Trump reignites his push to ban mail-in voting after meeting with Putin
President Donald Trump said Monday that he will “lead a movement” to end mail-in balloting in elections. The Constitution, Congress and the states figure to have their say, too.
The issue has re-emerged as a fixation for Trump when the most pressing business before him is his effort to mediate a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. It appears to have been rekindled, or at least stoked, by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who reinforced Trump’s unsubstantiated view that postal ballots “rigged” the 2020 election, at a summit Friday in Alaska.
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In an interview with Fox News host Bret Baier on Friday, Trump relayed that “one of the most interesting things” Putin told him during the summit had to do with the unreliability of mail-in voting.
“He said: ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. … It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections,’” Trump said, adding that Putin told him “no country” has mail-in voting.
It’s false that the United States is the only country with vote-by-mail. Other countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, also do. Russia has been heavily criticized, including by the U.S. government, for not having free and fair elections.
Trump then vowed Monday on his Truth Social platform to issue an executive order aimed at banning vote-by-mail.
“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump wrote. “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.”
He also brought it up when he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later in the day, saying, “Mail-in ballots are corrupt.”
But Trump faces high legal and political hurdles to changing the laws governing federal elections: the Constitution, federal and state statutes, the popularity of absentee balloting and the GOP’s success in using mail-in votes in key swing states, such as Trump’s home state, Florida.
The Constitution vests the power for choosing the “times, places and manner” of House and Senate elections in state legislatures, with Congress and the president retaining the right to pass laws overriding them. States also have the authority, under the Constitution, to determine how presidential electors are selected. Federal law requires states to accept mailed ballots from Americans living overseas, including veterans.
“I don’t want to presuppose what might be in the executive order, but I think it’s pretty clear that the times, places and manners of elections are set by the state. That’s right there in the Constitution,” said Matt Weil, vice president of the democracy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank.
Changing those “requires an act of Congress,” Weil said. And doing that would be no small feat when Democrats can block legislation in the Senate.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement, “Senate Democrats will make sure that any and every measure that would make it even more difficult for Americans to vote will be dead on arrival in the Senate and will continue to fight to protect our democracy.”
The Republican National Committee hinted at the power of Congress in a statement Monday supporting Trump’s plan.
“Under his leadership and direction, the RNC is continuing to build upon our historic election integrity efforts from the successful 2024 election cycle, and we will be ready to help implement any and all changes made to our nation’s election laws by the President and Congress,” RNC spokesperson Kiersten Pels said. “The Republican Election Integrity motto is simple: we want to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
Beyond those challenges, many Republicans say Trump is fishing in a politically toxic pond that is better left alone.
“From a pure tactics standpoint, it is not helpful,” said a former Trump campaign official who is working on midterm campaigns.
In his failed 2020 re-election bid, Trump discouraged Republicans from voting early and as absentees, and many of his allies believe that cost him votes. By contrast, in 2024, his advisers persuaded him to embrace those practices on the premise that he could “bank” votes early and not have to spend money trying to mobilize people who had already cast ballots.
Trump’s emerging push is destined to fail, the former campaign official said, and it could tamp down Republican turnout in the process.
“It discourages our use” of mail-in voting, which “is going to exist,” he said, adding that “this is where he starts getting into conspiratorial spaces where independent voters are like ‘What? What is he talking about?’”
Trump’s White House recently hosted a group of secretaries of state to discuss “our ongoing commitment to election integrity,” said Ben Kindel, a spokesperson for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican.
While LaRose still backs Ohio’s mail-in balloting laws, Kindel said, “we look forward to reviewing the details of what the president is proposing. … Changes to Ohio’s voting process require a vote of the General Assembly, so I’m sure we’ll be talking with them as well.”
Trump’s aversion to absentee ballots is perhaps most striking because Republicans’ recent success in Florida elections — in Trump’s home state — has coincided with the state GOP’s mastery of mail-in voting. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has been a longtime proponent of early voting in the state and helped Trump see the benefit to him across swing states in 2024.
Wiles and several other White House officials did not respond to requests for comment.
In Florida, Trump’s push to crack down on mail ballots has hampered Republicans’ decadeslong effort to build their mail programs. Since they began developing a mail-in program in the 1990s, Republicans in the state have dominated their Democratic counterparts using the method Trump detests.
But his message, that the practice is inherently corrupt, has altered the landscape in Florida, allowing Democrats to ramp up their efforts and, for the first time, take an edge in vote-by-mail ballots — even as Trump won the state in 2020 and 2024.
“For years, you had to build into turnout plans the fact that the GOP would have a big advantage in vote by mail,” Steve Schale, a longtime Florida Democratic operative who was an early advocate of his party’s better using mail ballots, said in a message to NBC News. “Using VBM to drive their sporadic voters to vote. We did counter first by driving people to vote in person early, then VBM.”
The slipping of Republicans voting-by-mail advantage has dismayed some of the state’s veteran Republicans.
“There was a time when Republicans owned and relied on voting by mail,” said longtime Republican operative Mac Stipanovich, who helped build Florida’s vote-by-mail program but left the GOP over disagreements with Trump. Stipanovich, who was chief of staff to Republican former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez, said the idea of expanding vote-by-mail to make it easier for all voters to cast ballots is “anathema to the Trump Republican Party, in which voter suppression is dressed up as preventing voter fraud.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has tried to follow Trump’s call to crack down on vote-by-mail in the state, signing sweeping changes to such laws in recent years. They worked as intended. During the 2020 presidential campaign, 4.3 million mail ballots were cast in Florida, a number that dropped to 3 million during last year’s presidential contest.
Some of the changes have concerned even Republican election officials, notably a requirement that voters renew their vote-by-mail ballot requests each election cycle.
“That’s a major thing,” Republican former Florida Sen. Alan Hays, who is now the election supervisor in Lake County, told a Republican-led state legislative committee in February. “Our theory is if they had the luxury of checking a box in that general election return ballot that said, ‘Please keep my vote by mail request valid,’ then we could have continued to send them their vote-by-mail ballot for the special election.”
Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, a DeSantis appointee and Trump supporter, did not reply to a request for comment about Trump’s renewed push to crack down on voting by mail.
“Mail-in voting is good when the rules are applied,” a second former Trump campaign official said. “I just think this is stupid.”
Democrats responded harshly to Trump’s Truth Social post, even as they waited to see the actual proposal. Connecticut Secretary of State Jena Griswold said she is ready to go to court to block him, if necessary.
“Donald Trump is trying to grab power ahead of the 2026 Election and says he will ban vote by mail,” Griswold said. “This is a direct attack on democracy. States oversee elections, not Trump. We will challenge any unlawful executive order and will beat this unconstitutional attempt to disenfranchise millions of Americans.”
Oregon conducts its elections entirely by mail, and it was the first state to hold a presidential election by mail. Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read emphasized that voter fraud is “extremely rare.”
He said he believes Trump “is actively working to corrupt our elections. If he had any inclination to actually understand or care about the American people, he’d know that mail-in voting is really the best way to protect everybody’s right to vote, and that’s especially true for rural folks, for elderly people and for people who work for an hourly wage.”
Read also pointed to the states’ constitutional role in deciding how to conduct elections, adding, “I’m going to protect the rights of Oregonians and the rights of the state to choose how we elect our representatives. This is a real threat.”
Some Trump allies say no one should be surprised by his desire to stop mail-in balloting, as he has long decried the practice of voting in any way other than in person on Election Day.
“It’s the same position the president has always held,” a person familiar with the Trump camp’s thinking said. “That being said, if mail-in ballots still exist come 2026, we will use them and win.”