Vote By Mail Is Safe—For Now

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans votes by mail. 

In 2024, absentee ballots accounted for more than 48 million votes, according to the States United Democracy Center, and in eight states and the District of Columbia (“universal vote-at-home states”), elections are held exclusively by mail. 

Voting by mail is convenient, secure, and often the only option for voters in the military or who have disabilities. Studies show that universal vote by mail can dramatically increase turnout. Fraud is practically non-existent.

Yet President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on vote by mail (despite his own record as a mail-in voter) threaten to jeopardize access to this option, as well as public trust, say two of the nation’s foremost experts on vote by mail.

Barbara Smith Warner is a senior advisor at the Center for Responsive Government and the former executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute. Phil Keisling is a former secretary of state for the State of Oregon, the founder of the National Vote at Home Institute, and a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes. 

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Anne Kim: So just to set some context, give us the basics on vote by mail. What percentage of Americans vote by mail at this point? Who are they?

Phil Keisling: People have voted at home in America for really over a 150 years. “Absentee ballots,” the name it’s often gone by, started in the Civil War as a way to help soldiers on the front participate in the democracy that they were fighting to defend. And over the decades it has increasingly grown in popularity. 

Today, eight states plus D.C. automatically mail ballots to 100 percent of their active registered voters. These we call “vote-at-home” states. And we call them vote-at-home states because most people return their ballots in person in a lot of states, beginning with Oregon. We were the first to go this route in the 2000 election after voters approved it by a two-to-one margin. And in the majority of other states, any voter can get a mail ballot without needing any kind of legal excuse.

In the 2020 pandemic election, almost half of all votes cast came via a mailed-out ballot. [This percentage] fell after the pandemic was over, but it’s still a very hardy one-third of Americans who are likely to use this method for voting, especially now that this totally unnecessary cloud has been lifted over mail ballots.

Anne Kim: Are there populations that tend to rely more on voting at home, people in rural areas, for instance, or other demographics that find voting at home to be particularly convenient or necessary?

Barbara Smith Warner: It’s a big range. When you think about how voting at home started, you think of rural areas, you think of seniors, you think of people who are disabled. And indeed, those are a lot of the folks who vote at home by returning their mailed-in ballots. But [there are also] college students who want to maintain their residency and vote in the state where they grew up.

There are also working families and people with transportation issues. If I’m a health care worker, I don’t know what kind of shift I’m going to be working around Election Day. Or I’m not sure where my early voting site is going to be. One of the best things you can do as a health care worker, as any sort of a shift worker, or as a working person or working parent, is vote at home. That way you get your ballot, you have the time to do it and return it, and you can vote at your own convenience.

It’s not partisan; it’s voter-centric. It is not a Democratic thing, and it’s not a Republican thing. It is an important, significant way to make it more convenient to vote broadly across the country.

Phil Keisling: It’s no small irony that prior to Trump’s election in 2016, in the previous two decades, expanding access to mail ballots was primarily a Republican priority driven by rural voters. Democrats were not actively opposed to it as much as they were generally indifferent to it. Their big push was for early in-person voting and setting up polling places prior to Election Day. 

Personally I think Trump lost the [2020] election because he discouraged so many of his own voters from doing what they would have been naturally inclined to do since it was such a popular thing among Republicans. 

Plus bad weather, sick kids, transportation challenges might have thwarted a lot of them from voting. And among Democrats who were more attuned to concerns about COVID and safety around polling places, probably a lot more of them voted at home than they would have otherwise.  

So ironies abound in this. And of course the biggest one is the president himself, who twice this year has voted with a mail ballot. Go figure. 

Anne Kim: You took the words right out of my mouth. Trump did in fact vote by mail very recently in the Florida primary. Nevertheless, he has claimed that vote by mail is rife with fraud, and that’s justified these extraordinary measures he has issued to try to restrict this practice. Barbara, what evidence is there, if any, to support these claims?

Barbara Smith Warner: There is absolutely none. [Even] the Heritage Foundation, which tracks voter fraud quite religiously, has found almost no incidence of voter fraud in vote-at-home states. It’s infinitesimally small. It’s vanishingly small. 

The truth is that there are a wide range of security elements. Voter lists tend to be very clean in the universal vote-at-home states because you’re regularly mailing and keeping up your lists. Envelopes are barcoded. There’s no such thing as copying a ballot and stuffing a ballot box because every ballot is tied to a single voter. There is signature verification. There’s ballot tracking and ballot curing. If something is wrong with your ballot, you are notified in almost every state by your election administrator: “Hey, you forgot to date this, or your signature doesn’t match.” 

The truth is that fraud is not a problem. It is a completely made-up excuse. 

Phil Keisling: You can’t say fraud has never happened with a handful of voters here and there. But what we fail to do is to juxtapose those very small cases of fraud with the remarkable turnout power that you get when you mail people their ballots.

A study that came out after the 2020 election by Mindy Romero and Eric McGee came to the conclusion that [voting at home increased turnout by five and a half percentage points]. And you say, five and a half percent, what’s the big deal? Well, let’s see. That’s probably 750,000 additional votes in Texas, and 400,000 additional votes in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Which way would those votes would have gone? Heck, they might have gone for Trump in 2020. But that’s a remarkable amount of additional votes. 

The last thing I’ll mention is the primary. On September 15, the last state held its primary election. Oregon, California, and Washington were in the top five among states in terms of turnout, and in all these cases, their elections were far duller than the huge contests in Texas and Michigan.

Barbara Smith Warner: And just to put a finer point on it, those are states that automatically send everybody a ballot. That is the meaningful difference. We’ve been tracking the turnout differential in primaries in general, and it is truly striking. In 2024, the states where everyone got a ballot at home had up to twice the turnout than the states that did not.

Anne Kim: Even though the Supreme Court has blocked any changes to mail-in balloting for this election, I get the feeling that it’s something of a reprieve. So I think it’s important to talk through what the president tried to do to vote by mail this fall because it may happen again for 2028 or beyond. 

Let’s start with Trump’s executive order, which he signed this spring, and it directed the U.S. Postal Service to take an unprecedented role in trying to regulate vote by mail. Can you talk a little bit about what the Trump administration wanted the Postal Service to do and why it’s so remarkable that the Postal Service was given these orders?

Barbara Smith Warner: The Postal Service, for its 250-plus years of existence, has operated under a simple premise: Universal delivery of every and any piece of mail that comes to it properly addressed and with postage—with a few exceptions for bombs and poisons and things like that. 

The proposal that the Postal Service came up with in response to the president’s executive order was for every local election administrator mailing out ballots to put together an electronic list of those ballots and to submit that list to the Postal Service. Any mismatch, any typo, any whatever between that electronic list and the physical ballots ballots would be rejected. 

So the idea that the Postal Service was going to be an arbiter of what ballots could be mailed is mind-blowing to anyone who has been around the Postal Service at any point in their life. I have a history with the letter carriers’ union, so that was really the most striking part of this that did not get enough attention—that this is a foundational change in how the Postal Service works. 

Having the Postal Service decide whose ballots get mailed out is shocking. What is worse is the Postal Service acquiescing and coming up with this complete change of how it does mail. That is really troubling.

Anne Kim: Even though the Supreme Court has blocked what the Trump administration is trying to do for 2026, it’s probably sowed a lot of confusion among voters and set a lot of election officials into a panic just in case they would have had to comply with what the Postal Service was asking them to do. What have you heard from states about the impact that all this uncertainty has had on preparations for this fall’s elections?

Barbara Smith Warner: Well, I have to start by reminding everybody watching and listening that despite all the Sturm und Drang and all the drama and all the noise, what’s going to happen is that in November, just like every other November, the United States through its decentralized election system will run a safe and secure and transparent election.

State and local election administrators take their jobs very seriously. They know how to do their jobs, and they will be doing their jobs, which is allowing people to vote by mail, to vote early, to vote on Election Day. They will be doing everything to make sure every vote gets in and gets counted safely and securely. So to me that’s the most important part.

I am in regular contact with election administrators, and we did monthly webinars about mail ballot issues throughout this whole process. Did they do some contingency planning? Yes. Are they worried about the future? Yes. But they’ve got an election to run.

There were conversations about driving ballots to distribution centers to get around using the Postal Service. But that hypothetical has been put to rest. We are going to have a federal election run by the same rules in each of those states that we were always going to have.

Phil Keisling: This is yet another example of an idea that never should have gotten off the launching pad and should have had a stake driven through its heart six months ago. But the wringer election officials have been put through, on top of needing private security hired in some cases, and dealing with the threats of violence and worse from the yahoos who have who embraced the election denialism that Trump is fomenting, is just inexcusable. 

But I want to make a make a point about something that I’ve believed ever since this was first floated earlier in the year. I think it never was a serious legal or court strategy to get this to happen. I think instead it was a psy-op operation that sadly has had success because of the chaos, the confusion, and the doubt that was sown and not resolved until now. 

It has put a [such a] cloud over mail ballots that people have not been signing up. And it’s prevented people from encouraging voters to go out and do it. Whether you’re Republican or Democrat, the cloud that this has put on [vote by mail] has reduced the faith that people have in it. 

Now it’s not too late. Over the next thirty days, people across the country could say, well, now that the coast is clear, I’m going to apply for one of these ballots because I’m worried about whether I might be able to vote. And the other thing is an ICE agent, or soldiers, or citizens packing weapons can’t intimidate you around your kitchen table the way they might be able to when it comes to going out physically to a polling place. 

So I’m hoping that now that this cloud has been lifted—which never should have been there in the first place—people out there running campaigns and trying to get as many voters as possible to vote are going to see this not just as an all-clear signal, but as a “let’s go full speed ahead and turn on the afterburners here.” 

And for all of those who care about small “d” democracy and want to make our elections as representative as possible, this isn’t just an alternative way of voting. This is one of the core answers, I would argue, to how we make that happen. It’s not the only thing; we need a lot of other things like campaign finance reform and the like. But this is a core component of how we make our democracy more representative and more robust, regardless of who ends up being out on top. We ought to be wanting to have 80 percent turnout in our elections, like they recently did in Hungary, for example, rather than fifty percent. We’ll be lucky if we get 50 percent of eligible citizens in this midterm casting a ballot.

Anne Kim: Do you have suggestions for what Congress can do, if there is a majority amenable to these ideas, to essentially “Trump-proof” mail-in voting so that we don’t have these kinds of challenges in the future? 

Phil Keisling: Well it’s a good question. I think the single most important thing in the near term is for Congress to just recognize it should stay out of this. We have 50 state election systems and while there are differences among them, there are basic principles that underlie each one of them. 

Congress at times has been an important “floor creator” in defining what the minimum standards are. You can’t discriminate. You can’t, for example, have white-only primary elections like Texas used to run up until the 1940s. But I’m of the belief that a Congress that thinks it can meddle in state election law to the point of saying, “Well, you have to do a vote-at-home system, and you’ve got to set up X number of drop boxes, and X number of places” is also a Congress that could say, “Well, if we’ve got the authority to do that, we have the authority to tell states like Oregon, no, you can’t use mail at all.”

So I’m wary about Congress opening the door to bad things. Administrations come and go. Republicans win one year, and Democrats win another. But I think the principle that states have the ability to innovate and try new things, just as Oregon innovated with [vote-at-home] reform 25 years ago, is a real strength of our system and not a weakness.

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