President Donald Trump is declaring war on mail-in voting. In a recent announcement, the president stated that an executive order to end mail-in voting in federal elections is currently being drafted.

There’s been a lot of talk over the past two presidential cycles over mail-in voting and whether or not it contributes to voter fraud. And no doubt Trump is likely still dismayed over his defeat during the 2020 election, which took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, and which saw a significant portion of votes mailed in.

Unfortunately for Republicans, their crusade against mail-in voting likely backfired in both the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms. By convincing many of their own supporters that voting by mail was wrong, they may have discouraged a significant number of Republicans from casting a ballot at all.

There have been many allegations of voter fraud made, most notably during the 2020 election. Yet any mass or targeted voter fraud seems to have never been proven.

What we know for certain is that in the 2016 election, in which Trump was victorious, approximately 23% of the total votes cast were mail-in or absentee ballots. During the 2020 election, in which Joe Biden claimed the presidency, 46% of the votes were mailed in. And in the 2024 election, in which Trump secured a second term, 30% of the votes were mailed in.

More than half of U.S. states now offer no-excuse mail-in voting, allowing any eligible voter to cast a ballot by mail as a matter of right rather than necessity. In addition, eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington — conduct elections primarily by mail, automatically providing every voter with a mail-in ballot. In several of these states, in-person voting is available but on a more limited basis.

The question of whether or not widespread mail-in ballot access would help or hurt Republicans is a matter up for debate. In the 2024 election, 35% of eligible voters, roughly 90 million Americans, did not vote. Among them, 44% preferred Trump, while 40% preferred Harris. To put that into perspective, if every single nonvoter voted in the 2024 election, each candidate would have likely received over 100 million votes, a number completely unthinkable in U.S. elections.

So we have to ask ourselves an important question: Why isn’t one-third of America voting? According to studies, around 20% say that they have no interest in voting, 18% are too busy, 15% don’t like the candidates, 12% were out of town, 9% had an illness or disability, around 4% forgot to vote, 3% had ballot issues, around 2% faced an inconvenient polling place and 2% had transportation problems. Using those figures, approximately 50% of nonvoters, or 45 million Americans, might have been able to vote if they had access to mail-in voting.

While there aren’t any figures on which of these voters lean right or left, the fact is that there is substantial room for Republicans or Democrats to significantly widen their lead by expanding mail-in voting or by targeting their voters with mail-in voting.

Studies also show that states that switched to universal mail-in voting found that it slightly increased overall turnout by 2%-3%, yet the change in vote share only found a slight increase in favor of Democrats. While 0.7% seems small, a 0.7% change in voter share can mean a lot in a tight race. If that number stayed consistent, it would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election, as Trump lost Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona by less than 0.7% of the vote. (Trump winning these three states would have led to a 269-269 tie in Electoral College votes.)

Voter fraud is, of course, a problem that still persists. There have been numerous criminal convictions where people have used fictitious names or filled out ballots for other people in large numbers to favor a particular candidate. Yet these cases represent a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of the total overall vote count. Since nearly all states award their electors based on the statewide popular vote, this implies that in the 2020 election, in which Trump narrowly lost states like Georgia and Arizona, roughly 11,000 to 12,000 fraudulent votes in each state would have been needed to change the outcome. Next to them, roughly 20,000 fraudulent votes would have to have been cast in Wisconsin, along with 80,000 in Pennsylvania and 155,000 in Michigan. There is simply no evidence that 280,000 fraudulent votes were cast in total in those states. And it would be practically impossible to cover up such a widespread scheme.

If Trump wants to continue his crusade against mail-in voting, he may do so at the peril of Republicans. Let’s face the facts: Democratic states will continue to permit mail-in voting — and maybe even expand it — if this executive order is found to be unconstitutional. If Republicans really want to use mail-in voting as their conduit to secure election victories, they should consider instead how they can encourage the 45 million nonvoting Republicans to vote by mail rather than discouraging nearly 80 million current Republican voters from voting through a method that might be easier for them.

Ask yourself this: Is it more plausible that those previously mentioned states — three of which were decided by just 10,000 to 20,000 votes — were tipped by last-minute, unforeseeable obligations or medical issues that kept many voters from the polls, or that it was the result of a nefarious, widespread scheme by a number of bad actors who managed to fraudulently cast hundreds of thousands of votes and somehow get away with it?

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