President Trump keeps casting ballots by mail in order to vote in Florida — even though he has become monomaniacally committed to passing the SAVE America Act, legislation that outlaws most reasons one might cite for acquiring a mail-in ballot.
According to the Associated Press, Trump voted by mail in order to cast a ballot in a Tuesday special election in Florida, even though he was in the state while in-person voting was happening. Here are the details and how the White House is trying to spin it, per the AP:
Palm Beach County voter records show the president voted by mail in a Tuesday special election for state legislative seats and that his ballot has been counted. Early in-person voting in the contest ran through Sunday, when Trump was still at his south Florida estate.
The White House said Tuesday that Trump’s ire is at states using universal mail-in voting, not individual instances of voters needing accommodations to vote by mail. A spokeswoman pushed back specifically at the idea that his voting practice contradicts his push for new federal voting rules.
Countless reports have shown that mail-in voting fraud is incredibly rare, including a 2025 Brookings Institute analysis that found fraud occurs in “only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast, or about four cases out of every 10 million mail votes.”
Trump’s recent visit to Florida suggests that, whatever his reason for voting by mail may have been, it was not included in the SAVE America Act’s list of acceptable reasons why one might do so: illness, disability, military service or travel during Election Day. Trump called mail-in voting “corrupt as hell” just days ago.
Trump has struggled with how exactly to position himself on vote by mail ever since he spent months in the aftermath of the 2020 election railing against the practice, casting it as a sweeping mechanism for voter fraud that supposedly cost him the election. While the total segment of the electorate that voted by mail in 2020 was much higher than usual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump’s own attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, said there was no evidence that there was any widespread fraud that could have impacted the election results.
As the Republican Party tried to move away from the election denial myths, at least in the aftermath of the 2020 election, one of the areas on which it has tried to change its tune was the party’s position on voting by mail — especially after analyses suggesting that the conspiracy theories Trump embraced in the days before the election mostly suppressed turnout among Republicans, who took the president at his word that the election was hopelessly rigged.
Leading up to the 2024 election, Republican primary candidates like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley began campaigning on the idea that Republicans needed to change their tune on certain types of early voting, beyond just encouraging Republican voters to show up in-person on Election Day. Trump’s campaign tried to follow suite, but the candidate himself made it difficult.
I’ve written about the Republican Party’s struggles with mail-in voting and Trump’s bad attitude about it during this specific post-2020 moment a few times. Here’s an excerpt from a March 2024 edition of Where Things Stand:
In February 2023, the Trump campaign first signaled the Republican Party’s revised thinking on the issue of early voting with a fundraising email letting supporters know that Trump was going to start looking into “harvesting ballots in every state we can.”
Shortly after, the RNC launched a Bank Your Vote initiative, designed to encourage Republican voters to take advantage of early-voting opportunities in any state where such actions were legal. To give the new initiative some credibility, the RNC released a video in July of Trump announcing his support for such an endeavor. The hostage-style video featured a docile Trump who both demonized early voting practices as some sort of menacing threat to elections, while also encouraging Republicans to use them.
“Democrats and dangerous groups funded by the far left have simply focused on collecting ballots,” he said. “That’s all they wanted to do, collecting ballots.”
“But you know what? It turned out to be not such a bad idea,” he continued.
— Nicole LaFond
Trump Keeps Rejecting Disaster Aid to Blue States and Approving It for Red Ones
President Trump has approved only 23 percent of disaster aid requests from states that have a Democratic governor plus two senators that are Democrats since the start of his second term, according to new reporting from Politico’s E&E News. Compare that to the fact that he has approved 89 percent of the requests for similiar disaster aid when its made by a state with a Republican governor and two Republican senators.
Per Politico:
There has never been such a sharp partisan disparity in the approval of federal disaster funds since FEMA was created in 1979, according to a review of 2,500 natural disaster declarations by POLITICO’s E&E News.
The denials have blocked Democratic-led states from getting a total of $250 million in disaster aid that would have been approved by every previous president including Trump in his first term, E&E News found.
During his first term, there were no such discrepancies in the aid request approvals for Republican versus Democratic-run states.
— Nicole LaFond
Minnesota Sues Trump Admin
After the Trump administration boxed local and state investigators out of its probe of shootings by federal officers in the state — which include the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — Minnesota officials are suing the Trump administration for access to the information they need to conduct their own investigations. Per the AP:
The lawsuit claims that the federal government reneged on its promise to cooperate with state investigations after the surge of federal law enforcement in Minneapolis, and are seeking a court order demanding that the Trump administration comply.
“We are prepared to fight for transparency and accountability that the federal government is desperate to avoid,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told reporters.
— Nicole LaFond
Schumer Says Dems Need ICE Reforms in Any DHS Funding Deal
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters on Tuesday that Senate Democrats continue to be united in their calls for ICE reform — which they have been calling for since before the ongoing Department of Homeland Security-specific shutdown began in February.
“We need reforms to ICE. We need to rein in the violence. We have never changed our position,” Schumer said when asked about Republicans’ latest offer to restore funding to the majority of the agencies that fall under the DHS including FEMA and TSA. “This does not have any reforms in ICE.”
A Republican offer that would reportedly fund all parts of DHS except ICE’s removal operations — which Republicans say they plan to address later with a new reconciliation bill — gained support overnight within the Republican caucus. That came shortly after a group of Senate Republicans managed to convince President Donald Trump that they can also address the SAVE America Act, which currently does not have the votes to overcome a Dem filibuster, in the same party-line reconciliation bill. Whether that will actually be possible in practice is a toss up.
“They’ve sent us an offer. We’ll be sending them an offer back, and I can assure you it’ll contain significant reform in it,” Schumer added when pressed on if the Democrats are a “no” on the GOP’s offer.
Schumer also pointed out that Senate Democrats have repeatedly tried to get Republicans on board with a bill that would fund all agencies under the DHS umbrella, except ICE and CBP, and they have refused every time. After a weekend of concerning incidents at airports across the nation, Republicans proposed the measure that, while similar to what Democrats have been trying to pass, would only carve out funding for ICE removal operations.
— Emine Yücel
In Case You Missed It
More from Emine Yücel: Senators Are Talking About a New Deal to Partially End the DHS Shutdown
Morning Memo: Pam Bondi Finally Relents in US Attorney Fiasco
Josh Marshall: Iran Has Trump Over a (Oil) Barrel. Sad.
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Fox News-Pilled SCOTUS Invents Wild Hypotheticals to Justify Curtailing Right to Vote by Mail
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