President Trump revealed Monday that he intends to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” before the 2026 midterms, adding explicitly that he thinks ending the practice will benefit Republicans.
“We gotta stop mail-in voting and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy. If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not going to have many Democrats get elected,” Trump said Monday during his Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”
Trump’s attention has seemingly flitted back to the voting method after he said that Russian President Vladimir Putin told him Friday that the 2020 election was “rigged” due to vote-by-mail.
“He said: ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity of Putin after the Friday summit in Alaska. “‘It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections,’” he said, adding that Putin told him that no other country in the world has mail-in voting, a lie Trump regurgitated in his Truth Social post.
Trump also vowed to get rid of voting machines, which are more accurate and cheaper than hand counting.
Trump has condemned mail-in voting for years, with a brief retreat in 2024 following months of lobbying from his advisers that losing mail-in ballots could cost him the election. Republicans had also poured millions of dollars into coaxing their voters to trust vote-by-mail again — after embracing Trump’s 2020 conspiracy theories that demonized the practice — and saw tangible improvement in the 2024 election. Trump said in his Truth Social screed that he’ll lead the “movement” by way of an executive order.
Trump signed a different executive order in March attempting a historic federal takeover of state-run elections. Among its mandates is that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission withhold federal funding from states that count ballots received after Election Day — a punishment that, if enacted, would befall close to 20 states (including Washington D.C.). Most of the order is currently blocked after a group of states filed a lawsuit in federal court.
Donald Palmer, the Republican chair of the supposedly independent U.S. Election Assistance Commission, shares Trump’s mission, telling a House committee this spring: “There should be a deadline for absentee or mail ballots prior to Election Day, and then they should be returned by Election Day.”
The Trump administration, though, isn’t alone in its attempt to restrict voting.
On the legal front, a Republican member of Congress and a couple presidential elector nominees — backed by the right-wing group Judicial Watch — are taking their quest to gain more control over state election practices to the Supreme Court. The case, which the Court will hear in October, will determine whether Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL) and the elector nominees have standing to challenge Illinois’ extended window for accepting ballots postmarked by Election Day. Two lower courts have found that they can’t bring the case, as they haven’t suffered an injury from the state’s policy.
The Republicans argue that the federally established Election Day preempts Illinois’ grace period to accept mail-in ballots, making Election Day the last day they can be received. The Supreme Court is only taking up the question of whether the candidates have standing to sue — but a decision in their favor would dramatically lower the bar for federal candidates to challenge state voting practices, and would almost certainly be followed by litigation challenging vote-by-mail.
Red states, too, are cracking down on their own vote-by-mail practices, Trump’s ire having seemingly trumped the concern that disenfranchising those who vote absentee — which includes old people and rural voters — will seriously hurt the Republican vote share.
Kansas, North Dakota and Utah have all ended their vote-by-mail grace periods — in Kansas, over the veto of Gov. Laura Kelly (D).
The renewed hostilities come alongside another Trump effort to manipulate the midterm vote, as he pushes red states to carry out a highly unusual process of mid-decade redistricting — the better to eke out Republican gerrymanders that lead to safe red House seats.
Trump isn’t bothering to hide his motives in either gambit; he thinks that vote-by-mail and the current constitution of the House map favor Democrats to take back power in the 2026 midterms, so he’s using executive, legal and state levers to cheat his way into an advantage.
