Though President Donald Trump returned to the White House this year the same way he left it in 2020 — by the Electoral College and ballots cast by millions of voters, including by mail — he again is sowing seeds of doubt in vote-by-mail systems.
He says he’s considering an executive order to ban voting by mail nationwide.
Some pundits say his latest pledge is just another attempt at distraction; toss a shiny nickel at the media and they’ll move off the Jeffrey Epstein story.
But two things can be true. It’s a calculated distraction and an actual goal. Either way, vote by mail should be here to stay.
Starting in 2005, the Legislature enacted vote-by-mail as an option across the state. With nearly every county exercising that option by 2011, lawmakers made it mandatory across the state. Voters like it, and it has proved to be efficient, convenient and secure.
In King County alone, 80% of registered voters participated in the November 2024 election; in the 2020 election, the figure was 87%. The convenience of vote by mail makes those numbers possible.
“It’s a bit hard to wrap my mind around the things we would have to do,” said King County Elections Director Julie Wise, of the possibility of going back to in-person voting and 500 polling places. “You’re talking millions of dollars. We don’t have the equipment or the vendors set up for electronic or paper ballots.”
Not only would such a ban negatively impact voters with accessibility challenges, it would also impact the 37,000 military personnel stationed outside of Washington who must vote absentee.
Trump’s latest threat could be another move toward achieving his goal of making sure the Republicans keep control of Congress, and what better way to do so than to complicate voting in states like Washington, Oregon, Colorado and California? His proposal no doubt would be met with a slew of federal lawsuits. Legal scholars say any legal challenge would last well past 2026.
Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud are not true, but he continues to repeat them in order to create mistrust in local election offices and results. This from the person who voted by mail and asked the Georgia secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes for him, two months after he lost the 2020 election.
Banning voting by mail would disenfranchise millions of voters. When it comes to engaging American citizens, more voters, not fewer, are needed.
