Mail-in Democracy vs Authoritarian Decree
Trump wants to erase America’s oldest form of absentee voting—because Putin told him to.
Fresh from a visit with his puppet master, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump has announced that he will issue an executive order to eliminate mail-in ballots and will also lead an effort to ban voting machines, ahead of the 2026 midterms. He claims this a necessary move to restore “honesty” to elections. We have heard this nonsense from him and his sycophants many times, but what’s new - and frankly bizarre - is that Trump now says this idea was inspired by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who told him in Anchorage that mail-in voting makes U.S. elections “rigged” and that “no country in the world” uses it. 1
That’s false. And, if our Constitution holds, Trump can’t do what he’s promising. Here’s why:
Who Controls Elections in the U.S.?
The U.S. Constitution gives states primary authority over elections.
Article I, Section 4 lets Congress step in with legislation, but the president cannot.
Executive orders apply only to federal agencies. They do not override state election laws.
Federal courts, including many led by Trump-appointed judges, rejected over 60 lawsuits challenging mail-in ballots in 2020.2 And, when Texas tried to throw out other states’ mail ballots, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case for lack of standing. 3
Bottom line: A president cannot ban mail-in voting. Only states or Congress could change those rules, and Congress would need to pass legislation.
But, if Trump tried anyway, the courts would almost certainly block him. States would sue immediately, and federal judges would fall back on constitutional precedent: election rules belong to states and Congress, not the president. Courts have already rejected this playbook before—both in 2020, when Trump’s lawsuits collapsed, and in 2025, when his earlier executive order was struck down. An attempt to outlaw mail-in ballots would almost certainly meet the same fate.
However, to guard against any effort in Congress to outlaw mail-in voting, Democrats must win back control of the legislature in 2026! The integrity of the ballot depends on it.
A Brief History of Mail-In Voting in America
Mail-in voting isn’t some new scheme dreamed up in the pandemic. It dates back to the Civil War, when Union soldiers cast absentee ballots from the battlefield. 4In 1864, about 7.5% of the national vote was cast through absentee or proxy ballots.[8] By World War II, the practice was firmly established. More than 3.4 million service members voted by mail in the 1944 election. 5
Over the course of the 20th century, states steadily expanded absentee voting, first for people who were sick, elderly, or away from home, and eventually for any registered voter.6 Today, all 50 states allow some form of absentee or mail-in voting, and five states - Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii - now conduct their elections almost entirely by mail. 7 Far from being partisan, mail-in voting has been used and trusted by both Democrats and Republicans for generations. Ironically, Trump himself voted by mail in the 2020 Florida primary.8
If you believe fraud is happening but going undetected, you haven’t seen the layers of protection each state builds into its system—signature checks, ballot tracking, curing mechanisms, bipartisan processing, post-election audits, and more. 9 I speak from direct experience. I’ve served in numerous roles with the Denver Elections Division—as a poll center supervisor and in ballot processing—and I saw every safeguard in action.
Multiple bipartisan studies confirm that voter fraud, including through mail ballots, is vanishingly rare. A 2025 analysis found only 143 criminal convictions related to mail-ballot fraud out of more than 250 million cast—about 0.00006%. 10 in Wisconsin, election officials reported just 30 suspected fraud cases in a year across all voting methods.
The push to ban mail-in ballots also comes straight from the Heritage Foundation, the lead architect of Project 2025. Yet, Heritage’s own Voter Fraud Database tells a very different story.
Over the span of 44 years, Heritage has documented only 1,465 proven cases of voter fraud nationwide—an average of fewer than 34 cases per year. That’s out of hundreds of millions of ballots cast. In other words, the organization driving Trump’s election agenda has itself shown that voter fraud is practically nonexistent. 11
Mail-in voting, in other words, is as American as the secret ballot itself.
What Other Democracies Do
When Trump repeated Putin’s line that “no country in the world” uses mail-in ballots, he wasn’t just wrong, he was spectacularly wrong. Around the globe, many of the most stable democracies not only allow voting by mail, they also rely on it. 12
In Germany, nearly half the electorate chose mail ballots in the last federal election, and the practice is so normal that voters don’t even need to give a reason. In Switzerland, the system goes further: every registered voter is mailed a ballot automatically, and the vast majority never bother with a polling place. Canada has long offered mail-in “special ballots” to anyone who prefers them, and in the United Kingdom, postal ballots are easy to request, with millions of voters using them every election.
Even France, which ended domestic mail-in voting decades ago after some small-scale fraud cases, still provides it for citizens abroad. And beyond Europe, countries like New Zealand and Australia also extend absentee or postal voting as a routine part of democratic participation.
Far from being rare, mail-in voting is a proven, trusted tool of democracy across continents and, in those countries, leaders encourage citizens to use it. Only here, does an American president, echoing a foreign autocrat, try to paint it as a danger to free elections.
Trump’s announcement fits a larger pattern. By calling mail voting “corrupt,” he primes his base to distrust results even before a single ballot is cast. And now he is openly citing Putin’s views to justify U.S. policy changes - an echo chamber where an American president takes direction from a foreign strongman.
The Takeaway
For more than 160 years, Americans have trusted mail-in ballots—from Union soldiers in the Civil War to millions of overseas voters in World War II, to everyday citizens today. Far from being a novelty, it’s one of the oldest tools of modern democracy. And across the world’s most stable nations, it’s seen as routine, safe, and even preferable.
That makes Trump’s position all the more striking. He is not just questioning a long-standing American practice; he is doing so by quoting Vladimir Putin, a foreign autocrat who has every reason to undermine faith in American democracy.
No president in U.S. history has ever sought to reshape voting rules on the advice of an adversary.
The danger here isn’t about ballots in the mail—it’s about a leader trying to delegitimize elections themselves. Trump is attacking one of the most tested and trusted forms of voting, not because it is broken, but because it works. And when authoritarians move to take away trusted forms of participation, history shows that it’s not the system that fails. It’s the people who lose their voice.
If the 2026 midterms bring a Congress that values voting rights, mail-in ballots will endure. If not, Trump and his allies will try to eliminate them.
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