President Trump cast a mail-in ballot ahead of Florida’s Tuesday special election, despite criticizing it as a source of fraud and pushing Congress to rein in the voting method.
Palm Beach County voter records show that the president’s ballot was received and counted. Early in-person voting concluded Sunday, when the president was at his South Florida estate.
“As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C. This is a non-story,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement.
The president has called the voting practice “corrupt as hell.”
He has been adamant about passing the SAVE America Act, his top legislative priority, which would require identification and proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. He has threatened not to sign any bill unless the voting bill passes the Senate, where it has been stalled and is unlikely to advance without Democratic support.
The Senate’s debate on the bill is in its second week.
Ms. Wales said his mail-in ballot does not contradict his stance against the practice. “As President Trump has said, the SAVE America Act has commonsense exceptions for Americans to use mail-in ballots for illness, disability, military, or travel — but universal mail-in voting should not be allowed because it’s highly susceptible to fraud.”
The president took his criticism of mail-in voting to a new level after losing to Joe Biden in 2020, when voters opted for mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mr. Trump claimed that his loss was “rigged” as the result of mail-in fraud.
“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all,” Mr. Trump said Monday.
In his State of the Union address this year, he called for “no more crooked mail-in ballots.”
Mr. Trump’s mail-in ballot comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority questioning whether state laws can allow the counting of late-arriving mail ballots — another target of the president.
