President Donald Trump voted by mail in a Tuesday special election in Florida even as he wages war on mail-in voting.
The president, who is registered to vote at his private Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, cast a mail-in ballot in a special election for the state legislature, according to the Palm Beach County Supervisor Elections website.
An elections office spokesperson confirmed to The Washington Post that the information on the site was accurate.
Given that he spent the last two weekends at Mar-a-Lago, and early in-person voting was available through Sunday, he could have cast his ballot in person.
The revelation comes a day after Trump torpedoed efforts to reach a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security—including the beleaguered Transportation Security Administration—unless Democrats agree to pass the SAVE America Act.
The Senate has entered its second week of debate on the bill, which would ban most voting by mail and require voters to appear in person and present proof of their citizenship when registering to vote, even though illegal voting is vanishingly rare.
The law threatens to disenfranchise 21 million Americans who don’t have ready access to the necessary documents, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
Trump has nevertheless demanded that Senate Republicans nuke the filibuster in order to pass the legislation, which has already cleared the House.
A White House spokesperson told the Post that Trump’s mail-in voting was a “non-story” because Trump votes in Florida but lives in Washington, D.C., and the SAVE America Act has exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel.
But besides being physically present in Mar-a-Lago during the voting period, Trump has railed against mail-in voting for years and has repeatedly pushed the false claim that the U.S. is the only country that allows it.
He has also cast his own mail-in ballots all throughout his crusade against the practice, going back to at least 2020, according to NPR.
During a roundtable Monday on crime and public safety, Trump claimed it had been “brought to my attention today that we’re the only country that does mail-in voting.”
“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” he said. “I call it ‘mail-in cheating,’ and we’ve got to do something about it.”
He said almost the same thing in August in a rambling Truth Social post in which he vowed to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.”
“We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED,” he wrote. “ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING.”
Thirty-four countries or territories worldwide allow mail-in voting, according to Politifact.
Despite his efforts, many red states have embraced mail-in voting, weakening Republican support for the SAVE Act, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.
Florida Republicans in particular have relied on mail-in voting for decades to make sure older, whiter parts of the electorate can vote, according to NPR.
During the pandemic, though, Democrats in swing states began requesting mail-in ballots in higher numbers than Republicans.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
