Trump casts Florida mail ballot
Administration pushes Congress to severely limit mail voting option
President Donald Trump has cast another mail ballot in Florida as he continues to publicly bash the voting method as a source of fraud and push Congress to curtail the practice.
Palm Beach County voter records show the president voted by mail in a Tuesday special election for state legislative seats and that his ballot has been counted. Early in-person voting in the contest ran through Sunday, when Trump was still at his south Florida estate.
The White House said Tuesday that Trump’s ire is at states using universal mail-in voting, not individual instances of voters needing accommodations to vote by mail. A spokeswoman pushed back specifically at the idea that his voting practice contradicts his push for new federal voting rules.
“As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel – but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud,” said White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales in a statement.
A report by the Brookings Institution published in 2025 found that cases of mail voting fraud occurred in only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast, or about four cases out of every 10 million mail votes.
Wales added: “As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C. This is a non-story.”
Nonetheless, Trump has in the last week called mail-in voting “cheating” and “corrupt as hell.” He is urging Congress to pass the SAVE Act. The sweeping bill would bar universal mail ballots and, as Wales noted, limit the options to a select few voters such as those with disabilities, military commitments or who are traveling on Election Day. The measure faces steep odds in the closely divided Senate even with the president’s pressure.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer tried to capitalize on the president’s voting choice.
“According to Donald Trump, vote by mail is cheating when other people use it, but perfectly fine when he does it himself,” Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor.
Trump has fixated on mail ballots since he began claiming that his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden was the result of fraud. Multiple U.S. courts and Trump’s own attorney general have found no evidence of fraud that affected the outcome, despite the COVID-19 pandemic increasing the share of the electorate that cast mail ballots that year.
“We’re the only country in the world that does it that way. Corrupt as hell,” Trump said last week at the White House when hosting Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin.
Dozens of countries, including European democracies that are traditional U.S. allies, use some form of mail-in voting.
