Donald Trump once again voted by mail in Florida elections despite repeatedly attacking mail-in ballots as “mail-in cheating” and a “scam” that his administration has spent months trying to restrict for millions of Americans. Records in Palm Beach County, where the president’s primary Mar-a-Lago residence is located, indicate that he requested a mail-in ballot last month to participate in Florida’s Republican primary elections. His ballot was received August 14.
Politico first reported his ballot. Trump has not returned to the Sunshine State since May. He last voted by mail during a special election in March.
But his latest absentee vote follows his administration’s emergency request to the Supreme Court to implement sweeping restrictions on Americans’ access to mail-in ballots, a move that has been repeatedly blocked in court while the president pushes Congress to enact his far-reaching election reform legislation. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all,” he said at the time. During a July speech, he called mail-in ballots “inherently corrupt.” He used February’s State of the Union Address to demand “no more crooked mail-in ballots.” In 2024, Trump’s presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee launched “Swamp the Vote” to make up for lost ground on mail-in voting among Republican voters in the aftermath of 2020 elections.
Days later, Trump told a crowd at the far-right Turning Point Action conference that early voting is “sad” and “crazy.” “They start early. You know, it’s sad, when you have to go months early,” he said at the time. What are they doing with all these votes?
What are they doing?” “Mail-in voting is totally corrupt,” he told supporters at a rally in Michigan in February that year. Federal courts have blocked the U.S. Postal Service from further implementing Trump’s executive order that sought to create a national voter registration list that would be used to decide who is eligible to cast a ballot.
If the Supreme Court doesn’t stop them, the judge’s rulings will “effectively run out the clock” on the administration’s attempts to implement the executive order before November’s elections, U.S. John Sauer wrote to the high court last week. Nearly two dozen Democratic-led states, dozens of election officials and more than 50 former state and federal judges have warned the nation’s high court that Trump’s order would create “chaos” for voters and their ballots.
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