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President Donald Trump voted by mail in an upcoming special election in Florida, Palm Beach County records show, as he publicly condemns the voting method as fraudulent.
“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we have to do something about all of this,” Trump said Monday.
Public records indicate his absentee ballot was received and counted by election officials in Palm Beach County, where he is registered to vote, although records do not detail how it was delivered to election officials.
It’s a familiar refrain – and action – from Trump, who has postal vote often criticized as if prey to fraud. He used this kind of rhetoric to push through Congress a massive election overhaul bill called SAVE America Act.
The bill would not end mail-in voting, as he has suggested in public comments.
“As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act provides common-sense exceptions allowing Americans to use mail-in voting in cases of illness, disability, military or travel – but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it is highly susceptible to fraud. As everyone knows, the President resides in Palm Beach and participates in elections in Florida, but he obviously lives primarily at the White House in Washington, D.C. This is not a story,” the SAVE America spokeswoman said. White House, Olivia Wales, in a statement.
Trump was in Palm Beach this weekend; early voting ran through Sunday.
This is not the first time that Trump has voted by mail while condemning this method: he also did so in 2020.
At that time, NBC News asked Trump how he reconciled his criticism of mail-in voting with the fact that he had voted by mail.
“You know why I voted? Because I was at the White House and I won’t be able to go vote in Florida,” he said.
“There’s a big difference between someone who’s out of state and they vote and everything is sealed and certified and everything else,” he said then, before claiming without evidence that thousands and thousands of people were fraudulently signing ballots in their living rooms. “I think mail-in voting is a terrible thing. I think if you vote, you should go for it.”
Reported by NPR at the time that his ballot had been hand-delivered by a third party.
Trump blamed his defeat in his second presidential bid on the expansion of mail-in voting during the 2020 pandemic, although there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the US election. Since then, the mailer has been at the center of Trump’s repeated false claims about election security.
In his State of the Union address This year, Trump called for “no more rogue mail-in ballots” and said, “Cheating is rampant in our elections.”
Trump posted on social media that he would like mail-in voting to be available only in cases of “ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY OR TRAVEL! »
Mail-in ballots are verified in different ways in different states, often by checking voters’ signatures against their voter registrations.
Trump made his comments Monday touting the SAVE America Act, which would add voter ID and documentary proof of citizenship requirements to federal elections nationwide. Trump has said he won’t sign any bill before it reaches his desk, but the measure is stalled in the Senate, where it lacks the 60 votes required to pass under current rules.
Trump suggested SAVE America Act would end mail-in voting, which is not true. The proposed law would make voting by mail more complicated — voters would have to photocopy their photo IDs to submit with their ballot — but it would not end the practice.
In his remarks Monday in Memphis, Tennessee, Trump also reiterated a false claim he had previously made, saying it was “brought to my attention today that we are the only country doing postal voting.”
Voters cast their ballots by mail in at least 32 countries, according to tracking by a Swedish organization. the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistancewhich claims to “support democracy around the world”.
Florida holds legislative elections Tuesday to fill vacant seats, including in the state House district that includes Mar-a-Lago. Trump won the district by about 11 percentage points in the 2024 presidential race, according to The Downballot, a left-leaning politics site that tracks partisan change in state special elections.
Trump supported Republican Jon Maples in the race and encouraged people to ‘get out and vote’ on Social Truth this month. Maples faces Democrat Emily Gregory.
Since Trump began his second term, Democrats have flipped nine state legislative seats across the country in special elections, on top of the gains they made in regularly scheduled congressional elections in New Jersey and Virginia last year.
