On August 18, 2025, President Donald Trump reignited a fierce national debate over the integrity of U.S. elections, taking to social media and the Oval Office to call for the elimination of mail-in voting and certain voting machines. Trump’s remarks, delivered both online and in person, were unambiguous: he labeled mail-in ballots as "corrupt" and voting machines as "highly inaccurate," vowing that he and the Republican Party would "do everything possible" to end mail-in voting in the United States.
"Mail-in ballots are corrupt," Trump declared to reporters on Monday, according to CBS6. "You can never have a real democracy with mail in ballots. We as a Republican Party are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots." He later amplified his message on Truth Social, insisting, "I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS. THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW! REMEMBER, WITHOUT FAIR AND HONEST ELECTIONS, AND STRONG AND POWERFUL BORDERS, YOU DON'T HAVE EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF A COUNTRY."
Trump’s rhetoric, however, quickly drew sharp rebukes from voting rights advocates, election law experts, and Democratic officials. Susan Lerner, Executive Director of Common Cause NY, dismissed the attack as a "scare tactic" intended to suppress voter participation. "The President cannot get rid of mail-in voting unilaterally. It's just not within his power, constitutionally or according to statute, and so it's very much a performance that... is designed to scare people," Lerner told CBS6. She emphasized that mail-in voting is not only popular and secure but is also essential for military personnel, overseas Americans, and those for whom in-person voting is difficult. "The United States is one of, I think, over 30 countries that uses mail in ballots, and so this sudden alarm does not make any sense and isn't based on any facts," Lerner added.
Indeed, Trump’s assertion that the U.S. is "the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting"—a claim he repeated on Truth Social and during a White House meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—has been widely debunked. According to a 2024 report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 34 countries or territories allow mail-in voting in some form. Of these, 12—including Canada, Germany, and South Korea—permit all voters to cast ballots by mail, while another 22 allow certain groups, such as those in remote areas or hospitalized individuals, to vote by mail. The organization’s North America head, Annika Silva-Leander, noted that while systems vary, "Europe has the largest number of countries that make in-country postal voting available to all or some voters."
Voting by mail itself is hardly a new phenomenon. The U.S. has allowed it since the Civil War, and Australia introduced postal voting more than a century ago, as Graeme Orr, an international electoral law expert at the University of Queensland, told PolitiFact. In Canada, all eligible voters have had the option since 1993, though it wasn’t widely used until the COVID-19 pandemic, according to York University’s Cary Wu. The United Kingdom expanded on-demand postal voting in the early 2000s to boost turnout, especially among older voters and people with disabilities.
Despite international precedent, Trump’s comments found support among some Republicans. New York State Assemblyman Chris Tague told CBS6, "I couldn't agree with him more... If you can't take one day out of your life to vote, then you really don't care about Democracy, or cares what happens in your community, or in your state, or in your country." Tague argued that mail-in ballots are "ripe with fraud" and advocated for strict voter ID laws, expressing concerns about verifying the identity of mail-in voters. "If I send you a mail-in ballot, who's to say that someone from your family that lives in your house didn't grab that ballot, vote it, vote on it and send it in?" he asked.
Election experts and observers have consistently found otherwise. Lerner countered Tague’s concerns with a detailed explanation of the safeguards in place. "If you have the opportunity to observe the procedures around absentee ballots... they have all come back and said to us, 'Oh, my goodness. We had no idea how detailed this process is. We had no idea how many checks there are along the way to ensure that eligible voters are having their votes counted.' Our election law is so very detailed. It has so many places in which the eligibility of a ballot is checked," she said.
New York State Senator James Skoufis, a Democrat, also dismissed Trump’s claims of executive authority over election rules as "preposterous." He pointed to numerous studies showing that fraud in vote-by-mail programs is "nearly nonexistent" and, if anything, comparable to or even safer than in-person voting. Skoufis cited Florida’s experience, where tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent on investigating alleged mail-in ballot fraud yielded only a handful of cases. "Any suggestion that he can just wave a magic wand via executive order and make all sorts election related changes, is preposterous," Skoufis said. "Every single examination, every single study, has unequivocally, clearly stated that fraud is nearly nonexistent in vote by mail programs."
Legal scholars were similarly blunt about the limits of presidential power. Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor, told Newsweek, "Any changes would have to be made by Congress. And even Congress can't change how states run state elections." Rick Hasen, a UCLA election law professor, described Trump’s assertion that states are "merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes" as "wrong and dangerous." He wrote, "The Constitution does not give the President any control over federal elections," emphasizing that the regulation of elections is a state power per Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, agreed: "The President plays literally no role in elections, and that's by design of the founders."
Trump’s own actions also complicate his anti-mail-in voting stance. As PolitiFact and others have reported, Trump has occasionally cast mail-in ballots himself, and in 2024, he even encouraged Republicans to do the same. This apparent contradiction has not gone unnoticed by analysts and critics alike.
As for Trump’s proposed executive order to "help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections" by eliminating mail-in ballots and certain voting machines, no such order has been signed. Experts across the political spectrum agree that any attempt to unilaterally change federal election rules by executive order would face insurmountable legal challenges, since state laws set the rules for voting by mail and the Constitution vests election regulation authority with the states.
While the debate continues to polarize Americans, the core facts remain clear: mail-in voting is a longstanding, internationally recognized practice with robust safeguards in place, and claims of widespread fraud remain unsupported by evidence. The controversy, however, is unlikely to subside as the 2026 midterm elections approach and the battle over how Americans cast their ballots intensifies.
