As Trump Plots to End Mail-In Ballots, Some Republicans Balk
After Donald Trump lashed out against voting by mail, a few Republican officials disagreed — politely! — with the president’s plans for an unconstitutional executive order.
The response underscores the extremism of Trump’s campaign to eliminate a widely used and popular form of voting that has made access to the ballot far easier for millions of voters of all political stripes.
An absentee voter himself, Trump railed against mail-in ballots and “Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES,” in a social media post Monday morning, which he reiterated in rambling remarks at the White House that afternoon.
“If you [end] mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting. And the Republicans have to get smart.”
But a few Republican election officials have suggested they don’t want to “get smart.”
New Hampshire Sec. of State David Scanlan told a local reporter that the executive order would be a bad idea, saying the electoral process there was “fair” and “accurate.”
Similarly questioned by local press, Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger avoided replying directly to Trump’s comments while saying Georgia’s elections, which let anyone registered vote by mail, were extremely secure.
“Everything we worked on builds voter trust, and trust is the real gold standard,” he said.
Don Millis, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that killing mail-in ballots or vote tabulation machines would delay results by weeks for no reason.
“I’ve long felt that the most important thing you can do for election security is to have a paper copy of a ballot,” Millis said. “We do audits after the fact, we do testing of machines beforehand. Tabulators in Wisconsin are not connected to the internet — so it seems to me that it’s very secure.”
A few Republican voting officials were quick to endorse Trump’s diktat. Even though Wyoming has let any qualified voter mail in an absentee ballot for decades, Sec. of State Chuck Gray immediately issued a press release expressing his “complete and total support for President Trump’s statement [Monday] morning on election integrity.”
Arkansas Sec. of State Cole Jester (R) likewise quote-tweeted his support in response to a video of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defending Trump’s social media post.
“Mail-in voting is innately less secure than voting in-person. We call on other states to follow Arkansas’s lead and restrict mail-in voting,” Jester wrote. “Thank you to President Trump for taking action on this.”
Other Republican voting officials offered tepid support for Trump’s statements, emphasizing that elections were already safe.
In an interview, Ohio Sec. of State Frank LaRose (R) said counting votes exclusively by hand would be “less secure,” adding that “just hand-counting something tends to yield an accuracy rate in the 97%, 98% range.”
But a spokesman for LaRose told other reporters he still looked forward to reviewing Trump’s order.
“We’re doing a lot of great things here in the state of Missouri, a lot of the things that President Trump has already said on his election order of March of 2025 as well as his social media post today, we’re already committed to doing and and already doing,” Missouri Sec. of State Denny Hoskins (R) told Spectrum News. “Is there room for improvement? Most certainly, most certainly there is with any process but I think for the most part, Missouri elections are safe and secure.”
The mixed response stands in stark contrast to how GOP election administrators reacted to Trump’s sweeping anti-voting executive order in March. Many showered that order with praise and pledged to enact on his behalf even as courts blocked most of it as unconstitutional.
Any executive order aiming to compel states to ban mail-in ballots would be manifestly unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution grants states the power to establish the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections,” subject to Congress’ ability to “by Law make or alter such Regulations.” At no point during drafting did the Framers think of empowering the president to oversee elections.
Likewise, Trump’s claim that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do,” runs completely contrary to the concept of federalism in general, the 10th Amendment in particular and the GOP’s once-beloved fealty to states rights in the extreme.
Election fraud is vanishingly rare — one Brennan Center report calculated that fewer than 0.0003 percent of votes are intentionally faked, while a Washington Post analysis found just four incidents out of the more than 135 million ballots cast in 2016. Similarly, academic research suggests that the availability of mail-in ballots doesn’t benefit one party or another.
Still, the GOP has often fought to prohibit postal voting, believing it gives the Democrats an edge. During the 2024 election cycle, the RNC launched more than a dozen lawsuits challenging mail-in ballots, even as the party simultaneously spent millions convincing their own voters it was safe in order to close the mail-voting gap with Democrats.
Trump’s repeated advocacy for paper ballots is odd, given that most states already rely on them — 98 percent of votes are cast on paper, according to the Brennan Center. As for handballots, experts say machine tabulators are much faster and more accurate than hand counts.
In contrast, Democrats universally excoriated Trump’s statements.
Arizona Sec. of State Adrian Flores said he’d tell Trump “to pound sand,” and promised legal challenges to defend voting by mail.
In Washington state, Sec. of State Steve Hobbs (D) provided a measured statement, saying “Washington’s vote-by-mail system has long been safe, secure, and accessible, and it continues to serve our voters well,” while Attorney General Nick Brown offered a more forceful rebuke.
“This order follows the president’s public embrace of the Russian dictator’s advice on how to run elections. This is the same president who is still lying about his 2020 election loss. Thankfully, we don’t take advice from election deniers, whether they’re in the Kremlin or the White House,” Brown said in a statement to reporters. “We’ve already sued over the president’s last executive order attempting to seize control of state elections. We will look at this order very closely and not be afraid to litigate any attacks we see coming against Washington’s voting system.”