Trump Doubles Down on Mail-In Ballot Broadside: GOP Will Do ‘Everything Possible to Get Rid’ of Them

Sitting in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy looking on quietly, President Donald Trump launched into a tirade against mail-in voting. 

The outburst followed up on a social media post published earlier Monday morning in which Trump said he wanted to eliminate mail-in voting and promised a new executive order on the issue. 

“Mail in ballots are corrupt,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “Mail in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are going to do everything possible [to] get rid of mail-in ballots.” 

Trump emphasized his partisan motivations during the remarks. “The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy,” Trump said of mail voting. “If you have mail-in voting, you’re not going to have Democrats get elected.”

“If you [end] mail in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected,” Trump continued. “That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting. And the Republicans have to get smart.”

Trump added that the executive order was being drafted “by the best lawyers in the country” at that very moment. 

Trump sat down with Zelenskyy to take reporters’ questions ahead of peace talks with other European leaders aimed at brokering a deal to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. 

Trump was asked about his post earlier Monday, setting off a rambling three-minute response. 

“That’s very off topic — just really quickly,” Trump said before railing against voting by mail, ballot counting machines, transgender athletes, and crime in Washington D.C.

“The other thing we want changed are the machines,” Trump said. “For all of the money they spend — it’s approximately 10 times more expensive than paper ballots, and paper ballots are very sophisticated, with the watermarked paper and everything else — we would get secure elections, we’d get much faster results.”

Most states already rely on paper ballots — 98 percent of votes are cast on paper, according to the Brennan Center — using machines to simply count them. Experts say machine tabulators are much faster and more accurate than hand counts.

Like in his earlier post, Trump said that most countries do not allow for mail-in ballots, which is untrue. His claims that mail-in ballots allow for voter fraud are also unsubstantiated, and election officials have repeatedly shown mail-in ballots to be safe and secure.   

Trump also repeated a debunked claim alleging former President Jimmy Carter opposed mail-in voting. 

“Even Jimmy Carter — with this commission they set up — he said, ‘the one thing about mail in voting, you will never have an honest election,’” Trump said. 

Carter never said anything close to that. The former president co-chaired a commission in 2005 that looked at U.S. election administration broadly and noted that mail-in voting requires additional safeguards to be secure. States that have adopted postal ballots have done so with those security provisions in place.

Democrats and election experts widely condemned Trump’s post. House Administration Committee ranking member Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) called the forthcoming executive order a “corrupt and ugly power grab.”

“Donald Trump is scared of voters, so he’s attacking vote-by-mail and rigging the rules to protect himself,” Morelle wrote on X.  

University of California Los Angeles law professor Rick Hasen, called Trump’s assertion that states are merely agents of the federal government, “wrong and dangerous,” on his blog.

“The Constitution does not give the President any control over federal elections,” Hasen wrote.

The U.S. Constitution provides states the primary authority to regulate elections, and then allows Congress to “at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” The Framers never contemplated empowering the president to oversee elections. 

In a press release, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State (DASS) vowed to fight any executive order in court. 

“Trump is doing anything he can to distract the American public from his failures – his disastrous trade war that is raising costs on American families, and his plan to eviscerate Medicaid,” DASS Executive Director Ariel Hayes said. “His latest distraction – calling for an end to mail-in voting – is anti-democracy, anti-freedom, and anti-American. It would silence voters and usher in a wave of authoritarianism unlike anything we’ve seen.”

On X, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) suggested Trump’s post was just another attempt at distracting the media from his administration’s ongoing scandals. “At this point it’s obvious Trump is in the Epstein Files,” Swalwell wrote. “But posts like this make you ask, ‘just how bad is it?’”

Pamela Smith, CEO and president of Verified Voting, an advocacy for responsible use of technology in elections, released a statement denouncing Trump’s rhetoric.

“Elections in the United States are run by the states as an intentional protection in our Constitution to prevent concentrated executive power. No president has the authority to dictate how Americans vote. Most voters already vote with paper ballots,” Smith said. “Instead of undermining options like mail or early voting that already use paper ballots, the federal government should prioritize real solutions that would strengthen our elections, like expanding robust post-election audits, re-instating cybersecurity protections and ensuring the stable support and funding local election officials need to administer our democracy — a nonpartisan priority for everyone.”

Trump himself voted by mail in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. 

Earlier in the press conference, Trump seemed surprised and bemused to learn that Ukraine suspends elections during wartime. “During the war you can’t have elections?” Trump said. “So, let’s say in three and a half years from now, you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody — no more elections? Oh, that’s good. I wonder what the fake news will say to that.”

Toward the end of his first term, Trump repeatedly suggested postponing the 2020 presidential election and called for the termination of the Constitution to overturn the results of the election.

Jacob Knutson contributed reporting. This story has been updated.