RICH LOWRY: Trump is wrong about mail-in voting

President Donald Trump is threatening to wage war on mail-in ballots, and the GOP has to hope he thinks again before the 2026 midterms.

In a Truth Social post, Trump said he is “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” and he’ll start off with “an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 midterm elections.” Trump likes the idea of in-person, same-day voting, which has much to recommend it, but mail-in and early voting are so ingrained and widespread that they aren’t going anywhere.

Most Republicans have concluded that there’s no alternative to making use of these modes of voting, and, crucially, they managed — most of the time — to get Trump on board in 2024. This aided the Republican get-out-the-vote operation in a close election.

Clearly, though, Trump believes that mail-in voting is a Democratic plot, and he also hates contemporary voting machines. Old-school paper ballots don’t guarantee honesty, however. In an infamous instance of voter fraud, allies of Lyndon Johnson stuffed Box 13 with enough ballots to put him over the top in the very narrow 1948 Democratic Senate primary in Texas. Today’s voting machines, moreover, were a reaction to the Florida fiasco in 2000, when punch-card ballots had to be painstakingly examined by hand with a presidential election at stake.

The fact is that vote-by-mail has been steadily growing since the 1980s, and it needn’t favor one side or the other. In Florida, Republicans long made it a priority to maximize mail voting. A study by the academic Andrew Hall of pre-COVID voting patterns in California, Utah and Washington found a negligible partisan effect as those states rolled out vote-by-mail systems. Overall, turnout went up only very slightly, and “the Democratic share of turnout did not increase appreciably.”

Mail-in voting didn’t change who was voting but how they did it — encouraging, as you might expect, voting by mail rather than in-person. Vote by mail did have a strong partisan tilt in the COVID election of 2020, in part because Trump inveighed against it.

Last year, Republicans made a concerted effort to make up ground and succeeded. They went from 24 percent of the mail-in vote in the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania in 2020, to 33 percent in 2024, and they outpaced Democrats in mail-in balloting in Arizona.

The advantage to a party of getting people to vote early — whether in person or by mail — is that it takes high-propensity voters off the table. Then, a turnout operation can focus on getting lower-propensity voters to the polls. If no one votes until Election Day, party operatives waste time and money right up to the cusp of the election contacting people who are going to vote no matter what.

None of this is to say that all mail-in voting is equal. So-called universal mail-in voting, or automatically sending a ballot to every registered voter and scattering live ballots around a state, is a bad practice. The rules should be more stringent.

Georgia gets this right. You have to ask for an absentee ballot and provide your driver’s license number or a copy of another form of valid ID. Ballots have to be requested at least 11 days before the election and must be returned by Election Day. The outer “oath” envelope has to be properly completed or the ballot is subject to being rejected, although the county elections office will provide the voter a chance to “cure” the envelope.

It’s also important to count early and mail-in ballots quickly, something that too many states fail to do, with California — as usual — the worst offender. States should be expected to abide by whatever rules have been set prior to an election, rather than changing them on the fly, and they should ensure that voter rolls are regularly cleaned up.

Regardless, the real question about vote-by-mail isn’t whether it is staying or going, but whether Republicans, too, will take advantage of it.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.