mailin

Oct. 31 (UPI) — A federal judge in Washington permanently blocked President Donald Trump‘s executive order requiring proof of citizenship for those who cast mail-in ballots.

The president lacks the authority to change federal election procedures because the Constitution places that authority with Congress and the respective states, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled on Friday.

“The president directed the Election Assistance Commission to ‘take appropriate action’ to alter the national mail voter registration form to require documentary proof of United States citizenship,” Kollar-Kotelly said in her 81-page ruling.

Because Trump does not have the authority to order the EAC to alter federal election procedures, Kollar-Kotelly permanently enjoined the EAC and others from enforcing the president’s directive.

The ruling arises from challenges to Executive Order 14,248 — Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections, which Trump signed on March 25.

In it, the president orders the EAC to require documentary proof of citizenship on the national mail voter registration form to ensure foreign nationals are not submitting votes via mail-in ballots.

State or local officials in turn would record the type of document used to show proof of citizenship.

The executive order also requires mail-in ballots to be received on or before election day for them to count.

The Democratic National Committee, League of United Latin American Citizens and League of Women Voters Education Fund filed the federal lawsuit against the president and the Republican National Committee to stop enforcement of the executive order.

“While the fight is far from over, we’re glad the court agreed that a president cannot ‘short circuit’ Congress and unilaterally use an illegal executive order to obliterate the rights of millions of voters,” said Marcia Johnson, who is chief counsel for the League of Women Voters, in a prepared statement.

Although Kollar-Kotelly blocked the enforcement of Trump’s executive order, other parts of the lawsuit are yet to be decided.

Aug. 26 (UPI) — President Donald Trump‘s wish to end mail-in voting is only part of his grander vision for fundamentally changing the election process, experts say.

Mail-in voting has been the target of the president for years and it is again garnering his attention. As president he does not have a direct role in election administration but by sowing mistrust in the results he is still capable of ushering in change.

“The president has no role with respect to election administration or setting election rules of anything of that nature,” Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships with Campaign Legal Center, told UPI. “The Constitution is crystal clear that the primary responsibility for setting election rules lies with the states, subject to modifications from Congress.”

Trump alleges that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, a claim that has routinely been disproven by election audits and federal investigations, Diaz said.

“His own Department of Justice during his first term said there was no evidence of any widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election,” Diaz said. “Countless studies and investigations and attempts have turned up virtually nothing. Isolated incidents that haven’t affected the outcome of elections at most. There is no basis to support any of the president’s views on vote-by-mail or the integrity of our election system in general.”

About one-third of voters participated in the 2024 general election by casting mail-in ballots.

Universal vote-by-mail

When Trump takes to social media or the podium to air his grievances with voting by mail, he does so in broad terms. Charles Stewart, director of the MIT Election Lab and professor of political science, told UPI that Trump’s issue is actually with universal vote-by-mail.

Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct universal vote-by-mail, meaning they send mail-in ballots to all registered voters without requests. Those states are California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Utah. Whether a voter intends to vote by mail or not, they still receive a ballot.

Universal vote-by-mail expanded to California, Vermont, Nevada, Hawaii and Washington, D.C., in 2020 or later. Stewart said some of the expansion was in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There ended up being a bit of a back-and-forth in the early days between Democratic activists and Republicans about whether everybody in America should be mailed a ballot,” Stewart said. “That has morphed over the years into this kind of partisan divide over this practice of mailing everybody a ballot.”

Utah, the only universal vote-by-mail state that leans Republican, passed a bill earlier this year to change its mail-in voting process. Voters will no longer automatically receive a ballot in the mail beginning in 2029. Instead, they must request one.

“Thus far, for all the political talk at the top about discouraging vote-by-mail, once voters have taken a bite of that apple, they like the apple,” Stewart said. “Once the candidates and their advisers, their campaign advisers, have learned to campaign with mail being a predominant part of the election they also have a hard time giving it up. In Utah they’re going to roll back mail voting but there’s still going to be a lot of mail voting.”

Challenges for administrators and voters

Whether Trump hopes to see an end to universal vote-by-mail or mail-in voting in general, he cannot achieve either through executive order. It would require an act by U.S. Congress.

Ending vote-by-mail in any fashion would be a major disruption for election administrators at the state level, Stewart said.

“It would certainly be a great reevaluation of how they administer things,” he said. “They would have to very quickly turn on a logistical dime to make it work. They did it in 2020 on the other side.”

Some of the logistical challenges that universal vote-by-mail states and states with heavy mail-in voting participation would face include finding additional poll workers and polling places, along with the costs associated with these additions. This would raise the costs of election administration for taxpayers.

“Many of these places will have some memory of doing elections in person but they will not have the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of local voting locations that will be needed on Election Day,” Stewart said. “They will have to recruit and deploy on Election Day, so there will be a real, major scrambling to make this happen. They will have no choice in the matter but it will be very expensive and very disruptive.”

Losing access to the option to vote by mail would also be consequential for many voters who otherwise may not be able to participate in their elections.

Sophia Lin Lakin, director ACLU Voting Rights Project, told UPI that mail-in voting is crucial for people with disabilities and mobility issues, seniors and people who lack reliable access to transportation.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, voters who are 65 and older voted by mail at the highest rate of any age group in the 2022 midterm elections. About 38% voted by mail.

Mail-in voting also levels the playing field of participation for voters across the socioeconomic spectrum. Voters with family incomes ranging between under $10,000 and more than $150,000 per year voted by mail at similar rates, between 24% and 36%.

“Many Americans juggle multiple jobs or irregular schedules and mail-in voting provides the flexibility needed for those voters to participate in democracy without sacrificing a paycheck,” Lakin said. “Ending it would disenfranchise many communities that already face systemic barriers to voting.”

Trump administration’s other election changes

The Trump administration has already taken other measures to change the election process in the United States while continuing the pattern of sowing doubt in the election he lost in 2020.

In March, Trump issued an executive order to restrict the acceptance of mail-in ballots received after Election Day and tighten the proof of citizenship requirements for voter eligibility. It also threatened to withhold federal funding from states that fail to comply.

A federal judge granted an injunction to stop the proof-of-citizenship requirement from taking effect.

Trump’s order charged the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Government Efficiency with scanning state voter registration rolls and federal immigration databases in an effort to identify foreign nationals.

The president has applied political pressure to lawmakers in Texas and other states to redraw their congressional maps to be more favorable for Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterm election.

Trump’s legislative agenda, passed in July, reduced funding for national cybersecurity, raising concern that U.S. elections, among other things, could be more vulnerable to interference from bad actors. The Trump administration has fired more than 100 employees from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal government’s chief cybersecurity arm.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has cut the leadership and many of the employees working in the voting section of the Civil Rights Division. The voting section enforces federal voting rights laws including parts of the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, Help America Vote and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

The voting section has halted all investigations into potential Voting Rights Act violations.

Voting section

Pamela Karlan, professor of law at Stanford Law School, told UPI that the Trump administration’s overhaul of election law enforcement is unlike anything ever seen in American history.

Karlan served as the former principal deputy assistant attorney general under former President Joe Biden‘s administration.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a time where they just outright stopped enforcing the Voting Rights Act,” Karlan said. “There has been more vigorous enforcement during some administrations than others. That has not traditionally been a partisan issue. But I don’t think we’ve ever had an administration that was outright not committed to enforcing any part of the Voting Rights Act.”

“The idea that the voting section isn’t in the game is really troubling, because the voting section has brought and won some of the most important voting rights cases in our history,” she continued.

Reducing the staff in the voting section and its overall capabilities greatly puts overseas voters and deployed military service members at risk of not being able to participate in elections.

“Almost every election cycle the voting action has had to deal with problems of getting ballots to overseas voters and to military voters in a timely manner,” Karlan said. “Almost every federal election cycle, the department has a bunch of UOCAVA responsibilities and really nobody else is going to enforce that.”

Karlan sees little opportunity for recourse if the voting section does not enforce election laws or actively protect the rights of voters, short of action by Congress. She still expects most election administrators will follow the law but the small few who do not will present significant problems.

“For the most part, state and local jurisdictions comply with the law,” she said. “Prior to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act we had rampant violations of the Constitution when it came to voting rights. Massive disenfranchisement. Purposeful vote dilution and the like.”

“Most election officials want to comply with federal law,” she continued. “But when it comes to the outliers, the lack of any federal enforcement is deeply problematic.”

United States President Donald Trump has stepped up his attacks against mail-in voting, which he claims was rigged in the 2020 elections, and has pledged to get rid of the postal voting system.

“We are now the only country in the world that uses mail-in voting,” he posted on his Truth Social platform on Monday.

His post echoed grievances about mail-in voting he had aired days earlier in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity.  After meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday in Alaska, Trump told Hannity that Putin said the 2020 US presidential election was “rigged” because of mail-in voting. It wasn’t. Trump lost that election. Officials in his own administration told him that.

Hours after his post, Trump slightly softened his language during a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“And do you know that we’re the only country in the world – I believe, I may be wrong – but just about the only country in the world that uses [mail-in voting]. Because of what’s happened, massive fraud all over the place,” Trump said.

Mail-in voting provides more opportunities for fraud than in-person voting, researchers said, but it’s still rare, and election officials have safeguards in place.

Trump said during Monday’s remarks at the White House that his administration is preparing an executive order “to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt”.

We asked the White House for evidence to support Trump’s statement about other countries and received no response.

Data compiled by a Sweden-based organisation that advocates for democracy globally found in an October report that 34 countries or territories allow mail-in voting, which it refers to as “postal voting”.

Dozens of countries allow at least some mail-in voting

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that of those 34 countries or territories, 12 allow all voters to vote by mail and 22 permit only some voters to vote this way.

“Europe has the largest number of countries that make in-country postal voting available to all or some voters,” the report said.

No two countries have exactly the same postal voting system, said Annika Silva-Leander, the organisation’s North America head.

Silva-Leander noted some differences:

• Ballot tracking: Ballot tracking allows voters and election officials to track ballots throughout the voting process to reduce fraud. Although that is common in the US, many countries don’t have it.
• Different state systems: Many countries have the same postal voting system for the entire nation. In the US, the system differs from state to state. The majority of states allow voting by mail, including primarily Republican-voting, Democratic-voting and battleground states.
• Mailing ballots to all voters is unusual: In most countries, postal voting supplements voting at polling stations, but some US states, such as Washington, rely largely on postal voting.
• Ballot curing: This is a US process that allows voters to fix a problem, such as forgetting to sign the envelope, after casting their ballots. This process is not available in most countries.

The US has had voting by mail since its 1861-1865 Civil War. Voting by mail also has a long history across the globe.

Australia introduced postal voting more than a century ago, Graeme Orr, an expert on international electoral law at the University of Queensland in Australia, previously told PolitiFact.

All Canadians are eligible to use mail-in voting, said York University Associate Professor Cary Wu, who cowrote a 2024 paper about the effect of Trump’s antimail-voting messaging on Canadians’ views of postal voting.

“Voting by mail has long been a vital component of the democratic process in Canada,” Wu said.

Although the option of submitting a ballot by mail was extended to all Canadian voters in 1993, it was not commonly used in general elections before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the United Kingdom, on-demand postal voting was part of a wider modernisation in electoral administration in the early 2000s, according to a 2021 paper by UK researchers. Postal voting’s expansion was driven largely by a desire to increase turnout. Using data from the 2019 British Election Study, researchers found older voters and people with disabilities were more likely to opt for postal voting’s convenience.

US states set mail-in voting laws

In his Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “The States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” and must do what the president tells them.

Election law Professor Rick Hasen at the University of California at Los Angeles wrote on his blog that Trump’s statement is “wrong and dangerous”.

“The Constitution does not give the President any control over federal elections,” Hasen wrote, adding that federal courts have recognised those limits.

The US Constitution’s Article 1, Section 4 says the regulation of elections is a power of the states.

“The president plays literally no role in elections, and that’s by design of the founders,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Despite often criticising voting by mail, Trump himself occasionally cast a mail-in ballot, and in 2024, Trump invited Republicans to cast mail-in ballots.

We asked the White House for details about the forthcoming executive order he described, including whether it seeks to entirely ban mail-in voting. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields did not address that question but said Trump wants to require voter IDs and prevent “cheating through lax and incompetent voting laws in states like California and New York.”

There is no evidence of widespread cheating in California and New York, two of the most populous states that consistently vote for Democrats for president. Most states require voter IDs although the rules vary.

Our ruling

Trump didn’t explain his evidence and hours later softened his language when he said he “may be wrong”.

In 2024, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that 34 countries or territories allow postal voting. For example, Australia has had mail-in voting for a century, and all Canadians are eligible to vote by mail.

We rate this statement false.

President Trump said Monday he would renew his assault on mail-in voting after Russia’s autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin, told him to do so at their meeting in Alaska last week.

The president provided few details, but wrote on social media that he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.”

Already in March, Trump had issued an executive order directing the Justice Department to “take all necessary action” to prevent mail-in ballots received after election day from being counted. The order also attempted to impose a proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration.

Those portions of the executive action has been enjoined by courts over constitutional concerns. But another provision, directing the independent U.S. Election Assistance Commission to shift its guidance on voting machines banning the use of certain bar codes and quick-response codes, has been allowed to proceed.

The U.S. Constitution states that the timing, place and manner of elections “shall be prescribed in each state” by local legislatures, and that Congress has the ability to pass laws altering state election regulations. The president is given no authority to prescribe or govern election procedures.

Trump’s action comes on the heels of his meeting with Putin in Anchorage, where the Russian leader told him that mail-in ballots led to his electoral defeat in 2020, according to the president.

The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Putin attempted to influence the last three U.S. presidential elections in Trump’s favor.

“Vladimir Putin said something — one of the most interesting things. He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump told Fox News in an interview.

Trump has criticized mail-in voting since entering politics in 2015. But his presidential campaign embraced the practice leading up to the 2024 election, encouraging his supporters — especially those affected by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina — to take advantage of mail-in voting opportunities.

“Absentee voting, early voting and election day voting are all good options,” Trump said at the time. “Republicans must make a plan, register and vote!”