Representative Jeff Van Drew was so worked up about voter fraud on Tuesday that he looked like he had seen a ghost—the politically active kind.
During an interview on Fox Business, the New Jersey Republican shared his opinion on mail-in ballots, one day after President Donald Trump pledged to ban the process ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Van Drew said that the 2020 election, when mail-in voting was expanded, was a “debacle” and that “sometimes people would have multiple ballots sent to different addresses.”
“Other times, people who are passed away—these are real people I spoke to, large numbers of them, and it’s indicative of what happened around the country.”
The claim that dead people voted in the 2020 election is a popular one among right-leaning election deniers, including President Donald Trump. But Van Drew is one of the first to say he spoke to some of these dearly departed electors.
Yet researchers at Stanford University published a study in 2020 evaluating elections in the state of Washington, which has universal mail-in voting, and found that only 0.0003 percent of votes cast between 2011 and 2018 were potentially suspicious.
Van Drew, who switched parties in 2020 after being elected to Congress as a Democrat in 2018, voted against certifying the 2020 election results and has made claims of voter fraud a persistent theme of his tenure in the House.
“In general, it is ripe for abuse,” Van Drew said of mail-in voting, which is used in 34 countries around the world, despite the president’s Truth Social post on Monday complaining that the U.S. is the lone practitioner.
Election experts say that President Trump’s planned executive order to ban mail-in voting in federal elections is unconstitutional.
“The Constitution does not give the President any control over federal elections,” UCLA professor Richard Hasen wrote on his blog.
The idea has already rankled some voters, with one Republican representative from Wyoming being drowned out by boos at a town hall this week when she defended Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots.
Van Drew’s home state of New Jersey offers “no-excuse” absentee voting, allowing any voter to cast a mail-in ballot without providing a reason.
New Jerseyans cast approximately 760,000 mail-in ballots during the 2024 general election, out of 4.3 million ballots cast total. Van Drew won his re-election race that year with 58.1% of the vote.
The Daily Beast has contacted Van Drew’s office for comment.
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