Trump Wants to End Mail-in Voting. Americans Disagree With Him

President Donald Trump wants to put an end to mail-in voting. A new poll suggests that most Americans disagree with that.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans favor allowing any voter to cast their ballot by mail, regardless of whether they have an excuse for doing so, according to a survey from Pew Research Center. An even larger share of respondents – 80 percent – said they support allowing early, in-person voting for at least two weeks before Election Day. 

The poll’s findings come as Trump refocuses his ire on mail-in voting, a practice that he’s long attacked, without evidence, as rife with fraud. In a lengthy post on Truth Social last week, the president said he would “lead a movement” to do away with mail-in voting, vowing to sign an executive order on the issues ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS,” Trump wrote. Neither Trump nor the White House have provided any additional information on the substance or timing of a potential executive order. 

Partisan Differences

While the Pew Research poll found that most Americans don’t share Trump’s dislike of mail-in voting, most Republicans do. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents said they oppose allowing Americans to vote by mail. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly supportive of the practice; 83 percent said they’re in favor of no-excuse mail-in voting, the poll found.

To be sure, Trump doesn’t have the power to unilaterally end mail-in voting. The Constitution gives the states the power to decide the “times, places and manner” of elections and changing those rules would require Congress to intervene.

Even with Republican majorities in Congress, it’s unclear whether Trump could muster the support for rewriting the rules on how states administer elections. While Trump himself has complained about mail-in voting, Republicans overall have taken advantage of the practice, often encouraging their voters to cast mail ballots. 

Trump, however, has insisted that the states are nothing more than an “agent” of the federal government when it comes to tabulating votes and are therefore obligated to follow the president’s orders. 

Support for Voting Accessibility

The Pew Research survey found significant support for certain voting restrictions and regulations. Eighty-three percent of Americans overall said they’re in favor of requiring all voters to show a government-issued photo ID in order to cast their ballots. And 84 percent said that the U.S. should require electronic voting machines to print a paper backup of each ballot. 

But there was also broad support for voting accessibility. Seventy-four percent of Americans said they favor making Election Day a federal holiday. Two-thirds of respondents said they support restoring voting rights for people convicted of felonies after they serve out their sentences. And 59 percent said they support automatic voting registration for all eligible citizens, according to Pew’s polling.

Only two proposals included in the poll received more opposition than they did support: banning groups from collecting completed ballots from large numbers of voters – a practice known as ballot harvesting – and automatically removing voters from the rolls if they haven’t voted in a recent election or confirmed their registration.