President Donald Trump signed an executive order cracking down on mail-in voting – despite casting his own postal ballot just last week.
‘The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary,’ Trump declared at an Oval Office ceremony on Tuesday. ‘I think this will help a lot with elections. We’d like to have voter ID, we’d like to have proof of citizenship – and that will be another subject for another time.’
Trump has long derided mail-in ballots as a vehicle for ‘cheating’ and blamed the process for his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden. ‘I won three times, convincingly,’ he repeated untruthfully on Tuesday, maintaining his disputed claim to have won that election.
Yet the President used a mail-in ballot to vote in a Florida special election last week – one ultimately won by a Democrat in the district that includes his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Trump brushed off the apparent contradiction, saying he is the President and simply had ‘a lot of different things’ to do.
The order directs the administration to compile a list of eligible US voters in each state, and mandates that absentee ballots be sent only to those on approved mail-in voter rolls.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to add more rigorous standards to mail-in ballots
A worker pushes a cart of received mail ballots at the L.A. County Ballot Processing Center Nov. 4, 2025, in City of Industry, California. Trump has, in part, blamed mail-in ballots for his 2020 presidential election loss to Joe Biden
Trump admitted that he voted by bail as recently as last week
‘The president does not have the authority to rewrite election rules,’ said Lexi Kennard senior political media strategist at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law.
The order also requires ballots to be issued in new secure envelopes bearing unique barcodes for tracking purposes, and warns that states which fail to comply could lose federal funding.
Trump said the measures were aimed at ‘stopping the massive cheating that’s gone on,’ and hinted at further reforms to come – including voter ID requirements and proof of citizenship checks – promising they would be ‘another subject for another time.’
Democrats have long argued that non-citizens are already barred from voting, though the Department of Justice has brought cases against illegal immigrants who cast ballots in federal elections.
The order builds on earlier action by Trump, who has previously directed federal agencies to help states verify voters’ citizenship status and sought to ban states from counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.
