President Donald Trump has often shown how far he’ll go to try to flout the will of voters. That’s what makes his new renewed obsession with mail-in ballots so sinister.
Trump falsely claimed in a Truth Social post Monday that voting by mail is a “scam” that allows Democrats to cheat. He promised an executive order to also target another safe election tool — voting machines — and inaccurately claimed he had the authority to dictate how elections are run before the 2026 midterms.
Incredibly, he appears to have been partly acting on the advice of Russian President Vladimir Putin, an authoritarian who destroyed Russia’s post-Soviet Union democracy and who interfered in the 2016 election that Trump won.
Trump’s fixation on mail-in voting is not new. His suspicion was sent into overdrive after he lost the presidency in 2020 in an election that saw an expansion of mail-in ballots to help keep voters safe during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The president sensed the danger to his hopes of a consecutive second term from a high turnout as early as the second quarter of 2020. He falsely claimed in interviews and on social media that foreign states could interfere in mail-in voting and that postal balloting would allow fraud. In June of that year, he predicted the “Election disaster of our time” and a “RIGGED ELECTION” on Twitter.
At the time, his warnings were seen as an odd quirk and were not supported by many senior Republicans. They also frustrated GOP strategists who were urging their voters to use mail-in ballots during the health emergency, especially since Democratic voters were traditionally more likely to use postal voting.
But in retrospect, and following the experience of Trump’s refusal to accept the result of the 2020 election, his comments look more alarming: They heralded a historic attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair presidential election.
And they mean his newest remarks on the topic should be taken seriously. Taken together with more recent attempts to sway future elections, they raise alarm bells about the midterms and the next presidential election. Since Trump lacks the Constitutional power to dictate election rules in the states, he may also be laying the groundwork to claim a Republican loss in the midterm elections — often a rite of passage for incumbent presidents — is illegitimate.
Trump is again using his position to undermine elections
Since returning to power, Trump has escalated his attempts to use executive power and the visibility of his office to tilt the midterms toward Republicans and to undermine democracy more generally.
Trump ordered Texas Republicans to initiate an unprecedented midterm redistricting drive to net five new GOP seats by 2026, which could be critical given the current tiny Republican House majority. The move set off a similar move by Gov. Gavin Newsom to draw new Democratic seats in California, which may trigger a nationwide partisan redistricting wave that could further damage democracy.
The president has also rewarded those who did his dirty work in attacking elections, granting hundreds of pardons and commutations to supporters who were convicted and jailed for the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, an attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s election win the previous November.
Trump’s supporters have shown a similar disregard for the right of voters in each state to choose their leaders, even those who fiercely resisted federal power in previous capacities.
In June, Homeland Security Secretary and former South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem explained the deployment of National Guard troops and active-duty US Marines to Los Angeles amid protests against Trump’s immigration policies. She said they planned to stay to “liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership” of its elected Democratic representatives. In the event, the soldiers did nothing of the sort and mostly just guarded federal properties, but the deployments and her rhetoric were in keeping with Trump’s authoritarian turn.
More recently, Trump has sent military reservists and federal agents into the streets of Washington, DC, as part of an anti-crime crackdown. He’s now importing National Guard members from Republican states in a show of force over a city that has repeatedly and overwhelmingly voted to reject him in national elections. There are concerns this could be a template he will later apply to Democratic cities in the states.
With all this in mind, the possibility of an attempt by Trump to block or delegitimize the rights of states — including those that return mostly Democratic delegations — to run their own elections must be taken seriously.
Putin’s advice on mail-in voting
Trump vented about mail-in voting during an Oval Office appearance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday. “Mail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots,” the president said, firing off a torrent of falsehoods about voter fraud.
His latest tirade against mail-in voting may have been sown by Putin, an enemy of the United States, during their summit meeting in Alaska last week.
“You know, Vladimir Putin said something — one of the most interesting things. He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.’ He said, ‘It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections,” Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News immediately after the summit.
Trump said Putin told him that he won the 2020 by “so much” and that there would have been no war in Ukraine had Trump held office in 2022. “And he said, ‘And you lost it because of mail-in voting.’ … Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.”
It took only two days for Trump to launch an early-morning online tirade against mail-in voting and to initiate a new attempt to halt it in the United States.
Still, Trump’s capacity to do more than try to discredit mail-in voting is questionable.
There is no official role for presidents in administering federal elections — a point driven home in several of the criminal indictments he faced for his role in seeking to overturn the 2020 election.
The Constitution states that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” It does allow Congress to at any time alter regulations on the times and manner of elections. This is one potential route for Republicans to change state election laws. But since they lack 60 votes in the Senate, they’d have to outlaw the filibuster to do so, an unlikely scenario since this could open the way to untamed Democratic power the next time their rivals control the chamber.
Still, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt signaled Tuesday that Trump intended to go beyond an executive order.
“I’m sure there will be many discussions with our friends on Capitol Hill. And also our friends in state legislatures across the country, to ensure that we’re protecting the integrity of the vote for the American people,” Leavitt said.
“I think Republicans generally, and the president generally, wants to make it easier for Americans to vote and harder for people to cheat in our elections,” she said — even though mail-in voting is one of the easiest ways to cast a ballot. “And it’s quite mind-boggling that the Democrat Party could stand in opposition to common sense.”
Multiple studies by academic institutions, think tanks and vote protection organizations have shown that mail-in voting is secure.
CNN’s Daniel Dale produced a comprehensive new fact check debunking the president’s claims that Democrats use mail-in voting to cheat and that the states “must do” what the federal government and president tell them to do. The latter claim, incidentally, is a fundamental misunderstanding of the character of a federal republic.
Dale notes that in general in US elections, “there has generally been a tiny quantity of ballot fraud representing a minuscule percentage of votes cast.”
Any attempt by Trump to change voting methods by executive fiat would immediately trigger court challenges. And it’s not clear that Republican-led state legislatures would all fall into line, since Republicans have been catching up to Democrats in the share of early voting in person and by mail.
Democrats are already signaling they will resist the president’s latest salvo against mail-in voting and as a rallying call.
Arizona’s Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, pointed out on X Tuesday that more than 80% of the state’s voters cast mail-in ballots and implied that previous warnings about Republican attempts to take over elections were coming true. “I’ve been warning about this for years. The canary is dead,” he wrote.
And Katie Porter, a candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in California, is already fundraising off Trump’s remarks. “Donald Trump is trying to steal the 2026 midterm election in plain sight,” she wrote in a mailing Tuesday.
That may be getting ahead of where things currently are. But the warning signs are there, not least following Trump’s joke during his meeting with Zelensky on Monday when his visitor said elections are suspended in Ukraine for the duration of the war — as the law stipulates.
“You say during the war, you can’t have elections? So, let me just say, three-and-a-half years from now — so you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good,” Trump said.
Coming from any other president, his quip might have been funnier.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
Comments