President Donald Trump is pushing for brand spanking new restrictions on mail-in voting. To promote his proposal, he’s telling lies.
Trump has been making false claims about mail-in voting since the 2020 campaign that was held amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, as he asks Congress to cross a invoice that may ban mail-in voting in federal elections aside from conditions involving incapacity, sickness, journey, or service within the army, he’s repeating a few of the identical false claims which have been debunked during the last six years.
Here’s a truth test of a few of the president’s latest falsehoods on the topic.
Over and over this month, Trump has falsely claimed that the US is the one nation on the earth that makes use of mail-in ballots.
“You know, brought to my attention today that we’re the only country that doesn’t — that does mail-in voting,” Trump claimed in a speech on Monday. “You know, there’s not a country in the world that does mail-in ballots anymore,” he claimed in one other speech on March 9.
In actuality, dozens of countries enable some or all voters to vote by mail. The listing consists of Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and Switzerland.
We don’t know what, if something, was truly delivered to Trump’s consideration on Monday, however this was not a brand new lie from him. He has informed it on a number of events since last year.
Trump continues to falsely describe what Jimmy Carter, the late Democratic president, stated about mail-in voting.
Last week, Trump said {that a} fee Carter shaped after his presidency “came out and said very strongly: ‘No mail-in ballots.’” At a March 9 press convention, Trump said of the fee: “Frankly, I think it’s probably the best thing Jimmy Carter did. He said, ‘You can’t have mail-in voting because it’s inherently dishonest.’”
In actuality, neither Carter nor an election reform fee Carter co-chaired stated “no mail-in ballots” or declared mail-in ballots “inherently dishonest.”
It’s true that the fee was typically skeptical of mail-in voting. Its 2005 report said that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and are “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.”
But the fee didn’t name for a ban on mail-in voting. Its report highlighted an instance of profitable mail-only elections, saying that Oregon, a state that had been conducting elections solely by mail-in poll since the late 1990s, “appears to have avoided significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.”
The report additionally provided suggestions for making using mail-in ballots safer and known as for “further research on the pros and cons” of voting by mail.
Carter, who died in 2024, said in a 2020 assertion after Trump’s White House disparaged using mail-in ballots on the time: “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.”
Trump encouraged supporters to vote by mail within the 2024 election and voted by mail himself in Tuesday’s state House particular election in Florida. But he continues to falsely describe mail-in ballots as inherently corrupt.
“They’re so corrupt,” he said in a March 13 interview on Fox News Radio. “People don’t want mail-in ballots because you have crooked elections. It guarantees a crooked election,” he said in a March 11 interview with Cincinnati’s WKRC Local 12. “Why would you want mail-in ballots if you know it’s corrupt? It’s a corrupt system,” he told reporters in February.
In actuality, mail-in voting is a legit technique utilized by legit voters — akin to one Donald J. Trump — to forged legit ballots. Elections consultants say the incidence of fraud tends to be marginally greater with mail-in ballots than with in-person ballots, but additionally that fraud charges in federal elections are tiny even with mail-in ballots.
Republican-dominated Utah is among the eight states (plus Washington, DC) the place voters are robotically despatched mail-in ballots, although it’s now phasing out that coverage; its elections, like elections in different mail-heavy states, have been freed from widespread fraud. And regardless of Trump’s claims, there stays no proof of widespread fraud within the 2020 election wherein using mail-in ballots spiked due to the pandemic.
Trump has for years made false claims about elections in California, a Democratic-dominated state the place he has persistently fared poorly. While disparaging mail-in ballots final week, he claimed, “You go to California, they send out like 38 million ballots. Some Democrats got seven, eight ballots. Republicans are a lot of times calling in, ‘Where’s my ballot, where’s my ballot?’ They’re lucky to get one.”
Trump’s “like 38 million” determine is just not even near correct. California counties ship a mail-in poll to all lively registered voters; the state had about 22.6 million lively registered voters as of about two weeks previous to the 2024 election and about 23.1 million as of the tip of 2025. There isn’t any foundation for any suggestion that some 15 million extra ballots have been distributed within the state in any election. (California had greater than 39 million whole residents in 2025, however that quantity consists of kids, grownup residents not registered to vote, noncitizens and folks in jail.)
While there are occasional errors by counties and the postal service in distributing mail-in ballots, in California and different states, there may be additionally no foundation for Trump’s declare that California Republicans are “lucky to get one.” And even when somebody is mistakenly despatched a couple of poll, California has safety measures in place to guarantee that every poll is forged by the voter it was meant for and that every voter solely votes as soon as.
When Trump made related claims final yr, the workplace of California Secretary of State Shirley Weber told NCS: “Elections officials use protocols to verify the eligibility and identity of the voter prior to sending the vote by mail ballot. When the ballot is returned, elections officials verify the voter’s identity through signature verification. If the elections official determines that the voter’s signature does not match, the identification envelope will not be opened, and the ballot will not be counted until the identification of the voter is confirmed.”