The Trump administration’s attack on mail ballots is anti-democratic and anti-constitutional, but also a bit dimwitted.
Eight states — Washington, California, Oregon, Hawaiʻi, Nevada, Colorado, Utah and Vermont — allow all-mail ballot elections. Another 10 primarily depend on votes delivered by mail. And all of the rest of our 50 states have provisions for absentee ballots sent through the post office.
One voter who mails his ballots to Florida from his temporary residence in Washington, D.C., is President Donald J. Trump. Yet, Trump is intent on disrupting, if not eliminating, voting by mail.
The president has gotten it into his head that somehow Democrats are favored by mail-in ballots; that, in fact, the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him, partly through the corrupt practice of voting by mail. He also thinks that hordes of noncitizens are dropping their votes into mailboxes. He may also believe in unicorns.
In the real world, the truth is that elections held using mail ballots are squeaky clean and votes cast by noncitizens are extremely rare. Trump lost in 2020 by millions of votes with exactly zero evidence of corrupted ballots, but, since the president lives in a different reality (where unicorns may exist), the entire executive branch of the federal government has been forced to cater to his delusions.
Trump has politicized the United States Postal Service by issuing an executive order that would stop delivery of any mail ballots in states that refuse to give complete voter lists to the federal government. Twenty-four states are suing to block that order from going into effect.
And a whistleblower inside the postal service has revealed that a new system for assessing mail ballots that is being thrown together to please the president is so terrible that it could seriously disrupt the 2026 election.
This overt meddling in the nation’s voting system is obviously an affront to American democracy and a usurpation of the authority over elections delegated to the states by the U.S. Constitution, but, as I noted, it may also be dimwitted.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs held a news conference this week in which he revealed that 20,000 ballots in the state’s August primary were postmarked too late to be counted. Hobbs attributed that failure to a recent change in postal service rules that stipulates that mail ballots must be sent to regional processing centers to be postmarked, rather than getting stamped earlier at local post offices.
Was the change made as a knuckle-headed efficiency measure or was it another Trumpian trick? Who knows? The result, though, was that the disallowed ballots were mostly from rural areas which, as we all know, heavily favor Republicans.
If Trump gets his wish and voting by mail becomes more difficult or even impossible, he may find it is his own party that is harmed the most.
Dimwitted, indeed.
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