Trump’s War on Mail-In Voting

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Michael Barbaro (0:32)

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

On Tuesday, President Trump asked the Supreme Court to bless his audacious plan to restrict voting by mail just weeks before a high stakes midterm election. Today, my colleague, Nick Corasaniti, takes us inside Trump's plan, the legal battle that it's touched off, and the uncertainty that it's created for both local election officials and voters across the country. It's Wednesday, September 9th. Nick, thank you for making time for us.

Nick Corasaniti (1:28)

Thanks for having me.

Michael Barbaro (1:29)

My pleasure.

So, looking at the calendar, we are, I believe, just days away in a few states from the official beginning of early voting in this year's midterm elections. And I think rightfully, a lot of our listeners are confused about the state of mail-in ballots, which have become a huge way that a lot of the country votes because of the actions that have been taken by the president and how much they've become tied up in the courts. So, can you just explain the situation that we are in at a very high level?

Nick Corasaniti (2:03)

Absolutely. And one thing really quick is that early voting, in a way, has already begun.

On Friday, North Carolina and Delaware started sending out mail ballots. So, there are ballots that are on their way to voters as we speak.

Michael Barbaro (2:18)

They're in the system.

Nick Corasaniti (2:19)

They're in the system. They're either being processed by the postal service or maybe they already arrived. But where we are in this moment is not to repeatedly use the phrase unprecedented, but something that we've never seen before, which is the president and the executive branch seeking to leverage an agency, in this case, the United States Postal Service, to change how elections are run.

And this stems from an executive order that the president signed earlier this year seeking to restrict mail voting, and basically turning the postal service into an arbiter of which states can have mail voting.

Michael Barbaro (2:59)

Turning the postal service, which we usually think of as a kind of a neutral player in our election system, literally the people who carry the votes to the people who need them, and then bring them back to the election offices, turning that into an organization that gets to decide if your vote ever counts.

Nick Corasaniti (3:17)

Or at least gets to decide whether you can cast your vote.

Whether a state can have mail voting at all, or whether a voter is able to receive their mail ballot. Turning this agency into this kind of partisan political operator so close to an election is just something we haven't seen, especially in the past decade with mail voting becoming so critical to a large part of the American electorate.

Michael Barbaro (3:42)

Just how critical is mail in voting at this point post-pandemic, when I know there was a major increase in mail in voting?

Nick Corasaniti (3:51)

The pandemic changed everything, and while mail voting isn't at the same clip that it was in 2020, still nearly 30 percent of Americans cast a ballot by mail in the 2024 elections. Now, that's tens of millions of voters. There's eight states that conduct their elections almost entirely by mail.

There's a large amount of Americans whose votes are very much wrapped up in this.

Michael Barbaro (4:17)

Nick, is the right way to think about the president's motivation here for mucking around with the role of the Postal Service when it comes to mail in ballots in this midterm election simply that he's seeking political advantage for Republicans in this election?

Nick Corasaniti (4:33)

I mean, the president himself has said, if we can limit mail voting or restrict these mail ballots, then that'll help Republicans win. So he's been very explicit about this. But he's also doubted mail voting for the better part of a decade. I was with him in Colorado in 2016 where he went on a tangent at a campaign event, casting doubt on the mail voting process in that state, a state that conducts its elections mostly by mail.

And then following his loss in 2020, where scores of Democrats chose to vote by mail to vote safely in the pandemic, the president blamed it for his loss. And ever since then, he's been obsessed with this idea without any evidence that mail voting is rife with fraud.