President Donald Trump launched his second-term assault on mail-in ballots and electronic voting machines on Aug. 18, firing off a series of unfounded claims while announcing an effort to do away with both.
The president began the day with a post on Truth Social saying 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.” Trump said he was working on an executive order to target both voting methods. He repeated his intentions later in the day while answering reporters’ questions alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House.
Trump made familiar unsupported or false claims about mail-in voting and voting machines, and a new assertion about a president’s power and the role of states in the election process:
- The president wrongly claimed “[w]e are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-in Voting.” Eleven other nations allow all their voters to use some form of mail-in voting, and 22 additional countries allow some voters to cast ballots by mail.
- Trump said that “States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” But experts told us that the Constitution gives states the authority to run elections, with oversight from Congress, and the president has no direct role.
- He continued to baselessly claim “MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD” associated with mail-in voting. Experts say that while fraud is slightly more prevalent with mail-in voting than in-person voting, it is still relatively rare, and there is no evidence to support claims of widespread fraud.
- Trump also took aim at voting machines, calling them “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial.” There is no evidence the machines are inaccurate. And while the president continued to call for paper ballots, that’s already the norm in nearly every state.
Trump has been making false and unsubstantiated claims about voting fraud ever since he entered politics, and he has consistently and falsely claimed the 2020 election, which he lost, was “rigged.”
Other Countries Allow Mail-In Voting
In his Truth Social post, Trump claimed, “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”
At a press briefing with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office later in the day, Trump said he was working on an executive order “to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And 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 it because of what’s happened, massive fraud all over the place.”
During an Aug. 15 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump also said that Russian President Vladimir Putin told him during their summit meeting in Alaska, “‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting. … No country has mail-in voting.'”
We don’t know what Putin might have told Trump about mail-in voting in other nations. But we do know that many countries besides the United States utilize mail-in voting in their elections.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an organization that advances democratic political processes around the world, in 2024 reported that 11 nations besides the U.S. allow all their voters to use some form of mail-in voting, or what the International IDEA refers to as “postal voting.” Those countries are Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Poland, South Korea, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Twenty-two other nations allow some voters to use postal voting, though the reasons vary by country. Among the groups allowed to vote by mail in those countries are citizens living in remote areas or abroad, incarcerated citizens, people who are hospitalized or have disabilities, and those with some other inability to vote in person. Countries that allow some citizens to vote by mail include Australia, France, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Pakistan and Spain.
The International IDEA describes “postal voting” as “a voting method where voters receive and mark their paper ballots in an uncontrolled environment (e.g. home) and then send the filled ballots in a return envelope with their personal details for processing and counting. While postal voting is in principle early voting, it differs in that the vote can be physically submitted remotely by the voters themselves. The term ‘postal’ refers to the postal service, historically the main method for sending and returning ballots.”
The Pew Research Center reported in October 2020, “Out of 166 countries for which data is available, 40 used postal ballots in their most recent national election, according to country experts surveyed before the COVID-19 outbreak by the Electoral Integrity Project. Postal ballots were used most widely in Europe and North America and are also common in some countries in the Asia-Pacific region, such as India, Indonesia, South Korea and Sri Lanka. Postal ballots were not available in most African and Caribbean countries, and not available in any Middle Eastern or Latin American countries.”
Role of States in Elections
The president mischaracterized the role of states in running elections, writing in his Truth Social post, “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
In his Aug. 18 Oval Office remarks, Trump said his administration was working on an executive order to “end mail-in ballots.”
We talked to half a dozen experts, and they agreed that states don’t operate as an “agent” of the federal government and the president has no direct authority over the counting and tabulating of ballots.
“[S]tates are most definitely not agents of the federal government when it comes to elections, or anything else, and even more, to the extent that the federal government can specify rules for running, the power lies with Congress, not the president,” Kenneth Mayer, a professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us in an email.
The way U.S. elections are run is “highly decentralized,” according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, National Conference of State Legislatures, election law experts and a report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
“Elections are primarily administered by thousands of state and local systems rather than a single, unified national system,” the CRS explained in a 2019 report.
The reason for this goes back to the Constitution, which gives the authority to run elections to the states, but says that Congress can change those regulations in a clause that specifies, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
“The Framers’ inclusion of the Elections Clause was driven by two overlapping concerns of current relevance: a focus on representation and a distrust of state lawmakers,” a 2021 law review article on the history and use of the clause explained. The framers were concerned about corruption among local officials, the paper said, so they added congressional authority to change the rules implemented by those officials.
“There was relatively little discussion at the time of excluding the president from that, but they very clearly did not include the president and there’s very good reason for that,” Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told us in a phone interview.
First, the role of the executive is to execute the rules, not make them, he said. Second, the framers likely wanted to avoid “exactly what we are witnessing right now,” which is a president attempting to interfere with elections with the potential to serve his own interests.
Congress has, on occasion, exercised its power to change states’ election rules, according to the National Constitution Center. For example, it has: established a national Election Day; limited how much money people can contribute to candidates for Congress and required that they publicly disclose campaign spending; required states to make sure their voter rolls are accurate.
Congress also passed the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act — all of which affect the administration of elections, Mayer pointed out.
“Under the Elections Clause, Congress does have the power to regulate the manner in which national elections are held,” agreed Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University School of Law. He told us in an email, “In theory, that means Congress could decide what policies should apply to absentee ballots or early voting or similar aspects of the election process. But the deep and long-standing practice about these issues is that Congress lets the states make their own policy choices on such matters.”
While Congress could conceivably eliminate mail-in voting for federal elections, “there may be constitutional issues involved related to equal protection and other constitutional rights,” Mayer said.
And, as a practical matter, Trump may run into a problem finding support for such a change in Congress. For example, recent election-related legislation called the SAVE Act, which would require documentary evidence of citizenship in order to register to vote, stalled in the Senate last year and has been stalled again since April.
“So, that gives you a sense of the political will,” Morales-Doyle said.
John Fortier, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agreed that there is no direct role for the president, but he told us in a phone interview that Trump may have a route to affecting election administration by applying pressure to agencies within the executive branch, such as the Department of Justice.
Many of the country’s voting rights laws have come out of actions taken by the Justice Department, he said. So, leaning on that and other executive branch agencies might yield some results for the president.
But, “the big picture is that it’s primarily run by the states,” Fortier said, and the president isn’t directly involved.
Unsupported Claims About Mail-in Voting Fraud
Trump continues to baselessly claim “MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD” associated with mail-in voting, which he referred to as the “completely disproven Mail-In SCAM.”
“ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Speaking in the Oval Office on Aug. 18, Trump again called mail-in voting “corrupt,” and he vowed Republicans “are going to do everything possible” to get rid of it.
Elections experts have told us for years that election fraud is slightly more prevalent with mail-in voting than it is with in-person voting. But, they say, it is still rare and has never been proven to have occurred frequently enough to have changed the outcome of a national election.
Currently, 36 states and Washington, D.C., allow no-excuse mail-in voting, including nine states that vote mostly by mail. No excuse means any voter can request a mail-in ballot. All states allow at least some voters to vote by mail, for reasons such as illness or disability or because the person is out of their home county on Election Day.
“There was no reliable evidence of mail-in ballots used to manipulate the 2020 election, where Trump made his claims during covid,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, told us via email.
“We’ve been voting by mail since the Civil War, and the mechanisms for making mail ballots safe, accurate, and reliable have improved mightily since then,” Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and an election law expert who served during the Biden administration as the White House’s first senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights, told us via email. “That’s part of why President Trump has himself voted by mail. We’ve been back and forth with these unfounded claims for the last ten years, and there’s no more truth to them now than there has been.” (Trump has voted occasionally by mail, including in the 2020 primary election and the 2018 midterm elections. He voted early in-person in the general elections in 2020 and 2024.)
David Becker, founder and executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said that contrary to Trump’s claims, getting rid of mail-in voting “which is offered by the vast majority of states, red and blue, is an incredibly bad idea that would make our elections much less secure and vulnerable to interference.”
Trump also wrongly claimed that Democratic President Jimmy Carter, who headed up an election commission in 2005, concluded, “‘The one thing about mail in voting, you will never have an honest election if you have mail in it.’” That’s not accurate. The commission Carter co-chaired did warn about the increased risk of fraud with mail-in voting, and a decreased ability to detect it, but the commission suggested measures to lessen that risk. Carter himself was an advocate for mail-in voting.
Baseless Claims About ‘Inaccurate’ Voting Machines
Trump also took aim — without evidence — at what he called, “Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” Trump further criticized voting machines as “A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER.”
“The other thing we want changed are the machines,” Trump said on Aug. 18. “For all of the money they spend, it’s approximately 10 times more expensive than paper ballots. And paper ballots are very sophisticated, with the watermark paper and everything else. We would get secure elections. We’d get much faster results.”
In fact, Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history” and that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
William Barr, who served as the U.S. attorney general under Trump, told a House committee in testimony released June 13, 2022: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.”
Barr told the committee the election fraud claims the Trump camp was “shoveling out to the public … was bullshit.” Barr said claims about Dominion Voting Systems voting machines, in particular, were “idiotic” and “disturbing in the sense that I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations. But they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people — members of the public — that there was this systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn’t count and that these machines controlled by somebody else were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense.”
There was never “any evidence that voting machines are being manipulated,” Hasen told us.
Becker, of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told us, “Requiring states to eliminate or replace the voting machines that confirmed the election of this president, just 15 months before a midterm election and less than a year before primaries, is not possible, and would result in chaos.”
Nor would it be cheaper, as Trump said, Matthew Weil, vice president of democracy and bipartisanship at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told us in a phone interview. Most Americans today are voting via a hand-marked paper ballot, with the voting machines acting as “glorified scanners,” he said. Because there are paper ballots, he said, it is possible to do recounts by hand if there are concerns about the tabulated results. There would likely not be any savings to switch to a new system, he said, since most states have already transitioned to the paper ballot system with electronic counters.
Some states do use watermarked paper to signify official ballots, he said. But that paper is more expensive, and so requiring all states to move to such paper would add to costs, not produce savings.
Becker noted that in numerous defamation cases, those who echoed Trump’s claims, including Fox News, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell, had opportunities to defend their attacks on Dominion voting machines as true “and every defendant failed to present even a shred of evidence.” Fox News reached a settlement in its case in 2023, agreeing to pay Dominion $787 million.
On Aug. 18, the conservative cable network Newsmax paid $67 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion for falsely claiming that the company had rigged votes in the 2020 election. Newsmax admitted no wrongdoing and didn’t retract its stories, the New York Times reported. In 2024, Newsmax settled with another voting systems company, Smartmatic USA, in a case related to false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.
As for Trump’s call to return to paper ballots, “Louisiana is, as far as I’m aware, the only state in which machines are used that don’t produce a paper ballot than can be separately verified by both voters and election officials, subject to careful audits,” Levitt told us.
The voting machines used in the 2020 election are “safe, accurate, and reliable, and rigorously tested by local officials,” Levitt said. “They also provide real accessibility, required by federal law but benefiting all of us — particularly voters with disabilities, voters who’d like the font to be a bit bigger or the screen to be a bit lighter, and voters who’d like to also see the ballot in a different language.”
“Our elections are as secure, transparent, and verified than ever before in American history, thanks to the thousands of professional election officials of both parties, at the state and local level, that oversee them,” Becker said. “We have more verifiable, recountable paper ballots than ever before, with 98% of all American voters voting on paper (only Louisiana without). We have audits of those ballots that confirm the results.”
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