Trump’s Assault On Vote-By-Mail

Donald Trump recently declared on Truth Social that he plans to “lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots.” He claimed that “ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS.”

In truth, vote-by-mail is a bulwark of American democracy. 

In 2024, roughly 30 percent of voters voted by mail, and in 2020—at the height of the pandemic—43 percent of voters mailed in their ballots. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) called that election “the most secure in  American history.”  

A large majority of Americans support the right to vote by mail, according to the Pew Research Center, and 34 states currently allow vote by mail for any reason. Nine states—Oregon, Washington, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Hawaii, Vermont, California, and the District of Columbia – have instituted “universal vote at home” where everyone automatically gets a ballot mailed to them at home. This convenience means better turnout—a boon for democracy regardless of the result. 

And as for Trump’s claims of fraud?  Even the Heritage Foundation can’t find any. It’s “database” of election fraud lists just 138 total cases nationwide, virtually none of them involving mail-in ballots. Government watchdogs called the 2020 election—despite the widespread use of mail-in ballots—“the most secure in American history.” 

Trump’s efforts to end vote-by-mail are an extension of his efforts to control the nation’s elections apparatus in advance of the 2026 midterms and to tilt the system in his favor. And if he succeeds, he could disenfranchise the millions of Americans— including seniors and people with disabilities—who depend on vote by mail to participate in elections. 

In this episode of the Washington Monthly podcast, Anne Kim and Garrett Epps spoke with Phil Keisling, the former Oregon Secretary of State who pioneered modern systems of vote by mail and the founder of the National Vote at Home Institute. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available on Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

Anne Kim: Give us a little bit of background on vote-by-mail, and who takes advantage of this option?

Phil Keisling: All 50 states have the option of mail-in ballots—the only question is how restrictive or how open they are.  They range from states like Alabama, where you have to meet some very narrow excuses to even legally request one, to eight states and Washington, D.C., which automatically mail a ballot to all active registered voters.

In 2024, roughly a third of the 160 million votes cast—well north of 50 million—were mail-in. In the 2020 pandemic election, it was almost half. In fact, it was the single most popular way of people casting ballots. And it’s no coincidence that in 2020 we set a century record for turnout despite a national pandemic. 

It’s a tried and true method that’s been around since the Civil War. It was first used in 1864 to let Union soldiers reelect Abraham Lincoln and save the Union.

Garrett Epps: Phil, you were a secretary of state, and you had a “Road to Damascus” moment because you opposed vote by mail originally and then realized that it had desirable consequences. You then led Oregon to become a national leader in Vote by Mail and founded the Vote at Home Institute. From a Secretary of State’s point of view, what are the advantages of vote-by-mail?

Phil Keisling:  I think the advantages are illustrated by my own personal history with it. It actually started long before I got into politics. By the time I was at the Washington Monthly as an editor in the early 1980s, a county clerk in a mostly rural county asked the question, “If we’re taking all the time money to distribute sample ballots to our voters, why don’t we send them the real thing?” And he stuck with the question and wouldn’t let it go.

In the 1980s, a Republican secretary of state led a change in the laws to allow local governments to automatically mail all registered voters a ballot. So by the time I became Secretary of State in 1991, it was widely in use for local elections, and the only question was, do we extend it to primary and general elections? 

The state law prohibited it at the time, and I was a sucker for the Norman Rockwell-ish notion of voting—the crush of autumn leaves under clear blue skies, seeing your neighbors at the polls, etc.  But the epiphany I had was that I realized I was confusing a beloved ritual of democracy with its essence, which is participation. And we were seeing double, triple, quadruple the turnout in local elections using this approach. 

To this day, when I ask Oregonians what they like most about it, it’s not necessarily the money that’s saved because it does save money, or the convenience, which does boost turnout. They say, “I feel like cast a more informed ballot. I could sit around my dining or kitchen room table, sometimes with friends, family, and really look at all the issues and feel that I was casting an informed vote.”

Two thirds of Oregonians return their ballot in person. They don’t return it by mail. And I realized years later that it’s an “opt-out” approach to democracy.

It’s not mandatory voting like Australia has, but it’s the mandatory receiving of the ballot if you’re an active registered voter. You don’t have to go search for it. You don’t have to physically travel to a location during particular hours, or you don’t have to apply in advance for mailed-out ballots. Lots of people don’t know what’s going to happen on a particular Tuesday in November and whether an unexpected illness or a work or transportation challenge will arise.

It helps people not to be inadvertently disenfranchised to have the intent to vote. It doesn’t force them to vote, but it removes some logistical barriers. If we’d had [automatic receipt of ballots] for every state in 2020, we would have had 12 million more votes cast across the country. And would that have helped Biden? Would that have helped Trump? Who knows? And ultimately, who cares? It would have been 12 million more votes.

Anne Kim: Let’s talk about the alleged partisan advantages because that is one of the claims that Trump is making. He’s alleging two things: One that vote by mail is susceptible to fraud, and two, that vote by mail delivers a partisan advantage to Democrats. Can you take each of those allegations in turn?

Phil Keisling: I think it’s total nonsense. Trump, of course, got elected in 2024 in an election in which the second highest total of mail ballots were delivered. And the best study, done by Mindy Romero and Eric McGhee, found that if anything, there might have been a slight advantage to Republicans in the states that automatically delivered their mail ballots to every active registered voter. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter  who gets advantaged in a given election if you have a lot higher turnout. 

So let’s go to the fraud issue, because “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s famous phraseology in looking for phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In a country of 300-plus million people, there are people that do stupid things that are crimes, some of which involve elections. Have there been people that have forged someone else’s name on a ballot and tried to vote twice? Yeah, that’s happened. 

But any evidence that fraud is meaningful, much less successful, is about as definitive as the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland. But there will always be people who are going to believe it. 

Here’s what a county clerk told me long ago. She said, “Phil, have you ever asked why people don’t counterfeit pennies?”

Well, the reason they don’t is that if you’re willing to do the crime and risk the prison time—which in Oregon is five years as a felony—you’re going to counterfeit twenties and hundreds. There are far, far “smarter” ways to try to steal an election than ballot by ballot, felony by felony by felony. 

Here’s another way to look at it. Let’s say that out of a million registered voters, you have one, 10 or even 100 cases of fraud. If you then weigh what we’re getting in terms of higher turnout from those million voters, are you going to turn your back on and throw over the cliff a system that’s getting more people to participate in democracy? 

Anne Kim: Is the effort to end vote by mail really an effort to suppress votes, particularly among minority voters?  Is ending vote by mail any different from imposing a poll tax or imposing some other burden that has been considered unconstitutional in the past?

Phil Keisling:  I tend to avoid the poll tax argument these days because we got it early in the days of our system where people said requiring the voter to put a stamp on the return ballot is effectively a poll tax. That got litigated and was not successful. It’s never been easier to register to vote in America than it is today, and we now have more options for voting than ever before. It used to be 10 years ago that lot of states only let you vote on Election Day itself at a polling place. Now we have early in-person voting in most places. 

Making mail ballots easier was a movement that mostly led by Republicans who wanted no excuse mail-in ballots rather than requiring election officials to check to see if your excuse was valid. “Do you really have a doctor’s note that you were sick?”  They said this is a waste of time and let’s just let anybody who wants it get one. 

Now, I think this is also where it really betrays how shallow and really unserious the president’s effort is to eliminate mail-in ballots because within two week so his Truth Social post, he’d already lost the courage of his convictions. [Now Trump says mail-in ballots are okay] if you’re “very ill,” or if you’re “far away” in military service. 

I’ll be waiting to see how he defines “very ill” or “far away.” It’s the kind of absurdity you get into when you posit this falsehood that vote by mail ballots are inherently corrupt. Because if they are inherently corrupt, you’d be telling two million soldiers, “Sorry, it’s just another sacrifice you’ve got to make for your country.” You’d be telling the sick and the ill and the hospitalized, “Hey, tough luck if you can’t get to the polls, your voice won’t be heard.” And Trump won’t do that. 

So if you say this is an inherently corrupt form of voting, but you also say that anybody over 65 or the very ill or those people in the military isn’t capable of fraud, then you’re also saying that all those “other” people – the single moms doing two jobs to feed their kids who aren’t sure what their work schedule is going to be on a day to day basis are the ones that we really have to prohibit from using this tool to get their voices heard. So do I think that there’s a desire to have only certain voters vote that are going to vote your way?  Yeah, I think that’s part of what’s going on. But that’s the irony of things. If you look at some of the polls from the 2024 race, there are pollsters out there that say if we’d had more lower-propensity voters vote, they actually might have given Trump a bigger victory. 

But I’m pretty tired of the “whose side is it going to help?” debate because at the end of the day, it should matter the least in this conversation.  If we truly believe in a representative democracy or a republican form of government, if we truly believe we want to make our politics as representative as they could be, you want to have higher turnout, and this is a proven tool. 

Mail ballots are actually a powerful solution to a real problem. I’ll give you an example of how bad turnout has gotten. A third of the people didn’t vote in the presidential election, even at the record high in 2020. That’s 80 million people eligible who didn’t vote—a much bigger no-show rate than many democracies that are much younger than ours. 

But the real turnout crisis is in primary elections. Turnout in the 2024 election cycle was less than 20 percent of eligible voters, and the median age was 65 years old. But in vote-at-home states that automatically delivered ballots, it was double that. 

This should be a story that we come back to over and over and over again, given that primary elections are now the killing field of American politics. And yet again, journalists who write about elections are spending far more time chasing after the lies and myths that certain people in high places are perpetrating and far too little time looking at what the real impact is of mail ballots, particularly when you automatically deliver them to everybody.

Go to red counties and talk to county clerks who use it and they’ll tell you. I mean, the highest turnout in Oregon is in the red counties. We’ve got red counties getting 90 percent plus of registered voters turning out.

What’s the secret? Well, it’s obvious. You send everybody their ballot, and it doesn’t matter if the roads are filled with snow and your truck or car breaks down or your kids are sick or you’re taking care of an elderly parent. You’re going to be able to make your voice heard.

For the long-term health of our democracy, I’d rather live in a country where we get 80 percent or even 90 percent turnout and all my candidates lose than be in a country where turnout is 40 percent and all the candidates I like win. That’s not healthy, and I don’t think it’s sustainable. I think we need to use this moment as an opportunity to say, no, the real problem, the crisis actually, is how many no shows we have, especially in these important elections. And mail ballots are actually one of the most powerful solutions we have for it. 

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