Tempers are flaring in Pennsylvania and across the nation as the debate over mail-in voting reignites, with President Donald Trump and several Republican allies pushing for the elimination of the practice—even as millions of voters, including prominent GOP figures themselves, have relied on it in recent elections. The controversy reached a boiling point this week, after Trump announced plans to sign an executive order banning mail-in ballots in an effort to, as he put it, "help bring honesty to the 2026 midterm elections."
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat and potential 2028 presidential contender, didn’t mince words in response. At a press conference in Harrisburg on August 20, 2025, Shapiro dismissed Trump’s plan as both unconstitutional and politically motivated. "Donald Trump can sign whatever the hell executive orders he wants to sign and make a show out of whatever he wants, but he can't change the Constitution with an executive order," Shapiro declared, according to Fox News. "The Constitution gives the authority to set our election rules to the states."
Shapiro went on to remind reporters that Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting system was created by a bipartisan majority in the state legislature just six years ago. He referenced Act 77 of 2019, a landmark law that expanded mail-in voting access and was initially supported by Republicans before some began to criticize it. "Let me remind you that it was just about five years ago that a bipartisan majority in the House and in the Senate passed mail-in voting. And, [since] that time, millions of people have voted by mail," Shapiro said. He added that the state has enjoyed "free and fair" elections, and that Trump himself has both won and lost Pennsylvania in past contests.
But not everyone in the state’s political leadership shares Shapiro’s enthusiasm for mail-in voting. Former Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler, a Republican from Lancaster, has repeatedly blasted Act 77 and accused Democrats, along with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, of "diluting" the law’s original intent. "Only one party [worked to] eliminate security safeguards and delay the timelines for elections," Cutler wrote in a column for LNP. He further charged that the Democrat-controlled high court "unconstitutionally acted to change the law for receiving and counting ballots [and] allowed for drop boxes … and stripped the security provisions for mail-in ballots."
Trump’s push to eliminate mail-in voting came in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. He wrote that he would sign an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and some voting machines, arguing that states are "merely agent[s]" for the federal government. During a subsequent meeting with the president of Ukraine, Trump labeled mail-in ballots "corrupt" and "a fraud," echoing claims he has made since before the 2020 election, according to PolitiFact.
The White House, for its part, has not ignored the uproar. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on August 21 that the administration is working with Congress and state legislatures to "ensure that we're protecting the integrity of the vote for the American people." She told reporters, "It's quite mind-boggling that the Democrat Party could stand in opposition to common sense. He wants to ensure election integrity. There were great efforts that were made in 2024."
Meanwhile, the debate has exposed some awkward contradictions among Trump’s own supporters. U.S. Representative Scott Perry, a Republican from Carroll Township and a U.S. Army veteran, has repeatedly criticized no-excuse mail ballots and publicly backed Trump’s proposal to end mail-in voting. Yet, according to York County voting records, Perry himself has voted by mail several times since 2008—including in the 2025 primary. Perry’s campaign disputes this, insisting he submitted an absentee ballot in person for the primary. "He went into the office and filled out what he was told was an absentee ballot and handed it in while he was there," campaign spokesman Matt Beynon told The York Dispatch. The confusion highlights the blurred lines between absentee and mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, especially after a 2019 overhaul of the state’s Election Code.
Perry, speaking at a press event at BAE Systems in West Manchester Township on August 20, acknowledged the complexity. "I wish I lived in a world with single-day voting, except absentee when necessary, but that’s not the world we have," Perry said. His campaign website, perhaps ironically, still includes a section on how to vote by mail. Perry’s fellow Republicans, U.S. Senator Dave McCormick and Representative Lloyd Smucker, echoed support for single-day voting and endorsed Trump’s call to end mail-in ballots. Yet McCormick also admitted that the party had benefited from mail-in voting in recent elections. "That’s one reason Trump won in Pennsylvania and a reason why I won," McCormick said, referencing the 2024 election, according to The York Dispatch.
The numbers back him up. Nearly 665,000 Pennsylvanians voted for Trump by mail in 2024—about 19% of his total votes in the state. McCormick received more than 650,000 mail-in votes, also around 19% of his total, while Smucker saw almost 16% of his votes come through the mail. The Republican Party, which had spent years attacking mail-in voting, pivoted after the 2022 midterms to encourage its use, recognizing the advantage of giving voters several weeks to cast ballots rather than limiting them to a single day.
Still, concerns about the cost and complexity of mail-in voting persist at the local level. York County President Commissioner Julie Wheeler, who also chairs the county’s election board, told The York Dispatch that mail voting has put "two- to three-times the financial burden on the county since before 2020." She emphasized the need for a consistent and uniform election code to ensure fairness across Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.
The legal and constitutional reality, however, is that elections are run by counties and overseen by states, not the federal government—a point that Perry himself acknowledged before hedging. "States determine the time, date and place of elections," he said, "however, we do have a federal government that will have something to say about that." Perry pointed to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which recently cleared the House and would require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
For now, mail-in voting remains popular among Pennsylvania voters. According to a June 2025 report by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, the method saw a surge in use nationwide during the last presidential election. In Perry’s own district, nearly 42,000 voters cast mail-in ballots for him in his most recent electoral victory—a margin that helped him win by about 6,000 votes. Perry is now preparing for a potential 2026 rematch against Democrat Janelle Stelson, a former WGAL TV anchor who recently moved into the 10th district.
As the 2026 midterms approach, the future of mail-in voting in Pennsylvania and the nation remains uncertain. What is clear is that the fight over how Americans cast their ballots is far from over, with both political principle and practical politics shaping the battle lines.