The idea, it seems, came from the Russian president. “Vladimir Putin, smart guy,” Donald Trump told the Fox News television host Sean Hannity following the summit between the two leaders in Anchorage, Alaska. Putin, Trump reported, had told him, “You can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.” And that, apparently, spurred the president to act—sort of.
Days later, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would ban “MAIL-IN BALLOTS” in an “EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.” He expanded on his plan during an Oval Office press conference ostensibly about the war in Ukraine, sitting next to a studiously blank-faced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “We’re going to end mail-in voting,” the president declared. “It’s a fraud.”
Several days later, the promised executive order has yet to appear. Even if Trump does end up signing a document that claims to prohibit mail-in ballots, though, such an order would likely have little legal power. The American system for administering elections is highly decentralized: The work of deciding how people should vote and of helping them do so is largely carried out at the state and local levels, with the federal government playing only a minor role. Mail-in balloting, which is authorized at the state level by a state’s legislature, is no exception. But as Americans have learned over the past six months, just because the president may lack legal authority to make a policy change does not mean he lacks the power to make an enormous mess.
Trump’s spree of second-term executive orders can be divided into several categories. Sometimes, he is exercising authority within the normal bounds of presidential power, though often to stupid or malicious ends; sometimes, there’s genuine uncertainty as to whether the president can wield the power Trump claims for himself; and sometimes, Trump has arrogated to himself an authority that doesn’t exist. An executive order banning mail-in ballots would fall into the final category. In an oddly professorial flourish in his Truth Social post, the president insisted, “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.” But this is not true. The Constitution establishes unambiguously that elections are carried out by each individual state, under state rules. Congress can establish additional instructions—but the president himself has no freestanding authority. Trump’s promise to intervene anyway reflects his understanding of the presidency not as one branch of government constrained by the separation of powers, but as America’s king.
For this same reason, two federal courts have already blocked significant portions of Trump’s previous executive order on “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which he signed in March. That order didn’t bar mail-in ballots, but sought to implement a range of other election-related policies responding to Republican conspiracy theories around election fraud: mandating proof of citizenship during voter registration, requiring states to share voter rolls with the federal government, and forbidding the counting of any ballots that arrive after Election Day, among other changes. Even former Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized the order as an unwise power grab. In an opinion barring several sections of the order from going into effect, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia explained, “The States have initial authority to regulate elections. Congress has supervisory authority over those regulations. The President does not feature at all.”
Any executive order claiming to outright ban mail-in ballots would immediately face a similar legal challenge. It’s not even clear what levers Trump could attempt to pull. Though the president can use executive orders to direct federal officials, “there are no federal officials who govern whether states get to use mail ballots or not,” Justin Levitt, who studies the law of democracy at Loyola Law School, told me. And the White House simply has no authority to make these demands of state officials, Levitt said. “The president passing an executive order that purports to tell state election officials how to do their jobs is the same as me writing a note to a state election official on a Burger King receipt.” Perhaps Trump could try threatening to withhold federal funds from states unless they restrict access to mail-in ballots—but such an effort would be legally dubious under well-established precedents, and Congress has allocated so little in the way of election funding that there’s not much to withhold.
Short on options, the White House will likely be left MacGyvering its way to a solution using equipment not really suited to the task. Project 2025, for example, suggested prosecuting former Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar for a 2020 legal opinion on the use of provisional ballots for mail-in balloting under Pennsylvania state law—a proposition that Levitt described to me as “crazy.” The Justice Department could threaten state and local election officials with similarly baseless investigations in an effort at intimidation. Prosecutors would encounter the small problem that no criminal statutes obviously apply to an election official legally handing out mail-in ballots. But the risk of a criminal investigation, even a meritless one, could still frighten election administrators.
Trump’s hatred of mail-in ballots dates back to 2016, when he complained that Colorado’s shift to all-mail voting would enable fraud. As more states adopted mail-in ballots during the pandemic election of 2020, he seized on this development as a basis to spread claims that Democrats would try to use “fraudulent” mail-in votes to steal the presidency—an idea that would become a key claim of the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 election, and a driver of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Now that he has secured the presidency again, Trump may feel that he has an opportunity to finally right this imagined wrong. (On the same day that Trump posted his Truth Social announcement, the voting-machine manufacturer Dominion announced that it had secured a $67 million settlement with Newsmax over the far-right television network’s promotion of conspiracy theories about the company in 2020.)
Yet if the goal is to corruptly tilt elections toward the Republican Party—“you’re not going to have many Democrats get elected,” Trump promised when detailing his plans to end mail-in voting in the Oval Office—the president’s mental model may be out-of-date. In the Trump era, the Republican coalition has come to rely on voters who follow politics less closely, vote less frequently, and are more likely not to cast a ballot if doing so is difficult. Limiting access to voting might have been politically helpful to Republicans in the past, but seems not to be now. That may be especially true in lower-turnout contests such as midterms, in which Democrats may see an advantage thanks to a more politically engaged voter base.
During the 2024 election, Trump’s campaign staff seems to have been able to convince him to be quiet about his hatred of voting by mail long enough to increase Republicans’ use of mail-in ballots. As the 2026 midterms draw closer, his advisers may have to struggle to contain him once again, whether or not he moves forward with an executive order. The risk created by Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots is less that Trump will actually succeed in limiting access to the franchise and that such limitations will actually tilt the playing field toward Republicans, and more that the president will—as he did in 2020—kick up enough doubt and confusion that a significant number of Americans no longer trust an election’s results.
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