“In August 2025, President Trump vowed on social media to \u201clead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,\u201d claiming, without proof, that \u201cELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST\u201d if Americans cast their votes by mail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet when the time came for Trump to cast his own vote in Tuesday\u2019s special election in Palm Beach County, Fla., he chose to do it \u2026 by mail<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just like he did in 2020<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The president hasn\u2019t abandoned his outspoken opposition to mail-in voting \u2014 at least not for other people. \u201cMail-in voting means mail-in cheating,\u201d he said during an appearance in Memphis on Monday. \u201cI call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all.\u201d”<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 2024 general election, about 30% of all ballots were cast by mail<\/a>. That\u2019s 48 million votes. In the 2020 election \u2014 which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n For decades, mail-in voting wasn\u2019t seen as controversial \u2014 let alone partisan. In fact, Republicans were even more enthusiastic about the practice than Democrats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why? Because they saw it as a safe and efficient way to make voting easier for rural and older voters \u2014 a key part of their base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n As polls began to show Trump trailing his Democratic challenger Joe Biden by a sizable margin<\/a>, the incumbent seized on mail-in voting as a preemptive explanation for any unfavorable election outcome. \u201c2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,\u201d Trump wrote online that July. \u201cDelay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???\u201d He described mail-in voting as the “biggest risk” to his reelection, and both his campaign and the GOP unsuccessfully sued to stop it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump\u2019s 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<\/a>; only 29% of Republicans did the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump lost to Biden by more than 7 million votes, but he\u2019s been blaming election \u201cfraud\u201d \u2014 including supposedly fraudulent mail ballots \u2014 ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n …<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2020, the president was particularly upset when he seemed to be \u201cwinning\u201d early on election night \u2014 only to see Biden catch up and surpass him as the evening wore on. But that effect \u2014 known as a \u201cred mirage\u201d or a \u201cblue shift<\/a>\u201d \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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,<\/a> and states that rely on universal vote-by-mail haven\u2019t experienced more misconduct because of it<\/a>. One election expert dismissed<\/a> as \u201cnonsensical\u201d any \u201cdistinction\u201d between the two forms of voting \u201cin terms of the potential for fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In truth, fraudulent mail voting is vanishingly rare. According to a Nov. 2025 analysis by the Brookings Institution<\/a> \u2014 which relied on an election fraud database compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group \u2014 there were only between six and 46 cases<\/em> of mail voting fraud in each general election from 2016 to 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That means just 0.000043% of mail ballots \u2014 four out of every 10 million cast \u2014 have been found to be fraudulent during the Trump era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In general, all of Trump\u2019s allegations of widespread, result-altering election fraud \u2014 claims he has been making since he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 \u2014 have been conclusively debunked, both in court and by GOP election officials<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n