With a renewed attack from the president on by-mail voting, Republicans risk losing the progress they’ve made on voter engagement and turnout, sources told NOTUS.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in late March directing the attorney general to withhold federal funds from states that count absentee or mail-in ballots received after Election Day, among other steps he says will reduce voter fraud. National Democratic organizations and nonprofits filed lawsuits against Trump, alleging that the order would limit access for voters.
It could also backfire for the president’s own party. Some Republicans warned that if the order is enforced, it could reverse the inroads they’ve made in multiple states.
“Demographically, we’re becoming a party that’s built mostly out of low-propensity voters, so we can’t be leaving turnout tools off the table,” said a source who was previously involved in Republican mail-in voting efforts in Pennsylvania and requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter in their current role.
Registered Republicans made up the bulk of mail-in and early voting in the 2024 election in Idaho, Wyoming, Indiana, Nebraska and other red strongholds across the country, according to data from NBC News. Mail-in voting also helped the Republican Party in battleground states like Pennsylvania, where the share of absentee ballots cast for Trump grew approximately 10 percentage points from 2020 to 2024.
Historically, Republicans have also relied more heavily on mail-in ballots in several southern and rural states. In 1988 in Florida, for example, GOP outreach encouraging Republicans to vote by mail delivered a narrow, last-minute win for the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, sparking a yearslong effort by Republicans in the state to take advantage of mail-in ballots.
“We have vote-by-mail in Utah because of the Republican Party,” said Ricky Hatch, the county clerk for Weber County, Utah. He said the party pushed for people to sign up for mail-in voting about 13 years ago. “That helped the party become more successful in the elections.”
Utah automatically mails ballots to all registered voters and offers a grace period to count ballots received after Election Day. But both those measures will soon change after the Republican governor signed a law last month limiting mail-in voting windows, which coincided with the Trump executive order.
Trump’s order has raised questions about what the future of mail-in voting could look like in multiple states where state-level rulings are contrary to the president’s directives. In Pennsylvania, for example, a federal judge ruled last week that election officials must count mail-in ballots even if the envelope does not contain an accurate date or any date at all.
Trump and his allies have held views across the spectrum when it comes to mail-in voting. Trump said as recently as January 2024 that mail-in ballots lead to crooked elections. Ahead of the 2024 election, Republicans were seemingly pushing opposite views simultaneously, taking to the courts to make it harder for voters to cast valid mail-in ballots while also encouraging voters to request mail-in ballots to keep Democratic advantages at bay.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Some party members have gotten on board with mail-in voting in recent years and months. In 2022, Ronna McDaniel, then the chair of the Republican National Committee, touted the benefits of mail-in voting. And Scott Presler, a conservative influencer who’s running voter registration campaigns in several battlegrounds and could-be swing states this year, has made mail-in ballots a key facet of his attempts to boost Republican success.
“We have a very good success rate and very high accuracy rate in how we run our program here,” said Alan Hays, the elections supervisor in Lake County, Florida, a majority Republican county. Republicans led Democrats in the share of mail-in and early ballots cast in Florida during the 2024 election, and voters there can request an absentee ballot for any reason.
For several people in the party, there’s tension about where they should stand as this all unfolds.
Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Republican from Nebraska, told NOTUS, “We ought to allow states to manage their own elections,” even as he praised Trump’s executive order for adding stricter rules to the mail-in voting process.
Eleven rural counties in Nebraska — all of them Republican strongholds — started automatically mailing voters ballots in 2020, which led to higher-than-average turnout increases.
But asked if he’s concerned about how the order could impact turnout, Ricketts told NOTUS, “I’m not really worried about that.”
And Cliff Maloney, who founded PA Chase, a GOP organization that aims to improve Republican mail-in voting numbers in Pennsylvania, said he appreciates the executive order for its transparency and accountability, but that Republicans in places like Pennsylvania can’t afford opposition to mail-in voting on a national level.
“Folks like us understand we can’t afford to ignore the battlefield we’ve been given,” Maloney wrote in an email to NOTUS. “What concerns me is when that skepticism becomes inaction. Telling voters not to trust the system without giving them a plan to beat it is a losing strategy.”
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Shifra Dayak is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.