President Donald Trump cast a mail ballot in an upcoming Florida special election, according to Palm Beach County records, while publicly condemning the voting method as fraudulent.
“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all,” Trump said Monday.
Public records indicate his mail ballot was received and counted by election officials in Palm Beach County, where he is registered to vote, though the records do not detail how it was delivered to election officials.
It’s a familiar refrain — and action — from the president, who has often criticized mail voting as rife with fraud. He’s used this rhetoric to push a massive elections overhaul bill in Congress called the SAVE America Act.
That bill does not end mail voting, as the president has suggested in public comments.
“As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel — but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud. As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C. This is a non-story,” White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said.
Trump was in Palm Beach over the weekend; early voting ran through Sunday.
This isn’t the first time Trump has voted by mail while condemning the method: He did so in 2020, too.
At that time, NBC News asked Trump how he reconciled his criticism of mail-in voting with the fact that he voted by mail.
“You know why I voted? Because I happened to be in the White House and I won’t be able to go to Florida and vote,” he said.
“There’s a big difference between somebody who is out of state and does a ballot and everything is sealed and certified and everything else,” he said then, before claiming without evidence that thousands and thousands of people were signing ballots fraudulently in their living rooms. “I think mail-in voting is a terrible thing. I think if you vote, you should go.”
NPR reported at the time that his ballot was hand-delivered by a third party.
Trump blamed the expansion of mail-in voting during the pandemic in 2020 for his loss in his second presidential bid, though there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in American elections. Since then, mail has been at the center of Trump’s repeated false claims about election security.
In his State of the Union address earlier this year, Trump called for “no more crooked mail-in ballots” and said “cheating is rampant in our elections.”
Trump has posted on social media that he would want mail-in voting to be available only in cases of “ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!”
Mail ballots are verified in different ways depending on the state, often by checking a voter’s signature against their voter registration.
Trump made his Monday comments while touting the SAVE America Act, which would add voter ID and documentary proof of citizenship requirements to federal elections nationwide. Trump says he won’t sign any bills until it reaches his desk, but bill is stalled in the U.S. Senate, where it lacks the requisite 60 votes to pass under the chamber’s current rules.
Trump has suggested the SAVE America Act would end mail voting, which is not true. The proposed law would make mail voting more complicated — voters would have to photocopy their photo ID to submit alongside their ballot — but it wouldn’t end the practice.
In his remarks in Memphis on Monday, Trump also reiterated a false claim he’s made before, saying that it was “brought to my attention today that we’re the only country that does mail-in voting.”
Voters cast ballots through the mail in at least 32 countries, according to tracking by a Swedish organization, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, which says it “supports democracy worldwide.”
Florida is having a slate of state legislative elections Tuesday to fill vacant seats, including in the state House district that includes Mar-a-Lago. Trump carried the district by about 11 percentage points in the 2024 presidential race, according to The Downballot, a left-leaning political site that tracks partisan change in state special elections.
Trump endorsed Republican Jon Maples in the race and encouraged people to “get out and vote” in a Truth Social post earlier this month. Maples faces Democrat Emily Gregory.
Since Trump began his second term, Democrats have flipped nine state legislative seats around the country in special elections, in addition to gains in regularly scheduled legislative elections in New Jersey and Virginia last year.
