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Topline
A majority of Americans say they support mail-in voting programs for anyone who wishes to use them, new Pew Research Center data released Friday shows, despite a renewed vow from President Donald Trump to “lead a movement” to end what he recently called the “main-in ballot hoax.”
Ballots are received, sorted and verified at the LA County ballot processing facility in 2022.
Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Key Facts
A 58% majority of Americans favor allowing any voters to vote by mail for any reason, the Pew poll found, but support is split sharply among party lines: 83% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents support voting by mail, while 68% of Republicans and Republican leaners oppose it.
Support for any-reason mail-in voting among Republicans has dropped steeply in the last five years—49% of Republicans favored it in 2020 but only 32% do now, after Trump baselessly claimed mail-in ballots cost him the 2020 presidential election.
Residents of states where mail-in voting is more common—like California, Colorado and Nevada, where ballots are mailed to all voters before the election—are more likely to support by-mail voting (73% of residents do) than those who live in states where mail-in ballots must be individually requested (58% are in favor).
States that require an excuse to vote by mail, like Texas, have the lowest support for mail-in voting among residents (45%).
The latest Pew poll also asked respondents about voter ID (83% of people think voters should have to show a government-issued ID to vote), early voting (80% support), making Election Day a national holiday (74% support) and automatically registering all eligible citizens to vote (59% support).
Pew’s data was gathered from a survey of 3,554 adults conducted Aug. 4 to 10, before Trump’s most recent call to end mail-in voting.
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Surprising Fact
In the 2024 election, voters were roughly equally likely to have voted in person on Election Day (34%), early in person (32%) or by mail (34%), according to Pew.
Key Background
Main-in voting has long been available for people who will be out of their home state on Election Day, called absentee voting, but the practice widely expanded during the COVID pandemic. Trump on Monday posted to Truth Social promising to end voting by mail and baselessly claimed Democrats use the mail-in system to “CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE.” He said he would sign an executive order “to help bring HONESTY” to the 2026 midterm elections and claimed “Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM.” In the same post, Trump falsely said the U.S. is the only country in the world that uses mail-in voting, claiming other countries gave up the practice because of “the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” Thirty four countries or territories allow mail-in voting, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Researchers have said mail-in voting does provide more opportunity for election fraud, but that all voter fraud is rare and there are safeguards in place to prevent it. Trump also claimed on Monday that he had the power to dictate how elections are run, but he does not have the authority to make election rules. Monday’s was not the first attack Trump has launched on mail-in voting, and he’s railed against the practice for years. In 2020, he made unsubstantiated claims that mail-in ballots bearing his name were found in trash cans and creeks, and that mail carriers were selling ballots and discarding them, calling into question the legitimacy of the 2020 election months before it happened. He then baselessly claimed fraudulent mail-in ballots cost him the 2020 presidential election. Ahead of the 2024 election, he falsely claimed that 20% of mail ballots in Pennsylvania were “fraudulent” and suggested mail carriers could “lose hundreds of thousands of ballots, maybe purposefully.”
Tangent
Trump also railed against voting machines. He said the use of such machines, which replace paper voting at some polling locations, “ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER” and he has called for nearly all voting to be done via paper ballot, to then be counted by hand on Election Day. In the wake of his 2020 loss, Trump and his team repeatedly spread lies about the use of voting machines, including false claims that they were designed to delete or flip votes cast in his favor. Many of those claims were aired on Fox News, by Trump’s team and the network’s anchors, prompting Dominion Voting Systems, the company behind the machines, to sue the network for $1.6 billion. Dominion and Fox News settled out of court for $787.5 million in 2023. Dominion similarly sued Newsmax, which settled for $67 million this week. The use of voting machines is more accurate, faster and cheaper than hand-counting paper ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, and all voting machines used in U.S. elections must pass tests requiring them to accurately count at least 10 million votes.
What To Watch For
What an executive order would say. In his rant against mail-in voting and voting machines on Monday, Trump said an upcoming executive order would address the practices before the 2026 mid-term election, but didn’t say exactly how. The president does not have the power to dictate how states run their elections, but the Constitution does say Congress can “make” or “alter” rules for federal elections. Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, told ABC News, “The president has very limited to zero authority over things related to the conduct of elections.”
