Trump's pledge to scrap mail-in voting could throw U.S. elections into a tailspin
Published: 2025-08-20 10:01:14 | Views: 10
U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to ban mail-in voting ahead of the country's midterm elections — a manoeuvre that could throw the electoral system into disarray and disenfranchise millions of voters who rely on this method to cast a ballot.
Trump has railed against voting by mail since he lost the 2020 election and started touting bogus claims about fraudulent ballots skewing the result.
This time, he's promising an executive order that will stop the well-established practice once and for all, even as scholars say he has absolutely no authority to make a change like that given some of the constitutional realities.
"This is really not a hard question — the president cannot do it. Period," Jeremy Paul, a professor at the Northeastern University School of Law who studies elections, said in an interview with CBC News.
Constitution gives states control of elections
Paul said Trump's promised mail-in ban is a form of "authoritarian fan fiction" that's based on "lies" designed to explain away his defeat in the COVID-era election.
The country's founders anticipated a tyrannical president, he said, and that's why they gave states the power to control federal elections.
However, the Supreme Court has ruled Congress can intervene when it feels like the states have gone astray, as it did with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that was meant to prevent racial discrimination in voting and after the 2000 vote-counting fracas in Florida.
The founders' intentions were laid out plainly in the U.S. constitution. State legislatures will "establish the times, places, and manner of holding elections," reads the centuries-old document, which Trump has vowed to preserve, protect and defend.
But Trump hasn't let seemingly insurmountable legal barriers stop him in the past.
"Trump is looking out at the electoral landscape and he can tell his party is not going to do well in 2026. So, he's going to do anything he can do to disrupt the election to suit his anti-democratic agenda," Paul said.
"He's trying to send a message that democracy is old hat and we're in a new world now. Hopefully, our country will not tolerate that. It's scary. If you're not scared, you're not paying attention."
The long history of voting by mail
Every state in the union has some form of mail-in or "absentee" voting to make it easier for citizens to cast a ballot.
It's a practice that dates back to the U.S. Civil War, when former president Abraham Lincoln wanted to give soldiers away from home a say in politics. Working people, families with child-care concerns, rural dwellers and seniors are others who often turn to mail-in voting.
While the practice was favoured by Democrats during the pandemic, defenders say there's no history of mail-in ballots disproportionately skewing one way or another.
Twenty-eight states require no excuse to request a mail-in ballot. Eight states — including a deep red one like Utah — and the District of Columbia run their elections almost entirely by mail and have for years.
In the last election, more than 46 million ballots were sent by mail — or 30 per cent of all votes cast, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Trump handily won the election after sweeping every battleground state thanks in part to mail-in ballots, which his team promoted.
Proposed changes 'inviting chaos'
Unlike in Canada, where voting generally involves picking a single candidate, U.S. election ballots are often unwieldy documents.
In the 2024 election, for example, Arizona's Maricopa County needed two pages to squeeze in the names of all the local, county, state and federal officials, judges and ballot measures under consideration.
There were 144 elected offices, 45 judges and 76 ballot measures up for a vote in parts of that county, which includes major population centres like Phoenix and Scottsdale.
It takes time to sort through that many choices — and counting such a long ballot by hand, as Trump is now demanding in his push to do away with machines by 2026, would inevitably lead to long delays in delivering results.
Barbara Smith Warner, the executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute, told CBC News that such changes would be so disruptive that it would make it difficult if not impossible to have a fully functioning election in 2026.
"And that is not a coincidence. It's inviting chaos," she said.
"This is a straight-up attempt to disenfranchise voters. Any attempt to roll back, eliminate or limit voting at home with mail ballots is merely to silence voters."
What's behind this push?
Trump floated his latest promise to ditch these ballots after discussing what he called election "fraud" with Russian President Vladimir Putin — a troubling choice for a discussion about democratic reforms given what that leader has done to voting rights in his own country.
Putin has orchestrated sham elections that would make even the North Koreans blush.
He has jailed his political opponents, and others have died under mysterious circumstances. There hasn't been a genuine opposition party in years.
"Vladimir Putin said one of the most interesting things. He said, 'Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,'" Trump told Fox News after his summit in Alaska late last week.
"'It's impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.' He said that to me. It was very tragic because we talked about 2020," Trump said, repeating his long-debunked claim that the vote was "rigged" against him.
As a reminder, Trump's own former attorney general found no evidence of widespread fraud, a joint study from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security found no evidence of manipulated election results and the House's bipartisan January 6 committee's final report concluded Trump engaged in a "multi-part conspiracy" to overturn the election based on false claims of fraud.
Trump was later criminally charged with four felonies for trying to overturn the election.
Still, in his Oval Office sit-down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday, Trump called mail-in ballots "corrupt."
"You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are going to do everything possible so that we get rid of them," he said.
Smith Warner says discussing these issues with Putin is just inviting Russia to interfere in the American democratic process again, as U.S. intelligence agencies and a Republican-controlled Senate committee found they did in the 2016 campaign.
"Who takes advice about democracy or elections from an established authoritarian dictator," she said of Putin. "He ain't Ben Franklin."
Fraud rare with mail-in ballots
There are some incidents of fraud with mail-in ballots, but they are rare.
A Republican campaign operative in North Carolina was busted in 2021 for alleged absentee ballot harvesting. In 1997, some Democrats in Georgia were accused of vote-buying with absentee ballots.
One study, which reviewed mail-in voting over a 12-year period, found the number of fraud cases to be "infinitesimal" with 491 incidents of absentee ballot fraud reported out of the hundreds of millions of votes cast in U.S. elections between 2000 and 2012.
In a report on the 2020 election, The Associated Press uncovered roughly 475 potential cases of voter fraud in the six close states it studied, including some cases of felons voting and others submitting ballots for dead people — not enough to change any result.
Smith Warner says Trump's recent diatribes and revived fraud claims are just "more lies."
"Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy," she said. "If it weren't so important, people would not be trying so hard to keep you from doing it."
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