On Aug. 18, in the Oval Office, President Trump said he has put his legal team to work drafting an executive order to ban mail-in ballots in American elections “because they’re corrupt.”
"You can never have a real democracy with mail-in voting," Trump said.
At one point, he said the U.S. is the only country in the world where mail-in voting is used. Wrong. There are 34 such countries.
And while his White House legal team is researching the subject, they surely will run up against some black-letter law in the U.S. Constitution — , which makes it clear the president has absolutely no role to play in setting the time and manner of voting in the states.
The Constitution leaves the administration of elections up to the state legislatures. Only Congress can weigh in, and those instances are rare.
So, how did Trump get the notion that he could tell the states how to run their elections? Especially since a year ago, as presidential candidate Trump, he and the Republican Party were urging their supporters to vote by mail?
The answer is because Vladimir Putin told him so.
Dial back to Aug. 15, when Trump gave the Russian president a red-carpet welcome to an air base in Anchorage, Alaska, where Trump and Putin met for two-and-a-half hours to talk about Russia’s war against Ukraine, coming to no conclusions.
After the conference, which ended before lunch could be served, Trump gave an interview to Fox News’ Sean Hannity, in which the U.S. president said Putin warned him that mail-in voting was not secure and could lead to massive fraud.
This is the same Vladimir Putin who rules his country as an authoritarian dictator and is a former KGB agent in the old Soviet Union who has never experienced a truly free and fair election in his life.
Putin’s advice to Trump is reverberating back to Ohio and dozens of other states that use mail-in balloting.
In last November’s presidential election, out of about 8 million Ohioans who cast ballots, about 1.1 million voted absentee by mail.
And instances of possible fraud were so small as to be practically nonexistent.
In January of this year, Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, released the results of his office’s audit of the vote-counting in Ohio.
“Ohioans deserve to know that their elections are transparent, accessible, and accountable,” . “As 2024 comes to a close, I am proud to announce yet another 99.9% audit accuracy rate and am grateful for the hard work and dedication of Ohio’s bipartisan election officials who make it happen.”
After Trump’s call for a ban on mail-in voting, LaRose’s press secretary, Ben Kindel, issued a statement that would not ruffle the feathers of the president.
“Secretary LaRose believes our voting system in Ohio is honest, accurate and accountable, but he’s always willing to listen to ideas on how to make it even more secure,” Kindel said. “Whether we change our voting process is ultimately up to the state legislature. Election crime is rare in Ohio because of the safeguards we’ve put in place to prevent it, but that’s not to say it doesn’t occur.”
The Ohio General Assembly, with its Republican supermajority, could change the balloting system if it wanted to. But the current mail-in ballot system benefits them at least as much as it does the Democrats.
In Ohio, there is a substantial network of voting rights groups ready to fight any attempts to scale back the present system.
Jen Miller, executive director of the Ohio League of Women Voters, said Ohio’s mail-in balloting “works well and is worth preserving.”
“It helps senior citizens, active duty military, students, those working abroad,” Miller said. “Taking away absentee ballots would disenfranchise those people.
“This is not a partisan issue,” Miller said. “The fact is, there are many Republicans who prefer voting by mail. We should be in the business of making it easier to vote, not harder.”
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