President Trump wants to slash voting by mail. About 1 in 4 Republicans voted that way in 2024

On the international stage, President Donald Trump is focused on the Iran war. At home, he said his top priority is overhauling elections and banning most voting by mail.

Such a move would force millions of voters to change how they cast ballots, including members of the president’s party. In the 2024 presidential election, an MIT national survey found that about 1 in 4 Republicans voted by mail. About 37% of Democrats did, too.

This option would go away for most voters if Trump’s wish for a rewritten Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE America Act, goes through.

Over the past week, Trump repeatedly called on the Senate to pass the bill, which the Republican-controlled House approved in February. The legislation requires citizens to provide a government-issued photo ID to vote and strict documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register. Under the bill, election officials could accept a Real ID driver's license that includes citizenship, though most states don't offer such a license.

Trump wants Republicans to add a mail voting ban except in cases of travel, illness, disability or military service. He also wants to ban "men in women’s sports" and transgender surgeries for children. 

"It must be done immediately," he posted March 8 on Truth Social. "It supersedes everything else."

He told CNN’s Dana Bash that the legislation "is more important than everything else we’re working on other than the war."

Trump said he won’t sign other bills until the SAVE America Act passes; the Constitution gives the president 10 days, excluding Sundays, to sign or veto a bill before it becomes law. 

Trump says that the legislation is overwhelmingly popular with both parties, although much of the polling the White House cites pertains to voter ID and not the SAVE America Act as a whole or voting by mail in particular.

Sen. John Thune, the Republican majority leader, said he supports the legislation but doesn't have the required 60 votes to proceed to a final vote. Thune opposes overturning that vote requirement to break a filibuster. Politico reported based on unnamed sources that he plans to bring up the bill next week.

The president’s demands to end voting by mail without an excuse would upend how millions of Republicans have long cast ballots.

In some states, Republicans launched and perfected the system that Trump himself has used. Absentee voters helped him capture the presidency in 2016 and 2024, despite his criticism of expanded mail-in voting in 2020.

A voter casts their ballot at a secure ballot drop box at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix, Nov. 1, 2022. (AP)

Voting by mail has long been popular in some Republican areas

The Constitution tasks states, not Congress, with running elections. Slightly more than half the states send a mail ballot to anyone who requests one. Others require an excuse, such as travel or illness. 

For now, eight states send mail ballots to all voters — but Utah will end that practice in 2029 and require voters to opt in.

Trump’s push to dictate the same mail-in voting rules for everyone is unprecedented.

Western states pioneered modern expansive voting by mail, giving voters more options and broadening access to rural and dispersed populations, said Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group, which works with election officials. 

"The option to vote by mail increases voter turnout regardless of party. Scaling it back will mean that citizens lose access to a safe and secure voting method which may better enable them to participate in an election," said Morrell, a former Colorado and Utah elections official and unaffiliated voter. 

In 1991, Arizona allowed any voter to cast an absentee ballot.

Republicans implemented voting by mail and used it to their advantage for many years. At least three-quarters of Arizona voters cast their ballot prior to the election, and the majority have said they don’t want to lose that right.

"Any efforts to ban early voting would not be well received among the broader electorate," said Paul Bentz, senior vice president at HighGround, an Arizona consulting firm that worked on the campaign of former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer.

Florida adopted "no-excuse" absentee voting after the 2000 presidential election recount, with bipartisan support. 

"Everybody wanted to clean up the mess," said Susan MacManus, a University of South Florida emeritus political scientist. "They were thinking that would be a way to improve turnout."

Voting by mail became popular with Florida’s seniors, college students and people who travel for work.

In 2024, about 1 million Florida Republicans and 1.25 million Democrats voted by mail. Tens of thousands of Republican voters cast mail ballots in each of Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.

States United Democracy Center, an elections research nonprofit, found that, nationally, white voters and voters age 65 and older used mail-in voting more than other groups.

Trump misleads about polling and SAVE America Act

When Trump promotes the SAVE America Act, he cites polling on voter ID — not about scaling back voting by mail. Trump said March 9 that the SAVE America Act is popular with 86% of Democrats and 98% of Republicans.

That doesn’t apply to their views on voting by mail.

A White House spokesperson told us Trump was referring to Pew Research Center polling in support of voter ID. The center’s August survey found that 83% of American adults support requiring voters to show government-issued photo ID to vote, including 71% of Democrats and 95% of Republicans.

That same Pew survey found 58% of Americans support allowing voters to cast ballots by mail, including 32% of Republicans and 83% of Democrats. 

That survey was done months before the current version of the SAVE America Act, and it didn’t ask about an earlier version (which was called the SAVE Act). 

The White House has pointed to polls that ask about broad goals of the legislation without mentioning some of the consequences required to meet those goals, such as the need to prove citizenship through a passport or birth certificate.

For instance, a February Harvard CAPS/Harris poll of about 2,000 registered voters found that 58% supported Trump asking Congress "to pass the SAVE America Act, mandating photo ID and proof of citizenship for all voters, sharply limiting mail-in ballots, and ending sanctuary protections for criminal illegal immigrants."

That question packs a lot of issues into one sentence without providing facts such as that the majority of states already require ID and noncitizens are banned from voting in federal elections. A separate question asked if illegal immigrants should be allowed to vote.

States already take steps to only register U.S. citizens and remove ineligible people from the voter rolls. Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and cases of noncitizen voting are rare. Surveys typically don’t capture nuances and often present voter ID as a yes or no choice.

The Harvard CAPS/Harris poll also showed that 54% support allowing everyone to vote by mail. 

Charles Franklin, Marquette University Law School polling expert, told PolitiFact that survey answers depend on how the legislation is described to respondents.

"A useful approach would be to ask about each element separately rather than combining them in a single package," Franklin said. "Specifically mail in voting usually polls quite well, so a question that includes both photo ID and limits on mail ballots may confuse people if they like one and not the other."

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RELATED: Can voters use Real ID to satisfy SAVE Act voting rules, as Byron Daniels said? Not in 44 states.