The Trump Administration’s Three-Part Attack on Mail Voting

Mail voting is a popular and trusted method of casting a ballot. Despite being widely used by Americans of all political backgrounds—including by President Trump himself—Trump has targeted mail voting through illegal executive orders and continued lies about its security.

The president’s attacks on mail voting are part of his plan to undermine trust in the voting process so he can interfere with the 2026 midterm elections. The Trump administration is seeking to sharply limit voting by mail by unconstitutionally seizing election powers from the states, imposing new deadlines and procedural hurdles, and spreading lies through a strategic misinformation campaign.

Here’s how the Trump administration is attacking mail voting, in three parts.

1. Limit who can vote by mail

Trump has repeatedly called for a ban on mail voting. To justify these limits, he routinely lies and promotes conspiracy theories about alleged mail voting fraud. He falsely claims that mail ballot drop boxes are not secure, leading some states to impose drastic restrictions or to question or eliminate drop boxes altogether.

Those lies were on display in his second election-related executive order, which seeks to unlawfully grant the federal government control over who can vote by mail. It directs the Department of Homeland Security to generate and distribute lists of eligible U.S. residents for each state—lists that are likely to be inaccurate and immediately out of date. The order also blocks the U.S. Postal Service from accepting a mail ballot from anyone who isn’t on a separate, undefined “participation list.”

The president has not shied away from his political motives: Democrats are more likely than Republicans to vote by mail. But restricting mail voting would burden voters of all political parties, including those in the military and in rural areas, ultimately shrinking the electorate.

2. Make it harder to cast mail ballots

Trump wants to disqualify votes from eligible voters by narrowing the window in which mail ballots can be received and counted.

In a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump administration has argued that states should be prohibited from counting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. And in his first elections executive order, Trump directed that federal funding be withheld from 14 states that accept mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but received later.

Trump has supported other limits on mail voting: In 2020, his administration prohibited USPS postmasters from acting as witnesses for mail ballots as they had in the past, making it harder for voters in some states to satisfy strict witness and notary requirements in order for their ballot to count.

Trump and his administration are aiming to exclude a significant number of mail ballots with timing and procedural hurdles based on false claims of voter fraud and a desire to control whose votes count.

3. Spread lies about mail voting

Trump and his allies may use false claims of mail ballot fraud to object to the certification of 2026 election results if they don’t like them.

Trump tried the same tactic in 2020, falsely claiming he was cheated out of an election victory by the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of fake mail ballots. FBI Director Kash Patel has also claimed, with no evidence, that China mass-produced fake IDs to support fraudulent U.S. voter registrations. These are just a sample of the misinformation the Trump administration is using as it argues for more restrictions on mail voting.

By spreading baseless mail voting fraud theories, Trump and his administration are continuing to cast doubt on past elections as part of a broader effort to undermine the 2026 election.