WASHINGTON, DC – Despite the fact that voting by mail is safe, secure, and a convenient way for millions of Americans in both red states and blue states alike to exercise their right to vote, President Donald Trump has declared an all-out war on mail-in voting for others, but not himself.

Over the weekend, President Trump was in Florida where he spent hours playing golf but didn’t go to his local polling place – which was open for the special election held to fill a seat in the Florida state legislature. Instead, Trump chose to cast a mail-in ballot. According to the Washington Post: “Trump did not have to vote by mail. He was in Palm Beach over the weekend, and early in-person voting was available through Sunday.”

Last summer Trump wrote on Truth Social that he would be leading “a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.”

Today, U.S. Senator Jack Reed called out President Trump’s hypocrisy, stating: “I have no problem with President Trump voting by mail. But I do have a problem with him spewing misinformation, undermining voter confidence, and trying to take away other Americans’ access to secure, accessible voting methods when he himself uses the exact same method. His philosophy is ‘mail-in-voting for me, not for thee.’ And he is falsely trying to claim mail-in ballots lead to electoral fraud. The truth is mail-in voting is an efficient, secure, and transparent voting method that includes high-tech and highly regulated safeguards against fraud, including signature matching, strict auditing, and other built-in verification methods.

“The security, integrity, and accuracy of our elections is paramount. Mail-in voting is a small piece of the larger puzzle that allows people to cast their vote, just like President Trump did. Seniors, servicemembers, college students, and people in rural or remote areas have found mail-in voting a secure means to make sure their vote is counted. President Trump wants to ban mail-in voters for others, while taking advantage of it himself. He’s waging a misinformation campaign to try restrict and reduce eligible voters from being heard. That’s bad for democracy. Our country works best when every eligible voter is able to cast their vote. We need to eliminate misinformation and unnecessary, regressive barriers to voting, not the option of safe, effective, and transparent mail-in voting.”

In an effort to nationalize election procedures, suppress eligible voters, and give his Administration unprecedented power over elections in all fifty states, President Trump is pushing the so-called SAVE America Act, which would narrow mail-in voting. Under the phony guise of preventing unproven and unmeasured election fraud, this unworkable, highly-partisan bill is a thinly veiled attempt to discourage eligible Americans from registering to vote as well as making voter registration and elections more costly for states, while granting the Trump Administration immediate and unprecedented power over the administration of elections.

According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), about one in three Americans (30.3 percent) voted by mail in the 2024 election, which President Trump won and did not contest the results.

Last year, President Trump signed an executive order that sought to penalize states that accepted mail-in ballots that had been postmarked before or on Election Day, but arrived at election offices after the election. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Watson v Republican National Committee, a legal challenge over a Mississippi state law that was brought in 2024 by the Republican party because Mississippi allows mailed ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of election day, so long as they were postmarked before or by election day.

The case is important because mailed ballots sometimes take longer to count. Signatures need to be matched and verified, which takes time, and some states allow for ballots to be ‘cured’ if signatures are flagged for further review. ‘Curing’ a ballot is a two-part process that involves administrators notifying voters of issues with their ballots and allowing the voter to clarify or correct those issues.

President Trump has also previously made the demonstrably false and easily fact-checked claim that the United States was “the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting,” and that “all others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”

Over 30 countries -- including leading, longtime democracies with major economies -- continue to rely on postal balloting as key parts of their election systems. This includes Austria, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, India, Ireland, Pakistan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and many more.