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Tag: Mail In Voting

  • Trump, contradicting the California GOP, opposes early and mail-in voting in Prop. 50 election

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    President Trump urged California voters on Sunday not to cast mail-in ballots or vote early in the California election about redistricting — the direct opposite of the message from state GOP leaders.

    Repeating his false claim that former President Biden beat him in 2020 because the election was rigged, Trump argued that the November special election about redistricting in California would be rigged, as would the 2026 midterm election to determine control of Congress.

    “No mail-in or ‘Early’ Voting, Yes to Voter ID! Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop Vote is! Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “GET SMART REPUBLICANS, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!!”

    Proposition 50, a ballot measure proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and other California Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional districts to boost their party’s ranks in the U.S. House of Representatives, is on the Nov. 4 ballot.

    The rare mid-decade redistricting effort was in response to Trump urging GOP-led states, initially Texas, to increase the number of Republicans in the House in the 2026 midterm election to allow him to continue implementing his agenda in his final two years in the White House.

    Newsom responded to Trump on X: “Ramblings of an old man that knows he’s going to LOSE.”

    Trump has not weighed in on the merits of Proposition 50, while prominent Democrats who support it have, including former President Obama.

    More than 4 million mail-in ballots — 18% of the ballots sent to California’s 23 million voters — had been returned as of Friday, according to a vote tracker run by Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell, who drew the proposed maps on the ballot. Democrats continue to outpace Republicans in returning ballots, 51% to 28%. Voters registered without a party preference or with other political parties have returned 21% of the ballots.

    Early-voting centers also opened in 29 counties on Saturday.

    Turnout figures were alarming Republicans leaders before Trump’s message.

    “It’s simple. Republicans need to stop complaining and vote. We ask and ask and ask and yet turnout still lags,” the San Diego GOP posted on X. “To win this one GOP turnout needs to be materially better than average. It’s very doable but won’t just happen. Work it.”

    Republicans historically voted early while Democrats were more likely to cast ballots on election day. Trump upended this dynamic, creating dissonance with GOP leaders across the nation who recognized the value of banking early votes. And it completely contradicts the messaging by the opponents of Proposition 50.

    Jessica Millan Patterson, a former chair of the state GOP and leader of the “No on Prop. 50 — Stop Sacramento’s Power Grab” committee, has been a longtime proponent of urging Republican voters to cast ballots as early and conveniently as possible.

    “Sacramento politicians rushed this costly election for partisan gain, and mistakes have been made,” she said Sunday evening. “If Californians want change from our state’s failed one-party rule, it starts by turning out to vote no on Proposition 50.”

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  • Record number of requested Minneapolis mail-in ballots sent out on first day of early voting

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    Despite Kirk assassination, Turning Point tour to continue at U of M, and more headlines



    Despite Kirk assassination, Turning Point tour to continue at U of M, and more headlines

    03:20

    Minneapolis officials sent over 12,600 requested mail-in ballots to residents for the first day of early voting on Friday, a record number for a municipal election, the city said.

    An additional 351 people completed a ballot at the Early Vote Center on Hennepin Avenue on Friday.

    The city said that it mailed out 3,736 ballot requests on the first day of early voting ahead of the 2021 municipal election. 

    Voters who applied to receive a mail-in ballot should allow up to seven days for it to arrive, and the same number of days for returning a completed ballot, according to the city. 

    Mail-in ballots need to be received by election day on Nov. 4, and cannot be dropped off at polling places that day.

    The last day to vote early in person is Monday, Nov. 3.   

    Minneapolis residents can learn more about voting early in person here, and Minnesota residents can find out more about the 2025 general election at the secretary of state’s website.

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    Nick Lentz

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  • Secretary of State Simon says Minnesota will fight Trump’s efforts to stop mail-in voting

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    This week, President Trump announced that he is working on an executive action to end mail-in balloting before the 2026 midterm elections. 

    While Mr. Trump may try to halt voting by mail, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon says he would fight those efforts in court.

    Trump has claimed mail-in ballots are corrupt and susceptible to voter fraud. Simon says Trump’s claims are untrue.

    “There is no evidence whatsoever that it’s anything other than very secure,” said Simon.

    In 2024, 1.2 million Minnesotans used mail-in ballots to vote, but it has a deep-rooted history in elections.

    “This started in the Civil War, believe it or not, where Union soldiers from Minnesota were able to use absentee ballots in Minnesota by mail to get their votes cast in elections,” said Simon.

    In addition, some remote Minnesota communities have long been able to choose via voting by mail.

    “We have about 150,000 Minnesotans who live in communities where that is the main option for voting, which means they get a ballot automatically mailed to them,” said Simon.

    Simon is also at odds with the Trump administration over the release of private voter information. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking for information that includes names, addresses, partial Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, email addresses and phone numbers. The DOJ has not said what it would do with the data.

    The Minnesota Secretary of State’s office does provide a more limited set of voter information data to law enforcement, political parties and political campaigns. That information is available to those parties for a copying fee.

    Esme Murphy

    Esme Murphy, a reporter and Sunday morning anchor for WCCO-TV, has been a member of the WCCO-TV staff since December 1990. She is also a weekend talk show host on WCCO Radio. Born and raised in New York City, Esme ventured into reporting after graduating from Harvard University.

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  • Faster vote counts without machines? Unlikely.

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    Resurrecting longstanding complaints about how U.S. elections are run, President Donald Trump this week reiterated that he wants faster election results, but doesn’t want voting machines.

    In Aug. 18 remarks at the White House, Trump said that a forthcoming executive order will “end mail-in ballots” and change voting machines.

    Trump continued, “The machines, I mean, they say we’re going to have the results in two weeks. With paper ballots, you have the results that night.”

    This echoed Trump’s 2024 campaign promises to use only paper ballots and count all votes on election night.

    In an Aug. 18 Truth Social post, Trump said he is going to “lead a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines. 

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    We asked the White House to explain what types of machines Trump wants eliminated — such as vote tabulators — and whether he meant all brands or only certain ones. We also asked whether Trump intends to have election workers count every ballot by hand, and if so, how they would do that fast enough to announce results on election night. 

    A White House spokesperson did not answer these specific questions and instead sent a statement about voter ID and California and New York voting laws.

    In interviews with PolitiFact, voting experts agreed that if Trump’s goals are to end the use of machines and to have results on election night, those goals are diametrically opposed.

    Without machines, “Hand-counting all ballots on election night and tabulating all the results would be a vast challenge,” said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director for Verified Voting, a nonprofit that studies election administration. “How many people do you need to hire, vet and train? How much space, in how many places, do you need to accommodate all those people and ballots? And once you have all those hand counts, how do you combine them into vote totals for many different contests in overlapping districts without possibility of error or fraud?”

    Experts said Trump is wrong to say that machine-conducted voting inevitably takes two weeks, and it’s inaccurate that using an entirely paper system would assure results on election night. More than 155 million votes were cast in the 2024 presidential election.

    States set laws that give election officials often weeks to complete an official count, which includes overseas ballots. If the margins are wide enough, media outlets project winners based on unofficial results.

    All but a tiny sliver of American voters cast their ballots either directly on paper or use machines that print out a paper record of their votes that they can verify directly, before a machine counts them. 

    Hand counting ballots is slow; machines are fast

    “Scanners make results faster, not slower,” Lindeman said.

    Hand counting is feasible for smaller-scale elections, experts told PolitiFact, but for not elections with large numbers of ballots, and with as many as a dozen races to be tallied from each ballot. If 15 offices are being contested on a ballot, those ballots would need to be counted 15 times, said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin political scientist.

    “Countries such as Canada that hand count ballots on election night typically have only one contest on the ballot,” Burden said. 

    In many elections, each voter gets a ballot that accounts for the congressional district, county, state legislative district and local districts where they live. Because of this, Burden said, “even a modest sized city can have hundreds of unique ballot combinations. This makes hand-counting of ballots much more complicated.” 

    In Dane County, Wisconsin, which includes the state capital of Madison, voters cast about 300,000 ballots in November 2022. “It would take months” to hand-count every ballot, said Scott McDonell, the Dane County clerk.

    It took Dane County eight 16-hour days to recount by hand its 2016 presidential race ballots, McDonell said — and that was just one race.

    Burden cited a 2020 recount in Georgia’s presidential election, which required thousands of ballot counters working long shifts over multiple days to hand-count ballots for just one contest. It took almost a week to complete and cost the state millions of dollars.

    In 2023, Mohave County, Arizona, population 213,000, considered but rejected moving to hand counting for the 2024 election cycle after its elections director said it would cost $1.1 million and would require hiring 245 people. The director said a test hand count also produced errors.

    When contractors hired by Arizona Republicans hand-counted 2020 presidential and Senate votes in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its suburbs, it took them months to complete the process, using hundreds of volunteers. Their results reconfirmed Joe Biden had defeated Trump in the county.

    Stephen Richer, the former Maricopa County Recorder, told PolitiFact that “tabulation is one of the fastest parts of the process. Tabulators can read thousands of ballots an hour.”

    Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 general election are examined and recounted by contractors working for Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix on May 6, 2021. (AP)

    Machines are more accurate than people for counting ballots

    Studies have shown voting machines produce more accurate counts compared with hand counts.

    “Counters must pause for regular breaks to stay rested and sharp,” Burden wrote in 2023 for The Conversation. “Counting must periodically stop to resolve challenges and questions from observers. It is painstaking work.”

    Given the limits of human endurance and focus, human counters can make errors, such as losing track of their counts.

    “In contrast, dedicated tabulator machines, which are used after voters have marked their ballots, are excellent at counting,” Burden wrote. Scanners for standardized ballots have lower error rates than most other technologies, making them significantly more accurate than counting the same ballots by hand, he said.

    Richer said in an X post that vote scanners — similar to machines that read filled-in ovals for standardized tests — “are highly, highly accurate. And fast. And cheap.” States also have procedures to test and audit voting equipment.

    “Hand counting hundreds of millions of individual votes is so stupid it’s not worth spending more time on,” Richer said on X.

    Our ruling

    Trump said with voting machines, “They say we’re going to have the results in two weeks. With paper ballots, you have the results that night.”

    Scientific studies and experience with past elections show that both parts of this assertion are incorrect.

    Trump is wrong that machine-conducted voting inevitably takes two weeks. And getting rid of machines that tabulate votes and relying solely on humans to count paper ballots would, in most cases, take longer, require more personnel and add expense to the process, particularly in large jurisdictions with large numbers of ballots cast and a variety of races on each ballot.

    We rate the statement False.

    RELATED: MAGA-Meter: Trump’s second term

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  • Trump says he’ll sign executive order aimed at eliminating mail-in ballots

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    President Trump says he will sign an executive order aimed at eliminating voting through mail-in ballots ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, joins “The Takeout” to discuss.

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  • Trump vows to try banning mail-in voting before 2026 midterm elections — can he do that?

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    President Trump promised Monday to work to end mail-in voting and said work is already underway on an executive order to ban it before the 2026 midterm elections, although the Constitution does not give him this power.

    “We, as a Republican Party, are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots,” he said during an Oval Office  meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots.”

    Why does Trump want to ban mail-in ballots?

    “Mail-in ballots are corrupt,” the president said. He suggested the method is susceptible to voter fraud, claiming in California, “it’s so corrupt, where some people get five, six, seven ballots delivered to them.” He has often insisted mail-in ballots can be tampered with or enable people to vote multiple times.

    But soon after the 2020 election, Debra Cleaver, founder and CEO of VoteAmerica, a nonpartisan voter information site, dismissed the idea of widespread voter fraud as “a myth.” 

    “The outgoing ballots have a barcode, and then when you send your ballot in, you put it in a return envelope and that barcode has to match the barcode that was sent out in order for the ballot to be counted,” she explained to CBS News.

    After that election, the director of the nation’s cyber security agency, Christopher Krebs, called the 2020 vote “the most secure in American history.”

    In 2024, when Mr. Trump won the presidential election, the U.S. Census Bureau said nearly a third of ballots nationwide were cast by mail. 

    Trump’s impending executive order to stop mail voting — would it be legal?

    In a social media post earlier in the day, the president said of the impending order that it would “help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.” 

    He claimed that the states “are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” and that “[t]hey must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

    But Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution says it’s the states that have the authority to regulate elections, not the president, and this may be changed only by Congress.

    Trump claims U.S. is the only country that uses mail-in voting. Is that true?

    Mr. Trump also claimed, “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting” and argued, “You will never have an honest election if you have mail-in. And it’s time that the Republicans get tough and stop it, because the Democrats want it. It’s the only way they can get elected.”

    In fact, more than 30 other countries allow voting by mail for some or all voters, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental advocacy group based in Sweden. Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark are among them.

    Mail-in voting in the U.S.

    In the U.S., mail voting is widespread: 28 states allow any voter to request a mail-in ballot, while the rest require a a documented reason such as illness or military service. 

    The pandemic gave mail voting a huge boost in the 2020 elections. About 43% of voters cast their ballot by mail that year, according to a report by the Election Assistance Commission. In 2024, mail voting dropped off, representing just over 30% of the total votes cast — about 46.8 million votes. The commission said that last year’s numbers still exceeded pre-pandemic levels.

    The topic of mail-in voting came up during Mr. Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin last Friday, too. After the two met Friday, the president told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that “Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said, ‘You can’t have an honest election, election with mail-in voting.’ And he said, ‘There’s not a country in the world that uses it now.’” 

    Mr. Trump said the two talked about the 2020 election and that Putin told him, “You won that election by so much, and that’s (mail voting) how [Biden] got it.” Audits and investigations, including some conducted by Trump supporters and Republican secretaries of state, showed no evidence that the 2020 election results were inaccurate.

    David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, pointed out in a statement to CBS News that mail-in voting has been around since the Civil War and said getting rid of mail voting “is an incredibly bad idea that would make our elections much less secure and vulnerable to interference.” 

    “Requiring states to eliminate or replace the voting machines that confirmed the election of this president, just 15 months before a midterm election and less than a year before primaries, is not possible and would result in chaos,” said Becker, who is also a CBS News election law contributor. 

    Sara Cook and Jenna Gibson Riggins contributed to this report.

    Laura Doan

    Laura Doan is a fact checker for CBS News Confirmed. She covers misinformation, AI and social media.

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  • Trump said U.S. is the only mail-in voting country. Wrong.

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    President Donald Trump vowed to take action against voting by mail, which he said makes the United States an outlier. 

    “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting,” Trump wrote in an Aug. 18 Truth Social post. 

    His post echoed grievances about mail-in voting he had aired days earlier in his interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. After meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Aug. 15 in Alaska, Trump told Hannity that Putin said the 2020 U.S. presidential election was “rigged” because of mail-in voting. It wasn’t. Trump lost that election. Officials in his own administration told him that.

    Hours after his post, Trump slightly softened his language during a White House meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

    “And do you know that we’re the only country in the world — I believe, I may be wrong — but just about the only country in the world that uses (mail-in voting) because of what’s happened, massive fraud all over the place,” Trump said.

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    Mail-in voting provides more opportunity for fraud than in-person voting researchers say, but it’s still rare, and election officials have safeguards in place.

    Trump said during his Aug. 18 White House remarks that his administration is preparing an executive order “to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt.”

    We asked the White House for evidence to support Trump’s statement about other countries and received no response to that question.

    Data compiled by a Sweden-based organization that advocates for democracy globally found in an October 2024 report found that 34 countries or territories allow mail-in voting, which it refers to as “postal voting.”

    RELATED: Live fact-checks: Trump meets Zelenskyy to talk potential end to Russia-Ukraine war

    Dozens of countries allow at least some mail-in voting

    The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that of the 34 countries or territories, 12 allow all voters to vote by mail and in 22 permit only some voters to vote this way. 

    “Europe has the largest number of countries that make in-country postal voting available to all or some voters,” the report said.

    No two countries have exactly the same postal voting system, said Annika Silva-Leander, the organization’s North America head.

    Silva-Leander noted some differences:

    • Ballot tracking: Ballot tracking lets voters and election officials track the ballots throughout the voting process to reduce fraud. Although that is common in the U.S., many countries don’t have it. 

    • Different state systems: Many countries have the same postal voting system for the entire nation; in the U.S., the system differs from state to state. The majority of states allow voting by mail, including red, blue and battleground states.

    • Mailing ballots to all voters is unusual: In most countries, postal voting supplements polling stations, but some U.S. states such as Washington state rely largely on postal voting.

    • Ballot curing: This is a U.S. process that lets voters fix a problem, such as forgetting to sign the envelope, after casting their ballot. This process is not available in most countries.


    The U.S. has had voting by mail since the Civil War. Voting by mail also has a long history across the globe. 

    Australia introduced postal voting more than a century ago, Graeme Orr, an expert on international electoral law at the University of Queensland in Australia, previously told PolitiFact.

    All Canadians are eligible to use mail-in voting, said York University associate professor Cary Wu, who co-wrote a 2024 paper about the effect of Trump’s anti-mail voting messaging on Canadians’ views of mail voting.

    “Voting by mail has long been a vital component of the democratic process in Canada,” Wu said.

    Although the option of submitting a ballot by mail was extended to all Canadian voters in 1993, it was not commonly used in general elections before the COVID-19 pandemic.

    In the United Kingdom, on-demand postal voting in Britain was part of a wider modernization in electoral administration in the early 2000s, according to a 2021 paper by United Kingdom researchers. Postal voting’s expansion was driven largely by a desire to increase turnout. Using data from the 2019 British Election Study, researchers found that older voters and people with disabilities were more likely to opt for postal voting’s convenience.

    Volunteers prepare postal votes during the German national election in Munich, Germany, Feb. 23, 2025. (AP)

    States set mail-in voting laws

    In his Truth Social post, Trump wrote that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” and must do what the president tells them.

    UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen wrote on his blog that Trump’s statement is “wrong and dangerous.”

    “The Constitution does not give the President any control over federal elections,” Hasen wrote, adding that federal courts have recognized those limits. 

    The Constitution’s Article 1, Section 4 says that the regulation of elections is the power of the states.

    “The President plays literally no role in elections, and that’s by design of the founders,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research.

    Despite often criticizing voting by mail, Trump himself occasionally cast a mail ballot, and in 2024 Trump invited Republicans to cast mail ballots.

    We asked the White House for details about the forthcoming executive order he described, including whether it seeks to entirely ban mail-in voting. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields did not address that question but said Trump wants to require voter ID and prevent “cheating through lax and incompetent voting laws in states like California and New York.” There is no evidence of widespread cheating in California and New York, two of the most populous states that consistently elect Democrats for president. Most states require voter ID, although the rules vary.

    Our ruling

    Trump said, “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting.”

    Trump didn’t explain his evidence and hours later softened his language when he said he “may be wrong.”

    In 2024, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that 34 countries or territories allow postal voting, or mail-in voting. For example, Australia has had mail-in voting for a century, and all Canadians are eligible to vote by mail.

    We rate this statement False. 

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  • On Putin’s advice, Trump launches assault on mail-in ballots and voting machines

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    President Trump said Monday he would renew his assault on mail-in voting after Russia’s autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin, told him to do so at their meeting in Alaska last week.

    The president provided few details, but wrote on social media that he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.”

    Already in March, Trump had issued an executive order directing the Justice Department to “take all necessary action” to prevent mail-in ballots received after election day from being counted. The order also attempted to impose a proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration.

    Those portions of the executive action has been enjoined by courts over constitutional concerns. But another provision, directing the independent U.S. Election Assistance Commission to shift its guidance on voting machines banning the use of certain bar codes and quick-response codes, has been allowed to proceed.

    The U.S. Constitution states that the timing, place and manner of elections “shall be prescribed in each state” by local legislatures, and that Congress has the ability to pass laws altering state election regulations. The president is given no authority to prescribe or govern election procedures.

    Nevertheless, Trump wrote Monday that states “are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.

    “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do,” he wrote.

    Trump’s action comes on the heels of his meeting with Putin in Anchorage, where the Russian leader told him that mail-in ballots led to his electoral defeat in 2020, according to the president.

    The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Putin attempted to influence the last three U.S. presidential elections in Trump’s favor.

    Trump blamed his 2020 election loss to President Biden on a conspiracy of voter fraud. But independent analysts, state attorneys general and every court that reviewed the matter found no evidence of fraud that altered results in the race.

    “Vladimir Putin said something — one of the most interesting things. He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” Trump told Fox News in an interview.

    Trump has criticized mail-in voting since entering politics in 2015. But his presidential campaign embraced the practice leading up to the 2024 election, encouraging his supporters — especially those affected by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina — to take advantage of mail-in voting opportunities.

    “Absentee voting, early voting and election day voting are all good options,” Trump said at the time. “Republicans must make a plan, register and vote!”

    But on Monday, Trump wrote that voting machines “cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”

    “With their HORRIBLE Radical Left policies, like Open Borders, Men Playing in Women’s Sports, Transgender and ‘WOKE’ for everyone, and so much more, Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM,” Trump wrote.

    “I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS,” he added. “THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW!!!”

    Trump said he would take additional executive action before the 2026 midterm elections, but provided no details on timing.

    In the Oval Office yesterday for a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said his lawyers were currently in the process of drafting an order. “It’s time that the Republicans get tough and stop it,” he said.

    “Mail-in ballots are corrupt. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots. And we as a Republican Party are going to do everything possible to end mail-in ballots,” Trump said. “They’re corrupt.”

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  • Trump is encouraging Pennsylvania state lawmakers to repeal mail-in voting law

    Trump is encouraging Pennsylvania state lawmakers to repeal mail-in voting law

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    Reporting by Robert Costa

    Behind the scenes, a key ally says that former President Donald Trump is encouraging state lawmakers in Pennsylvania to repeal Act 77, the law that allows all voters in the state to cast ballots by mail, an effort that reveals that he is working behind the scenes to affect the 2022 midterm elections.

    On Sept. 6, there was a meeting in Trump Tower with Trump and key allies about how to urge Pennsylvania state Republicans to overturn or repeal Act 77, according to veteran political strategist and longtime Trump ally Michael Caputo, who participated in the meeting. The law, passed in 2019, enables “no excuse” mail-in voting and was upheld by the state Supreme Court earlier this year. The gathering was first reported by the news site Semafor and further details were reported by Rolling Stone.

    Trump, who lost Pennsylvania to President Joe Biden by 81,660 votes, attacked and discouraged mail-in voting in 2020 in remarks and tweets: There is “NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-in Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” one tweet read.

    Caputo said that he and others who are working on repealing Act 77 requested the meeting with Trump. The former president agreed to see them and was encouraging, Caputo added. 

    “Trump’s message in the September 2022 meeting was that [Pennsylvania] state legislators have to act now, or else we will have no excuse mail-in balloting long into the future,” Caputo told CBS News. “What can [Trump] do? As head of the Republican Party, he can make phone calls, talk to people.” 

    Caputo said Trump is regularly talking to allies in Pennsylvania about their push to change election law and said he keeps close tabs on state legislative developments, and called Trump’s efforts “encouraging” and active. 

    Democrats voted in far higher numbers by mail in Pennsylvania in 2020: over 2.6 million voted by mail in 2020 — 1.7 million were Democrats and about 623,000 were Republicans.

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  • Supreme Court reverses lower court decision which allowed undated mail-in ballots to be counted in Pennsylvania

    Supreme Court reverses lower court decision which allowed undated mail-in ballots to be counted in Pennsylvania

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    Pennsylvania’s top-ranking state elections official said Tuesday a new U.S. Supreme Court decision regarding how rules for the state’s mail-in ballots had been applied in a county judge election doesn’t change her agency’s guidance about counting them.

    Acting Secretary of State Leigh M. Chapman said county elections officials should count mail-in votes that arrive in exterior envelopes with inaccurate or nonexistent handwritten dates, despite a requirement in state law.

    The U.S. Supreme Court earlier Tuesday had declared as moot a decision in May by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that had said mail-in ballots without a required date on the return envelope had to be counted in a 2021 Pennsylvania judge race.

    The justices ruled 7-2 that the 3rd Circuit must “dismiss the case as moot.”

    Chapman issued a statement saying the high court decision did not affect a separate, previous ruling by state Commonwealth Court in favor of counting ballots without properly dated exterior envelopes.

    The new decision, Chapman said, “provides no justification for counties to exclude ballots based on a minor omission, and we expect that counties will continue to comply with their obligation to count all legal votes.” Chapman works in the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat.

    The 3rd Circuit had said state election law’s requirement of a date next to the voter’s signature on the outside of return envelopes was “immaterial.” That lower court had said it found no reason to refuse counting the ballots that were set aside in the Nov. 2, 2021, election for common pleas judge in Lehigh County.

    Those votes were enough to propel the Democrat, Zac Cohen, to victory in the race. He has since been sworn in and the new U.S. Supreme Court decision is not expected to reverse the results of Cohen’s election contest.

    Joshua Voss, a lawyer who represents the losing judicial candidate in the Lehigh County race, Republican David Ritter, said in a phone call Tuesday he believes the effect of the new high court ruling is that state law goes back to where it had been.

    “The Department of State certainly should update their guidance,” Voss said. “But at the end of the day, elections are administered by counties and counties will need to assess what the state of the law was.”

    Adam Bonin, a lawyer for Cohen, said voters should not leave anything to chance.

    “Voters should still be careful to follow all of the instructions,” Bonin said, including the use of a security envelope and signing and dating the exterior return envelope.

    Voss had argued to the Supreme Court that the 3rd Circuit ruling was already being cited in other cases but should be declared moot.

    He said it’s possible that more litigation over the undated envelopes might occur if there is a close race in November and a candidate wants to seek a court review.

    “I don’t know about ‘likely’ because it would require a close race. So, possible? Yes. Likely? I don’t know. Remember, these ballots made the difference in Ritter’s race, which is why the case existed,” Voss said.

    Jason Gottesman, a spokesperson for the state House Republican Caucus, said in a statement that Pennsylvania law “is clear: ballots must be dated,” and urged the Wolf administration to work on comprehensive election law changes that will make the process more uniform, accessible, modern and secure.

    The case involves the law’s requirement for handwritten dates on return envelopes that are also logged in by county election workers and generally have been postmarked.

    Pennsylvania allowed only limited use of absentee mail-in ballots until 2019, when a state law OK’d them for voters who did not otherwise qualify from a list of acceptable excuses.

    A lawsuit by Republican lawmakers challenging the mail-in voting law is pending in state court, while in August the state Supreme Court upheld the law against a separate challenge.

    More than 2.5 million Pennsylvanians voted by mail during 2020′s presidential election, most of them Democrats, out of 6.9 million total votes. Chapman said Tuesday that more than 1.1 million absentee and mail-in ballots have been requested for the fall General Election. 

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