Fact check: The lies Trump is using to sell his latest attack on mail-in voting

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump is pushing for new restrictions on mail-in voting. To sell his proposal, he is telling lies.

Trump has been making false claims about mail-in voting since the 2020 campaign that was held amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, as he asks Congress to pass a bill that would ban mail-in voting in federal elections except for situations involving disability, illness, travel, or service in the military, he’s repeating some of the same false claims that have been debunked over the last six years.

Here’s a fact check of some of the president’s recent falsehoods on the subject.

It’s not true that the US is the only country that uses mail-in voting

Over and over this month, Trump has falsely claimed that the US is the only country in the world that uses mail-in ballots.

“You know, brought to my attention today that we’re the only country that doesn’t — that does mail-in voting,” Trump claimed in a speech on Monday. “You know, there’s not a country in the world that does mail-in ballots anymore,” he claimed in another speech on March 9.

In reality, dozens of countries allow some or all voters to vote by mail. The list includes Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and Switzerland.

We don’t know what, if anything, was actually brought to Trump’s attention on Monday, but this was not a new lie from him. He has told it on multiple occasions since last year.

It’s not true that a Jimmy Carter commission called for a ban on mail-in voting

Trump continues to falsely describe what Jimmy Carter, the late Democratic president, said about mail-in voting.

Last week, Trump said that a commission Carter formed after his presidency “came out and said very strongly: ‘No mail-in ballots.’” At a March 9 press conference, Trump said of the commission: “Frankly, I think it’s probably the best thing Jimmy Carter did. He said, ‘You can’t have mail-in voting because it’s inherently dishonest.’”

In reality, neither Carter nor an election reform commission Carter co-chaired said “no mail-in ballots” or declared mail-in ballots “inherently dishonest.”

It’s true that the commission was generally skeptical of mail-in voting. Its 2005 report said that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and are “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.”

But the commission did not call for a ban on mail-in voting. Its report highlighted an example of successful mail-only elections, saying that Oregon, a state that had been conducting elections exclusively by mail-in ballot since the late 1990s, “appears to have avoided significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.”

The report also offered recommendations for making the use of mail-in ballots more secure and called for “further research on the pros and cons” of voting by mail.

Carter, who died in 2024, said in a 2020 statement after Trump’s White House disparaged the use of mail-in ballots at the time: “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.”

It’s not true that mail-in ballots are inherently ‘corrupt’

Trump encouraged supporters to vote by mail in the 2024 election and voted by mail himself in Tuesday’s state House special election in Florida. But he continues to falsely describe mail-in ballots as inherently corrupt.

“They’re so corrupt,” he said in a March 13 interview on Fox News Radio. “People don’t want mail-in ballots because you have crooked elections. It guarantees a crooked election,” he said in a March 11 interview with Cincinnati’s WKRC Local 12. “Why would you want mail-in ballots if you know it’s corrupt? It’s a corrupt system,” he told reporters in February.

In reality, mail-in voting is a legitimate method used by legitimate voters — such as one Donald J. Trump — to cast legitimate ballots. Elections experts say the incidence of fraud tends to be marginally higher with mail-in ballots than with in-person ballots, but also that fraud rates in federal elections are tiny even with mail-in ballots.

Republican-dominated Utah is among the eight states (plus Washington, DC) where voters are automatically sent mail-in ballots, though it is now phasing out that policy; its elections, like elections in other mail-heavy states, have been free of widespread fraud. And despite Trump’s claims, there remains no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election in which the use of mail-in ballots spiked because of the pandemic.

It’s not true that California sends out ‘like 38 million ballots’

Trump has for years made false claims about elections in California, a Democratic-dominated state where he has consistently fared poorly. While disparaging mail-in ballots last week, he claimed, “You go to California, they send out like 38 million ballots. Some Democrats got seven, eight ballots. Republicans are a lot of times calling in, ‘Where’s my ballot, where’s my ballot?’ They’re lucky to get one.”

Trump’s “like 38 million” figure is not even close to accurate. California counties send a mail-in ballot to all active registered voters; the state had about 22.6 million active registered voters as of about two weeks prior to the 2024 election and about 23.1 million as of the end of 2025. There is no basis for any suggestion that some 15 million excess ballots have been distributed in the state in any election. (California had more than 39 million total residents in 2025, but that number includes children, adult citizens not registered to vote, noncitizens and people in prison.)

While there are occasional errors by counties and the postal service in distributing mail-in ballots, in California and other states, there is also no basis for Trump’s claim that California Republicans are “lucky to get one.” And even if someone is mistakenly sent more than one ballot, California has security measures in place to make sure that each ballot is cast by the voter it was meant for and that each voter only votes once.

When Trump made similar claims last year, the office of California Secretary of State Shirley Weber told CNN: “Elections officials use protocols to verify the eligibility and identity of the voter prior to sending the vote by mail ballot. When the ballot is returned, elections officials verify the voter’s identity through signature verification. If the elections official determines that the voter’s signature does not match, the identification envelope will not be opened, and the ballot will not be counted until the identification of the voter is confirmed.”

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