Trump votes by mail amid his push to end mail-in ballots
The president has made passage of his SAVE Act, which would curtail mail-in voting, a major priority.
Josh MeyerWASHINGTON – President Donald Trump cast a ballot by mail in the March 24 special election in Palm Beach, Florida, even though he has spent years attacking mail-in ballots as susceptible to fraud.In fact, he wants to largely prohibit the practice nationwide as part of his SAVE America Act election security legislation.
In recent days, Trump has ramped up his attacks on mail-in voting, calling it a way for Democrats to try and steal elections.
"Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all," Trump said at a Memphis roundtable on crime March 23.
He's also pushing for the Supreme Court to back a Republican effort to stop states from counting late-arriving mail-in ballots, a decision that would lead to stricter voting rules around the country.
Palm Beach County voter records show Trump voted by mail, according to its website. The White House did not dispute that in email exchanges with USA TODAY. Early in-person voting in the race for two state legislative seats ran through March 22, when the president was still at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.
Trump has previously voted by mail, including in 2020.
Trump took to his Truth Social media platform on the night of March 23 to urge South Floridians to get out and vote, including a link where people could find their local polling places. He also endorsed Jon Maples for Florida State House District 87 in Palm Beach County over Democrat Emily Gregory.
"He had ample opportunity to conveniently vote in-person during Florida’s early voting period, and instead he chose to cast a mail-in ballot, as tens of millions of other Americans do every election cycle," David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told USA TODAY.
The SAVE Act, formally known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, is such a priority for Trump that he has vowed to stop signing virtually all bills until Congress passes it.
The GOP's push to pass it faces stiff opposition from Democrats. And while Republicans, who hold a majority in both houses of Congress, generally support the measure, many are unwilling to eliminate the Senate's filibuster and its de facto supermajority requirement to pass it, as Trump demands.
"As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel – but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud," White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said in a statement March 24 to USA TODAY.
The White House said did not respond to several requests for comment about which of the proposed SAVE Act exceptions Trump was using to vote by mail.
Attacking mail-in ballots for years
Trump has long been fixated on how "universal" mail-voting poses what he says is the biggest danger for voter fraud and threat to democracy.
He has also made baseless claims of voter fraud to argue the 2020 presidential election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen from him.
Dozens of U.S. judges, and even William Barr, Trump’s attorney general at the time, found no evidence of widespread fraud.
Florida law allows no-excuse mail voting, meaning any registered voter can request and submit a ballot by mail. Trump has voted absentee or by mail multiple times in recent elections, including while living in Florida after leaving the White House.
Disenfranchising millions of voters?
Democrats and voting rights groups have accused Trump and the GOP of trying to use the SAVE Act to disenfranchise potentially tens of millions of voters in a midterm election that could determine which party controls the House and Senate during the last two years of Trump’s second term.
"TO ALL GREAT PATRIOTS IN FLORIDA … Polls are open from 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M," Trump wrote.
But Trump said nothing about how he himself had voted by mail.
At a March 23 event, Trump told lawmakers debating the bill to get it passed as soon as possible. "And I’m requesting that the Republican senators do that immediately," Trump said. "Don’t worry about Easter, going home. In fact, make this one for Jesus, okay?"
Despite Trump’s pressure, the measure faces steep odds in a closely divided Senate.
After news broke that Trump once again voted by mail, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York, called the president "a complete fraud" for doing so.
"Don’t ever believe a word he has to say about election integrity," Jeffries said in a Facebook post.
Trump has also repeatedly claimed, falsely, that the United States is the only country that uses mail-in voting and that other nations abandoned it due to fraud. Numerous countries including Canada,Germany and the United Kingdom allow and even encourage people to mail in their ballots.