With New Order, Trump Tries to Kill Off Vote By Mail
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump issued a massive anti-voting executive order that sent lawmakers, election officials and voting rights advocates into a frenzy.
And one provision looks like a bid to advance a goal that for years has been a borderline obsession for Trump: cracking down on voting by mail.
The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to “take all necessary action” against any states that count absentee or mail-in ballots received after Election Day.
“There is no good-faith reason to limit vote-by-mail access, reject ballots without postmarks, or refuse to count ballots that arrive after Election Day,” Debra Cleaver, the founder and CEO of VoteAmerica, said in a statement. “If the administration moves forward with these proposals, they will effectively disenfranchise older voters, rural voters, and military voters.”
Trump’s order is the culmination of years of attacks on absentee ballots and vote by mail. In the months before the 2020 election, Trump repeatedly spread disinformation and conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots as he campaigned for reelection.
“We want to make sure the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be,” he told reporters in September 2020. “I don’t know that it can be with this whole situation — unsolicited ballots. They’re unsolicited; millions being sent to everybody.”
After he lost in 2020, Trump and his acolytes launched a massive disinformation effort to steal the election, falsely claiming that tens of thousands of fraudulent mail-in ballots helped former president Joe Biden win. In the 2024 election cycle, Trump continued his attacks on vote by mail — even after the GOP tried to rein him in on the subject, given how widely it was used in 2020.
The GOP made big gains in mail-in voting in 2024, after mounting a high-profile campaign to tell supporters to take advantage of it. But the actions of the party’s lawyers told a different story. The GOP — including the Republican National Committee (RNC) — filed 24 lawsuits in 2024 to restrict mail-in voting in battleground states, according to Democracy Docket’s litigation tracker. The RNC was also behind a lawsuit in Mississippi to block counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day. The 5th U.S. Circuit of Appeals ultimately ruled in favor of the RNC, blocking all ballots postmarked on or before Election Day, but received after it, from being counted in future elections.
Barbara Smith Warner, former Oregon state representative and executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute, told Democracy Docket she isn’t surprised by Trump’s order.
Warner cited recent reports that Trump planned to issue an order taking control of the U.S. Postal Service, which could give him the power to hamper mail voting — though the White House may be reconsidering that plan.
“We certainly expected something. We just weren’t sure what it was going to be,” Warner said. “I would say that the pre-announcement of the Postal Service was the warning shot. And in both of these situations, it continues to demonstrate that this is a power grab over things that they have no actual right to control.”
Currently 18 states allow mail-in and absentee ballots to be counted if they are received within varying timeframes, so long as they’re postmarked on or before Election Day. But Trump’s order threatens the vote by mail rules in those states.
“Ballots arriving after Election Day is a problem that could easily be solved by providing ballot drop boxes in sufficient numbers,” Cleaver said. “The current administration, however, is wholly opposed to ballot drop boxes and has aggressively litigated against them.”
Restricting mail-in voting could disenfranchise millions of vulnerable voters. There’s clear research and evidence that voting by mail vastly helps citizens with disabilities to vote in federal elections.
“There is a direct correlation between the amount of disabled voters who are able to participate in an election, and how much easier it is to vote at home,” Warner said. “And rural voters depend on their ability to do this and their ability to mail those ballots in.”
The big question of Trump’s order is the same question looming over most of his executive orders: Is this legal?
Minutes after Trump signed the order, both the ACLU and Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias said they plan to sue. (Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.)
But Warner is more concerned about the cumulative effect of all of Trump’s anti-voting maneuvers — the executive order and the attacks on the USPS — and the confusion and uncertainty it creates for voters.
“All of these efforts are all voter suppression. Because confusion is part of voter suppression too,” Warner said. “Then people start to think, ‘My vote doesn’t matter.’ All of this is an attempt to make people believe that their voice doesn’t count, when the truth is none of these attacks would be going on if your votes didn’t matter so much.”