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Voting Wrongs
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President Donald Trump utilized mail-in voting for a special election in Florida this week, despite years of falsely claiming that the method is rife with fraud and shouldn’t be trusted.
Voting records from Palm Beach County, Florida, indicate that Trump voted by mail for the election taking place on Tuesday. Mail-in ballots were due by this Sunday, meaning Trump cast his ballot sometime before this weekend.
News of Trump voting by mail comes as he has spent several weeks deriding the voting method and calling for the passage of the SAVE America Act voting restrictions bill, which includes limitations on mail-in voting.
“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” Trump said on Monday. “I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all.”
Trump has also demanded restrictions on mail-in voting on Truth Social. “NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!)” he wrote in a post earlier this month.
By his own standards, Trump violated the terms he says mail-in ballots should abide by. As a frequent traveler to his Palm Beach home at Mar-a-Lago, he would have had ample opportunity to vote in person. Indeed, Trump was in Florida on Monday, and could have opted to stay there until Tuesday morning to cast his ballot before returning to Washington, D.C.
Trump has railed against mail-in voting for years, and became fixated on ending the practice during the 2020 presidential election, which took place during the COVID pandemic. During that year’s race, millions of Americans opted to vote by mail in order to avoid getting sick. Trump decried the idea of voting by mail, planting seeds of doubt in the election’s outcome months before Election Day.
Notably, people planning to vote for Democratic candidate Joe Biden were more likely to use mail-in voting than Republican voters for Trump.
When the initial returns on Election Night started trickling in, they showed Trump with big leads in many states, only for those leads to tighten and, in some states, eventually flip when mail-in ballots were counted last in the tallies. Trump and his allies wrongly claimed the change in the trajectory of the final vote was proof that mail-in ballots had fraudulently altered the outcome.
Trump’s claims of election interference, including on mail-in voting, went through vigorous tests, including dozens of federal court hearings and multiple audits, some by organizations friendly to him. His claims of fraud were never proven, and several fact-checks have debunked them.
Yet Trump has continued to peddle wild conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. In December, for example, he shared a video that falsely alleged the pandemic “only came to the U.S. so Democrats could use mail-in ballots to steal the 2020 election.”
Mail-in voting remains a popular method of casting ballots, and will likely play an important role in the 2026 midterms. Close to 3 in 10 voters used mail-in voting in the 2024 presidential election, with 37 percent of Democrats voting by mail and only 24 percent of Republicans doing so that year.
Several democracy and voting rights organizations tout mail-in voting as an option for voters who want to submit their ballots early or who don’t have the ability to vote in person on Election Day.
“Voting by mail is a vital ballot-casting option for millions of voters — especially those with disabilities or accessibility issues, caregivers who cannot make it to in-person polling places, people with strict work schedules, voters with crowd sensitivity, people who are immunocompromised, and military and overseas voters,” an explainer on the League of Women Voters website explains.
“Mail voting is a safe, secure, and reliable method used by voters of all political parties” that has “been in use since it helped soldiers cast ballots during the Civil War,” the Bipartisan Policy Center points out.
“Voting at home is a time-tested, secure method of voting. … [V]oting systems have numerous safeguards in place to protect voters and keep ballots secure,” the National Vote at Home Institute says.
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