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President Donald Trump has long criticized the integrity of mail ballots. But leading up to the 2024 election, Republicans spent millions of dollars encouraging supporters to vote early, including by mail, hoping to bank votes ahead of Election Day. Even Trump encouraged his supporters to use them.
“ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS,” Trump, then the Republican nominee, posted on social media in April 2024.
That embrace didn’t last. In a new social media post this week that was full of false claims about elections — and signaled solidarity on the topic with Russian President Vladimir Putin — Trump promised to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” among other things, and wrote that an executive order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections” is coming.
Trump is only the latest to swing between support and skepticism of mail voting, a method that has divided the parties for decades.
Mail voting has been in use in American elections since the Civil War, though even then, as now, there were differences in how states administered it. Today, all states allow some form of it, and 28 states allow voters to cast ballots by mail for any reason. Eight states, including Republican-dominated Utah, as well as Washington D.C. allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail.
A bipartisan 2005 report from a commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Republican, concluded that absentee ballots were the greatest potential source of fraud, a finding often cited by critics of the method.
Voter fraud happens, but experts agree that it’s exceedingly rare and leaves a long paper trail. Election officials have multiple safeguards designed to catch any attempt.
Since 2008, an MIT Election Lab project called the Survey of the Performance of American Elections conducted after every federal election has asked voters whether they support running all elections by mail. Republican support was typically flat, while growing numbers of Democrats and independents supported the idea. Then, in 2020, when the pandemic supercharged mail ballot use, Democratic support spiked, while Republican support declined.
The partisan gap shrank considerably in 2024, the survey found, even as mail ballot use dropped from pandemic-fueled heights. But it’s still a bigger gap than it was before the pandemic. The survey also found Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe that voter fraud, including absentee ballot fraud, happens frequently.
Public opinion, of course, shifts. As Votebeat has reported, Republicans in 1991 made Arizona one of the first states in the country to allow voting by mail with no excuse, and the option has been wildly popular. But by 2022, against the backdrop of Trump’s claims about mail-in ballots, Republicans in the state were trying (so far unsuccessfully) to eliminate the option.
Even Carter and the Carter Center urged states to expand mail voting in 2020 during the pandemic, stressing the commission’s earlier conclusion that fraud was rare when safeguards were in place.
It isn’t clear what steps Trump will take to attempt to limit use of mail ballots. Under the Constitution, states have authority over the “time, place and manner of elections.” Congress also has some authority. Any attempt by Trump to eliminate mail voting by fiat would be quickly challenged in the courts, and legal experts stress it would be unlikely to succeed. Federal judges have already blocked key provisions of an executive order on elections Trump issued in March, citing his lack of authority over elections.
Comments from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt this week signaled a legislative effort could be in the works.
“The White House continues to work on this, and when Congress comes back to Washington I’m sure there will be many discussions with our friends on Capitol Hill, and also our friends in state legislatures across the country, to ensure that we’re protecting the integrity of the vote for the American people,” she said.
Ultimately, the fight isn’t just in the courts — it’s in public perception. And there, the verdict is far from settled.
Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.
