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TRUMP’S WAR ON MAIL-IN VOTING THREATENS THE FOUNDATIONS OF
DEMOCRACY ITSELF  
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Thom Hartmann
August 19, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying
the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. _

Mail-in ballots in boxes. Mail-in ballots in their envelopes await
processing at the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorders' mail-in
ballot processing center at the Pomona Fairplex in Pomona, California,
October 28, 2020. , Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images

 

On Monday, US President Donald Trump
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that no president in our history has ever dared to touch. With the
echo of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in
front of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and seven other
European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order
to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America
ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sitting in front of the chancellor of Germany and the prime minister
of Great Britain—both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in
voting—Trump said:

Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real
democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna
do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're gonna
start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the
best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re
corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I
believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world
that uses it because of what’s happened.

This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the
Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the
foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in
broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering
him on.

Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.

FIRST, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases
participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen
table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have
introduced over 400
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pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make
voting more difficult.

SECOND, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less
vulnerable to sound-bite TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at
the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and
get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and
rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.

THIRD, mail-in ballots—because they arrive in the mail weeks before
the election—give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve
been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite
tactics to pre-rig elections.

FOURTH, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and
underresourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to
hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150% longer than
white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200% longer wait; mail-in
ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression
efforts.

Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself Monday, finally
blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in
America:

“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the
charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy,”
Trump proclaimed
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“If you have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats
get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with
redistricting, believe me.”

Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which
explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and
Congress, not presidential executive orders.

That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: It’s written
into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules,
unless _Congress—_not the president_—_overrides them. States
decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I,
Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:

The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and
Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature
thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such
Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the
terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of
law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s
tyrannical.

When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full
knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the
country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the
definition of dictatorship.

And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s
inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on
mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Vladimir Putin,
who reportedly told him that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in
2020.

The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to
rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career
poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums
to annex entire countries.

It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now
we see the Kremlin effectively writing US election law. If Jefferson,
Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.

Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of
millions of Americans—Republicans, Democrats,
independents—exercise their right to vote.

But never—not once in 250 years—has a president openly declared
that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run
elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether.

Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military
service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a
day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural
voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.

And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found
mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it
exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with
nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To
ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.

And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us
to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight
from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and
endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.

I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators
for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should
use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots
and operating transparently on open-source software with every
election subject to sample audits.

Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the
groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle:
It’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of
the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a
Republican Party too craven to object.

If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines,
millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in
nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities,
single parents, rural citizens: They will all be disenfranchised
overnight. And make no mistake: That’s the point.

This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about
shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will
guarantee them victory forever.

Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of
America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their
agenda is toxic.

So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that
make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from
the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate
voters at the polls.

And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban
the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not
politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy.

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver.
It’s a declaration of war against the American people.

Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against
this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court
and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional
authority.

Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must
take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space
available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does,
we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.

We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.

Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to
hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried
to sabotage our democracy by killing LBJ’s peace negotiations with
Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought
Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and
the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the
presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for
decades.

But never—not once in 250 years—has a president openly declared
that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run
elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether.
This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.

It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have
launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act—which will
prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’
license have different names on them and they’ve never had an
official change-of-name in the courts—teed up in the US Senate. All
while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read
these words.

This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they
still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just
more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we
wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves
the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.

The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always
required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three
from each of us.

Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver.
It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the
dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to
dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.

What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not
freedom. It’s not America.

And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as
Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents,
and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or
patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.

This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his
cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every
patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest
conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together
and say no.

No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.

If we fail now, there may not be another chance.

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Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden
History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream"
(2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of
America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.

* Voting Rights; US Democracy; Trump; Mail-in Voting;
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