After claiming cheating Democrats and mail-in ballots lost him a second term in 2020, President Trump says he remains concerned about election integrity. Looking ahead to future elections, he has assembled a team of lawyers to craft an executive order for the elimination of mail-in voting.
Getting rid of mail-in ballots, the president says, is part of his effort to bring honesty to the 2026 midterms.
Attorney Cleta Mitchell is a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute and is founder of the Election Integrity Network. During an appearance on Washington Watch this week, she praised the president's decision.
“The president is 100% right, and the main thing that he said is he's going to start a movement," she said. "I think that is the most important thing because he will raise the issue, and give us a chance to talk about all the problems, because all we've heard is from the Left saying it's great."
Democrats and Republicans have historically split over strict election laws meant to clamp down on election fraud.
Democrats, who say fraud is virtually non-existent, claim Republicans support those laws because they hurt minority turnout, implying a racist motive.
Republicans flatly accuse Democrats of using loose election rules to cheat and win elections, especially in large Democrat-run cities where urban votes dwarf ballots cast in conservative rural areas.
If Republican claims are true, and mail-in ballots are a reliable source of cheating, then banning them could set back Democrats even in their big-city strongholds.
Biden won 2020 with record turnout
In the November 2020 presidential election, which came during the Covid pandemic, Joe Biden supposedly broke all previous election records with 81.2 million votes. Democrats claimed that historic turnout, 26 more million more votes than 2016, came from grassroots support for Biden and a determination to defeat Trump.
In January 2020, 16 states required voters to identify a reason for requesting an absentee ballot. Before the 2020 general election, 14 of the 16 states changed their requirements for getting an absentee ballot. They included Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia, according to Politifact.
At the same time, five states used mostly-mail elections: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington. Before November 2020, California, Vermont and the District of Columbia temporarily joined this group. Nevada passed legislation, which stated that, under a state of emergency, all active registered voters would be sent a mail ballot and made that permanent the next year.
In last year's presidential election, voters cast 152 million ballots, which was down from 155.4 million in 2020. Those official results showed Trump increased his 2020 results by 3 million ballots. Meanwhile, last-minute Democrat nominee Kamala Harris was 6.2 million ballots behind Biden's 2020 total.
While she agrees mail-in balloting should end, Mitchell says an executive order is not the way it can be done.
"No, the president doesn't have the power to wave a wand and fix everything. But what he has done is through his leadership and his public statements, it gives us the opportunity to move into that and say, okay, here's how we do this. It's got to have legislation to make it happen."
