President Donald Trump said Monday that “he will lead a movement” to end the vote by mail in the elections. The Constitution, Congress and States also have their opinion.
The problem has resurfaced as a fixation for Trump when the most pressing business before him is his effort to mediate a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. It seems to have been revived, or at least fueled, by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who reinforced Trump’s foundation opinion that the postal tickets “manipulated” the 2020 elections, at a summit on Friday in Alaska.
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In an interview with Fox News Bret Baier presenter on Friday, Trump transmitted that “one of the most interesting things,” Putin told him during the summit, had to do with the lack of vote reliability by mail.
“He said: ‘His choice was manipulated because he has a vote by mail … It is impossible to have a vote by mail and have honest choices,” Trump said, and added that Putin told him that “no country” has a vote by mail.
It is false that the United States is the only country with vote by mail. Other countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, do so. Russia has been very criticized, even by the United States government, for not having free and fair elections.
Trump then promised Monday on his social platform for truth to issue an executive order aimed at prohibiting vote by mail.
“Remember, the states are simply an ‘agent’ for the federal government by counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump wrote. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the president of the United States, tells them, for the sake of our country, to do.”
He also mentioned it when he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later in the day, saying: “The tickets by mail are corrupt.”
But Trump faces high legal and political obstacles to change the laws that govern federal elections: the Constitution, the federal and state statutes, the popularity of the vote in the absence and success of the Republican Party in the use of votes by mail in Swing key states, such as Trump’s home state, Florida.
The Constitution grants the power to choose the “times, places and manner” of the elections of the Chamber and the Senate in state legislatures, with the Congress and the President retaining the right to approve the laws that annul them. The states also have the authority, under the Constitution, to determine how presidential voters are selected. Federal law requires that states accept the tickets by mail of Americans living abroad, including veterans.
“I do not want to presuppose what could be in the executive order, but I think it is quite clear that the times, places and manners of elections are established by the State. That is there in the Constitution,” said Matt Weil, vice president of the Democracy Program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington’s thinking tank.
Change those “requires an act of Congress,” Weil said. And doing that would not be a little when the Democrats can block legislation in the Senate.
The leader of the Senate minority, Chuck Schumer, DN.Y., said in a statement: “Senate Democrats will ensure that each and every one of the measures that would make even more difficult for Americans voting will be dead when they arrive at the Senate and will continue to fight to protect our democracy.”
The Republican National Committee hinted at the power of Congress in a statement on Monday that supports Trump’s plan.
“Under its leadership and direction, the RNC continues to build on our historical efforts of electoral integrity of the successful 2024 electoral cycle, and we will be ready to help implement each and every one of the changes made in the electoral laws of our nation by the President and the Congress,” said Kiersten Pels of RNC. “The integrity motto of Republican Elections is simple: we want it to be easier to vote and more difficult to cheat.”
Beyond those challenges, many Republicans say Trump is fishing in a politically toxic pond that is better to leave alone.
“From the point of view of pure tactics, it is not useful,” said a former Trump campaign official who is working on mid -period campaigns.
In his failed re -election offer of 2020, Trump discouraged the Republicans to vote early and as absent, and many of his allies believe he cost him votes. On the contrary, in 2024, his advisors persuaded him to embrace these practices with the premise that he could “refer” to the votes early and not have to spend money trying to mobilize the people who had already cast votes.
Trump’s emerging impulse is intended to fail, said the former campaign official, and could reduce republican participation in the process.
“It describes our use” of the vote by mail, that “it will exist,” he said, and added that “this is where he begins to enter conspiracy spaces where independent voters are like ‘What is talking?'”
Trump’s White House recently organized a group of state secretaries to discuss “our continuous commitment to electoral integrity,” said Ben Kindel, spokesman for Ohio’s Secretary of State, Frank Larose, Republican.
While Larose still supports Ohio’s mail voting laws, Kindel said: “We hope to review the details of what the president proposes … the changes in the Ohio voting process require a vote of the General Assembly, so I am sure we will also talk to them.”
Trump’s aversion to the ballots in absence is perhaps more surprising because the recent success of the Republicans in the Florida elections, in Trump’s native state, has coincided with the domain of the Republican Party of the state of the vote by mail. The White House Cabinet Chief, Susie Wiles, has been a long -time proponent of early vote in the state and helped Trump see the benefit for him in Swing states in 2024.
Wiles and several other White House officials did not respond to comments requests.
In Florida, Trump’s impulse to take energetic measures on mail tickets has hindered the effort of Republicans to build their mail programs. Since they began to develop a program by mail in the 1990s, Republicans in the state have dominated their democratic counterparts using the method that Trump hates.
But his message, that the practice is inherently corrupt, has altered the landscape in Florida, allowing Democrats to increase their efforts and, for the first time, take an advantage in the voting tickets by mail, even when Trump won the state in 2020 and 2024.
“For years, he had to incorporate the fact that the Republican party would have a great advantage in the vote by mail,” said Steve Schale, a Florida Democratic operation for a long time that he was one of the first defenders of the best mail tickets in his party, in a message to NBC News. “Use VBM to boost their sporadic voters to vote. First we counteract by promoting people to vote in an early person, then VBM.”
The sliding of the advantage of the Republicans voting by mail has dismayed some of the veteran state Republicans of the State.
“There was a time when the Republicans possessed and depended on the vote by mail,” said Mac Stipanovich, a long time republican operation, who helped build the Florida mail voting program, but left the Republican Party about Trump disagreements. Stipanovich, who was head of personnel of the former Republican governor of Florida Bob Martínez, said that the idea of expanding the vote by email to facilitate that all voters emit vote is “an anathema for Trump’s Republican Party, in which the suppression of voters is dressed how to avoid the fraud of voters.”
The governor of Florida, Ron Desantis, has tried to follow Trump’s call to take energetic measures against vote by mail in the state, signing radical changes in such laws in recent years. They worked as planned. During the 2020 presidential campaign, 4.3 million tickets per mail in Florida were issued, a number that fell to 3 million during last year’s presidential contest.
Some of the changes have even worried Republican electoral officials, especially a requirement that voters renew their voting voting requests by email each electoral cycle.
“That is something important,” he told a state legislative committee led by Republican in February. “Our theory is that if they had the luxury of verifying a box in that return ballot of the general elections that said:” Keep my vote by valid mail “, then we could have continued to send them their vote of vote by mail for the special elections.”
The Secretary of State of Florida, Cord Byrd, designated by Desantis and supporter of Trump, did not respond to a request for comments on Trump’s renewed impulse to take energetic measures against vote by mail.
“The vote by mail is good when the rules are applied,” said a second former Trump campaign official. “I think this is stupid.”
The Democrats responded hard to Trump’s social position, even while waiting to see the real proposal. The Secretary of State of Connecticut, Jena Griswold, said she is ready to go to court to block it, if necessary.
“Donald Trump is trying to grab power before the 2026 elections and says he will prohibit the vote by mail,” Griswold said. “This is a direct attack against democracy. The states supervise the elections, not Trump. We will challenge any illegal executive order and expire this unconstitutional attempt to deprive millions of Americans.”
Oregon holds its elections completely by mail, and it was the first state to hold a presidential election by mail. The Secretary of State of Oregon, Tobias Read, emphasized that electoral fraud is “extremely weird.”
He said he believes that Trump “is actively working to corrupt our choices. If he had any inclination to understand or worry about the American people, he would know that mail vote is really the best way to protect everyone’s right to vote, and that is especially true for rural people, for the elderly and for people who work for an hourly salary.”
Read also pointed out the constitutional role of the states in the decision on how to make elections, adding: “I will protect the rights of the Oregonians and the rights of the State to choose how we choose our representatives. This is a real threat.”
Some Trump allies say that no one should be surprised by their desire to stop vote by mail, since for a long time they have denounced the practice of voting in another way other than in person the day of the elections.
“It is the same position that the president has always occupied,” said a person familiar with Trump’s field thinking. “That said, if there are still tickets by mail in 2026, we will use them and win.”
