Donald Trump, the nation’s most outspoken critic of mail voting, continued his assault on the practice this past week, trashing it as rife with fraud — even as Republicans who want to see him elected president again tell his supporters to sign and participate in voting-by-mail.
Trump was clear Tuesday night in a Fox town hall: “If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud,” he said, adding “If you have it, you’re going to have fraud.”
His anti-mail voting stand isn’t new. It was a constant for much of the 2020 campaign, in which he lost reelection.
But it’s a stand that could hurt Republicans — including Trump — in the 2024 elections by tamping down GOP voters’ interest in voting by mail.
A day after his assertions of fraud, U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. — an early and prominent Trump supporter — said in an email blast that Republicans should “get ready to defeat Joe Biden and the Radical Left by requesting your vote-by-mail ballot TODAY.” Scott would presumably be helped if Florida Republicans get their votes in via mail since he’s up for reelection this fall.
On Thursday, the Palm Beach County Republican Party had a similar message, assuring people that Trump “came out in support of Vote-by-Mail and Early In-Person Voting in states that allow it.”
And months ago, Trump himself urged his supporters to request mail ballots for the 2024 election in a highly scripted video as part of a broad Republican party “bank your vote” campaign.
So which is it: Riddled with fraud? Or vital for Trump and other Republicans who hope to win elections?
No fraud
Despite Trump’s comments on Tuesday, and his stream of complaints during and after the 2020 campaign, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, according to a range of government officials, political analysts and partisan campaign operatives.
Multiple investigations, including those conducted by Republicans, have uncovered nothing more than sporadic minor instances around the country and in Florida — where incidents have involved Republicans as well as Democrats.
“Voting by mail is extremely secure as a method of voting. States have numerous safeguards to ensure it is not abused. And incidents of misconduct or irregularities are extremely rare,” said Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program.
Ever since Florida made voting-by-mail easier, it’s been overseen by Republican secretaries of state, elected in the past and now appointed by governors, who have all been Republicans.
To vote by mail, Clapman said, people use paper ballots, which are retained and can be recounted, or audited if there is a suspicion of irregularities. Florida doesn’t do mass mailings of ballots. Individual requests are required from each voter.
And people sign their return envelopes, and staffers in county elections offices match the signature to what voters have on file in their records. (In Florida, ballots have been rejected if spouses accidentally sign each other’s return ballot envelope, which means the signatures don’t match what’s on file for each individual.)
Clapman pointed to the conservative Heritage Foundation, which tried to estimate the number of questionable mail-in ballots. The results, she said maybe one ballot out of every 1.7 million cast. “That gives you a sense of how infinitesimally small this risk is.”
Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist, is a nationally recognized expert on voting.
“The evidence simply isn’t there,” McDonald said about suggestions of widespread voter fraud. “Is there some fraud? Of course. If 100 million people do something, you’re going to have some instances of fraud, no matter what it is. But it’s not widespread, organized fraud. It is really isolated incidents, lone-wolf type of fraud.”
Widespread use
Florida voters have embraced mail voting. It began with a change in state law as part of the reforms that came in the aftermath of the disrupted, ultra-close 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Florida voters can request a mail ballot without having to cite a reason. Under the old system, called absentee voting, someone had to have a reason, such as being out of town on Election Day.
The biggest Florida users for most of the last two decades: Republicans. And mail voting was one of the most potent weapons for Florida Republicans, helping the party rack up win after win while Democrats used to prefer in-person early voting.
But that all changed in 2020.
Democrats — who polling showed were more concerned than Republicans about COVID — moved en masse to voting by mail. During the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Democrats were much more likely to eschew any kind of in-person voting (at regional early voting centers or at neighborhood polling places on Election Day).
On the offensive
With mail voting shaping up as an advantage for Democrats in 2020, Trump went on the offensive against the practice, and Republican skepticism of mail-voting started increasing in Florida and elsewhere.
At political rallies, during official events at the White House, and in missives posted on social media, Trump claimed again and again that mail voting was “a very dangerous thing for this country,” “fraudulent in many cases,” “horrible,” “corrupt,” and “a terrible thing.”
After Trump spent months criticizing mail voting in 2020, Florida Republicans were showing reluctance to sign up for mail ballots that year. So he reversed course over the summer — at least as far as Florida was concerned — and said he thought mail voting was good in the Sunshine State.
McDonald said Trump’s stand emanated from pandemic politics.
“Trump did not want to admit that the pandemic was something of concern. And so when blue states were taking precautionary measures and adopting mail balloting as a precautionary measure, he didn’t want to let that message out,” McDonald said.
Trump and his wife, Melania, both used mail ballots in the March 2020 presidential primary and in the August 2020 state and local primaries and nonpartisan elections. (The Trumps didn’t use the mail. Instead they had someone deliver their mail ballots to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office.)
They became registered Republican voters in Palm Beach County since 2019, when the president announced he was changing his official residence after he got mad at his home state of New York.
Republican efforts
Aside from Trump’s oft-repeated disparagement of mail voting, Republicans are urging voters to take part in voting by mail.
That allows candidates and the party to go into the final days of an election knowing their most loyal registered voters (and most likely to vote the party line) have cast ballots and they can shift attention to trying to persuade and turn out people who aren’t as committed.
Also, an advantage to voting before Election Day is it makes sure people actually vote, and aren’t deterred because something comes up at work, they or a family member gets sick, or inclement weather makes it tougher to get to the polls.
The Palm Beach County Republican Party has a “request vote by mail ballot” tab at the top of its website. Clicking on it takes someone to the vote-by-mail request page at the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Office.
Fox host Laura Ingraham, who questioned Trump in the town hall, tried to probe his thinking, given that he won Florida in 2020 even as he lost reelection. After he said “you automatically have fraud” with mail voting, Ingraham reminded him, “Well, there is mail-in voting in Florida and you won huge.”
He seemed to acknowledge his victory in the state, but returned to his negative assessment of mail voting. “That’s right. That’s right. If you have it, you’re going to have fraud,” he said.
Trump’s assertions about mail voting Tuesday night started immediately after he asserted that President Joe Biden “has destroyed our country. This guy is destroying our country.”
Ingraham asked Trump how he would ensure the security of mail voting. “What are you going to do to make sure we don’t have problems going forward?” Trump didn’t answer that question directly, instead decrying the practice.
He said he preferred in-person voting “in a properly run state,” which he asserted is a better method. “I mean, it would be very hard to cheat in a mass scale.”
Trump’s solution to what he argues is mail-voting fraud and the way to win elections “is by swamping them. The way you win is by swamping them. You have got to have — and we’re going to swamp. I’ll tell you what, I’ve, I did great in the first election. I did much better in the second,” he said.
Bob Sutton, a former chairman of the Broward Republican Party, and a national board member and local leader of the Republican Liberty Caucus, said he thinks there are “abuses” in mail voting, but said he couldn’t immediately identify any.
Sutton, who said he always votes in person on Election Day, also said he thinks Republicans should take full advantage of mail voting.
“The Republicans need to make sure they do everything they can to make sure that they own the mail-in-voting apparatus,” he said. “If it’s going to be here, we need to be the ones to own it.”
But McDonald said Trump is so influential over his base, the MAGA movement that developed along with his successful 2016 presidential candidacy, and he has railed against mail voting so often that those views are deeply entrenched among Republican voters — so much so that even messages from Trump himself may not work.
Even if Trump encourages mail voting, his encouragement doesn’t last, McDonald said. “He won’t stick with the script and he’s going to stray back into this conspiracy claim that the election was stolen from him in 2020,” he said.
Good for Democrats?
Trump opponents and Democrats welcomed Trump’s creating doubt about mail voting among his supporters.
Rick Wilson, the former Republican strategist turned never-Trump activist and leader of the Lincoln Project, was happy to highlight Trump’s criticism of mail voting, hoping it tamps down Republican interest.
“Way to shave off a percent or two, Donnie. Keep it up,” Wilson wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Ron Filipkowski, a Republican-turned-Democrat who posts video clips on social media and is editor of the liberal MeidasTouch website, posted video of Trump’s comments this week on social media.
Filipkowksi sarcastically sought to promote Trump’s concerns, hoping to dissuade some Republicans from using mail ballots.
“Basically Republicans, if you vote by mail the Deep State is probably going to steal it. Best to wait for Election Day. Don’t mind the lines. And if one of those canvassers comes to your door trying to get you to do it, good chance they work for Soros and are tricking you,” he wrote on X.
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Post.news.