President Trump aims to eliminate mail-in voting ballots

President Donald Trump announced he’s asked lawyers to draft an executive order to eliminate mail-in voting ballots. 

The move comes after Vladimir Putin told President Trump U.S. elections were rigged because of postal ballots.

President Trump also said he will get rid of controversial voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Critics say the move would favor Republicans.

Jen Fifield, a reporter for VoteBeat, joined “Arizona Horizon” to help break down the latest developments.

“Well, I think just like the last executive order, there’s gonna be lots of challenges to this because we know what federal law says about…how voting happens,” Fifield said.

The Constitution says that the states control the time, place, and manner in how the elections occur. Congress is able to step in to make rules, but doesn’t give the President authority to make rules over this matter.

“…what we see is Republicans created it to boost turnout in the 90s, and then we saw Republicans and Democrats using it alike,” Fifield explained.

When COVID-19 first started spreading in 2020, Democrats were more likely to be using mail-in voting. Fifield emphasized how there are still numerous Republicans throughout the state that may use mail-in voting.

“There would be tremendous blowback from the rural areas that rely so much on the system to vote,” Fifield said when discussing the impact of eliminating mail-in voting. “…to get their ballots filled out at home, and not have to drive potentially an hour or more to a voting location.”

Fifield also stated how there is no proof that eliminating mail-in voting would change partisan turnout in elections.

“The entire state uses it, we would have to increase the voting locations,” Fifield explained, “…it would really be an upheaval of our current system.”

75% of the state is currently on the active early voting list, both democrats and republicans alike. If this executive order were to go into effect it would also mean that hundreds of people would be needed to count the individual ballots, which may cause future problems to occur.