President Trump promised Monday to work to end mail-in voting and said work is already underway on an executive order to ban it before the 2026 midterm elections, although the Constitution does not give him this power.
“We, as a Republican Party, are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots,” he said during an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots.”
Why does Trump want to ban mail-in ballots?
“Mail-in ballots are corrupt,” the president said. He suggested the method is susceptible to voter fraud, claiming in California, “it’s so corrupt, where some people get five, six, seven ballots delivered to them.” He has often insisted mail-in ballots can be tampered with or enable people to vote multiple times.
But soon after the 2020 election, Debra Cleaver, founder and CEO of VoteAmerica, a nonpartisan voter information site, dismissed the idea of widespread voter fraud as “a myth.”
“The outgoing ballots have a barcode, and then when you send your ballot in, you put it in a return envelope and that barcode has to match the barcode that was sent out in order for the ballot to be counted,” she explained to CBS News.
After that election, the director of the nation’s cyber security agency, Christopher Krebs, called the 2020 vote “the most secure in American history.”
In 2024, when Mr. Trump won the presidential election, the U.S. Census Bureau said nearly a third of ballots nationwide were cast by mail.
The White House told CBS News in a statement that Democrats had “eroded faith in our elections” with policies like “unfettered mail-in voting.”
“President Trump wants to secure America’s elections and protect the vote, restoring the integrity of our elections by requiring voter ID, ensuring no illegal ballots are cast, and preventing cheating through lax and incompetent voting laws in states like California and New York,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said Monday night.
Trump’s impending executive order to stop mail voting — would it be legal?
In a social media post earlier in the day, the president said of the impending order that it would “help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”
He claimed that the states “are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” and that “[t]hey must do what the…
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