Trump vows to crush ‘legendary’ mail-in voting despite doing so himself just this month

President Donald Trump signed an executive order eliminating the requirement to vote by mail, even though he voted by mail himself just last week.

“Mail voting fraud is legendary,” Trump said at an Oval Office ceremony on Tuesday. ‘I think this will help a lot in the election. ‘We want to have voter ID, we want to have proof of citizenship, and that will be another topic for another time.’

Trump has long dismissed mail-in ballots as a tool for “cheating” and blamed the process on Joe Biden for his 2020 defeat. “I won convincingly three times,” he repeated matter-of-factly on Tuesday, continuing his long-debunked claim that he had won the election.

But the President used a mail-in ballot to vote in last week’s special election in Florida; after all, this election was won by a Democrat in the district that includes the Mar-a-Lago property.

Trump ignored the contradiction, saying he was the President and had ‘a lot of different things’ to do.

The order instructs the administration to prepare a list of eligible U.S. voters in each state and requires absentee ballots to be sent only to certified mail-in voter registries.

A worker pushes a cart containing mail-in ballots at the LA County Ballot Processing Center in Industrial City, California, on Nov. 4, 2025. Trump partly blames mail-in votes for his 2020 presidential election loss to Joe Biden

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“The president has no authority to rewrite election rules,” said Lexi Kennard, senior political media strategist at NYU Law’s Brennan Center for Justice.

The order, which is almost certain to face legal challenges, also requires ballots to be placed in new secure envelopes bearing unique barcodes for tracking purposes and warns that states that fail to comply could lose federal funding.

There is little evidence of widespread voter fraud in US elections.

Instead of cutting costs or addressing the challenges they create, Trump and Republicans are once again trying to rewrite the rules to make it harder for Americans to vote and have their voices heard. Undermining free and fair elections is undemocratic and unconstitutional, and we will fight back at the ballot box and in court,” said New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, chair of the Democratic campaign committee.

Trump said the measures were aimed at ‘stopping ongoing mass fraud’ and hinted at more reforms to come, including voter ID requirements and citizenship checks, promising these would be ‘another topic for another time’.

Democrats have long argued that noncitizens are banned from voting, but the Justice Department has filed lawsuits against illegal immigrants who vote in federal elections.

The order builds on earlier actions by Trump, who previously directed federal agencies to help states verify voters’ citizenship status and sought to ban states from counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.