Trump Launches (Another) Assault on Mail-in Ballots
President Donald Trump started the week with a post on his Truth Social platform taking aim at mail-in ballots and electronic voting machines, promising that he would “lead a movement” to get rid of both.
Trump has made false or unsupported claims about these voting systems for years, and he repeated some of them again this week, and added a new claim about the role of states in running elections.
Three of our staffers – Robert Farley, Saranac Hale Spencer and Alan Jaffe – explained what the president got wrong.
First off, Trump was incorrect in claiming that the U.S. is the only country in the world to use mail-in ballots and that “All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”
There are 11 other countries besides the U.S. – Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Poland, South Korea, Switzerland and the United Kingdom – that allow all voters to use some form of mail-in voting, according to a 2024 report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. And there are another 22 that allow some voters – those living in remote areas or abroad or people who are hospitalized or have disabilities, for example – to use mail-in ballots.
The president was also wrong when he claimed that “States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
Half a dozen experts we spoke to agreed that states don’t operate as an “agent” of the federal government and the president has no direct authority over the counting and tabulating of ballots.
The Constitution gives the authority to run elections to the states, but gives Congress the ability to change the states' rules – which it has done sparingly. There is no direct role for the president.
Trump also repeated a claim that he’s made frequently in the past – baselessly asserting that “MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD” is associated with mail-in voting.
Elections experts have told us for years that election fraud is slightly more prevalent with mail-in voting than it is with in-person voting. But, they say, it is still rare and has never been proven to have occurred frequently enough to have changed the outcome of a national election.
And the president cast doubt on electronic voting machines, calling them, “Highly ‘Inaccurate.’”
As we’ve written many times before, Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history” and that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
For more, read the full story: "FactChecking Trump’s Claims About Mail-In Ballots, Voting Machines and States’ Role."
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