President Donald Trump’s family has also been busted using mail-in voting, days after the president called it “cheating.”
The 79-year-old has spent years railing against mail-in voting as a vehicle for mass fraud. Earlier this week, state election records revealed that HE requested his mail-in ballot on March 14, just days after he insisted his voting bill, the SAVE America Act, include strict limits on the practice.
And now, it has been revealed that the president’s wife, Melania Trump and the couple’s son Barron, who turned 20 last week, also voted by mail in the same Florida state legislature special election.
The timing is particularly ironic. On Monday, during a stop in Memphis, Trump referred to voting by mail as “mail-in cheating.” Days earlier, he had requested his ballot by post.
“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” Trump said in Tennessee, where he appeared to doze off at a meeting and took an impromptu visit to Elvis Presley’s Graceland. “I call it ‘mail-in cheating,’ and we’ve got to do something about it.”
The SAVE America Act—the sweeping election bill Trump has made a central condition of reopening the government and funding the beleaguered Transportation Security Administration—would ban most mail-in voting.
Trump’s act would also require voters to present proof of citizenship in person when registering. Trump has demanded Senate Republicans nuke the filibuster to pass it. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, the law threatens to disenfranchise 21 million Americans who lack ready access to the required documents.
It is also worth noting that Trump was physically present at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida during the early in-person voting period, which ran through Sunday—meaning he could have voted in person had he chosen to.
A White House spokesperson dismissed the revelations as a “non-story” on Tuesday, pointing out that Trump lives in Washington, D.C., and that the SAVE America Act contains exceptions for mail-in ballots in cases of illness, disability, military service, or travel. The explanation did not address why the president spent the voting period at the very Florida property where he is registered to vote.
This is not a new pattern. According to NPR, Trump has cast mail-in ballots throughout his years-long crusade against the practice, going back to at least 2020. In August, he posted on Truth Social vowing to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” claiming the U.S. was “the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting” and that “ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING.”
The crusade is also running into resistance within his own party. Many red states have long relied on mail-in voting, which has weakened Republican support for the SAVE Act, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.
Florida Republicans in particular have depended on it for decades to turn out older, whiter parts of the electorate—a dynamic that began to shift during the pandemic, when Democrats in swing states started requesting mail-in ballots in greater numbers.
White House spokesperson Olivia Wales again called this a “non-story.”
“As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel–but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud," she said.
Wales added: “As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C. This is a non-story.”
