to redraw congressional maps across the country, going as far as weighing a primary challenge to New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte if she continues avoiding a remapping effort in her state.”
“U.S. military operations in space will soon be led from Huntsville, Alabama. President Donald Trump announced he is moving U.S. Space Command headquarters out of Colorado Springs, Colorado, citing the state’s use of mail-in voting as a “big factor” in the decision.
“The problem I had with Colorado, one of the big problems, they do mail-in voting,” Trump said. “When a state is for mail-in voting, that means they want dishonest elections … so that played a big factor also.”
Trump also touted his support in conservative Alabama and slammed Colorado’s Democratic governor as he announced the relocation, the latest move in a years-long partisan tussle over the military’s space program.”
“A conservative election researcher whose faulty findings on voter data were cited by President Donald Trump as he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss has been appointed to an election integrity role at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Pennsylvania activist Heather Honey is now serving as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans
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The political appointment, first reported by Democracy Docket, shows how self-styled election investigators who have thrown themselves into election conspiracy theories since 2020 are now being celebrated by a presidential administration that indulges their false claims.
Her new role, which didn’t exist under President Joe Biden, also comes as Trump has used election integrity concerns as a pretext to try to give his administration power over how elections are run in the U.S.
The president has ordered sweeping changes to election processes and vowed to do away with mail ballots and voting machines to promote “honesty” in the 2026 midterms, despite a lack of constitutional authority to do so. Trump’s Department of Justice also has demanded complete state voter lists, raising concerns about voter privacy and questions about how the federal government plans to use the sensitive data.
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Since 2020, she also has led a variety of election research groups whose flawed analyses of election data have fueled right-wing attacks on voting procedures, including in battleground states Pennsylvania and Arizona.
In 2020, her election research misrepresented incomplete state voter data to falsely claim that Pennsylvania had more votes reported than voters. Trump echoed the falsehood during his speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, saying Pennsylvania “had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.” Shortly after, his supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden from becoming president.
In 2021, Honey was involved in the Arizona Senate’s partisan audit of election results in Maricopa County, she confirmed in a podcast interview with a GOP lawyer. That review in the state’s most populous county, which spent six months searching for evidence of fraud, was described by experts as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, it came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden actually won by more votes than the official results certified in 2020.
In 2022, Honey’s organization Verity Vote issued a report claiming that Pennsylvania had sent some 250,000 “unverified” mail ballots to voters who provided invalid identification or no identification at all.
Officials in Pennsylvania said the claim flagrantly misrepresented the way the state classified applications for mail-in and absentee ballots. The “not verified” designation did not mean the voter didn’t provide accurate identification information, nor did it mean their ID wasn’t later verified.
Former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he received dozens of public records requests related to elections from Honey during his time in office, which took up “scores of hours of staff time.” He said he was surprised to hear she had been elevated to a position of such “authority and responsibility.”
From what he saw, Richer said, she’s “not a serious auditor.”
Honey’s hiring at the Department of Homeland Security comes amid reports that Trump’s administration has met with several other election conspiracy theorists in recent months.”
“due to structural changes in our politics, which are largely due to a realignment in our politics based on education levels, even if the Democrats were to have a really great election cycle in the midterms, there’s going to be a limit to how many seats they can win back due to these structural changes.
If you look at Trump’s job approval on issues, he’s underwater on everything, particularly way, way lower now on the economic ratings, on inflation, and even immigration now is underwater. So you would think that his total job approval, currently around 44 percent, would be lower.
The bottom line is based on historical standards, Trump and the Republicans should be headed to a really bad midterm election. But because of these changes in our politics, due to realignment based on education, they’ll be more insulated than they would have been in the past from a tsunami-type of midterm.”