Right now, there’s a fight happening over whether tens of millions of Americans will keep an option they’ve relied on for decades: the ability to vote from home. In March 2026, Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to seize control of how mail voting works nationwide—directing the U.S. Postal Service to build an “approved” list of mail voters and refuse to deliver ballots to anyone not on it. A federal court has already struck down key parts of that order as unconstitutional. But the pressure campaign hasn’t stopped: the USPS has proposed new rules, Congress is debating the SAVE Act, and the president continues to call for mail voting to be curtailed or ended entirely.

So it’s worth stepping back and asking plainly: what is mail-in voting, who actually relies on it, and what would really be lost if it disappeared.

A Century and a Half in the Making

Mail voting isn’t some pandemic-era invention. It dates back to the Civil War, when states first let soldiers cast ballots from the battlefield rather than force them to choose between defending the country and having a say in how it’s run. Vermont passed the first civilian absentee-voting law in 1896 for people who were sick or away on business. Over the following century, states steadily expanded access for the elderly, people with disabilities, rural voters far from a polling place, and Americans living overseas. By the time COVID-19 hit, mail voting was already a well-worn, well-tested part of American elections in dozens of states. The pandemic just accelerated what had already been building for 125 years.

Who Actually Uses It

Older Americans vote by mail more than any other age group. Voters 65 and older cast mail ballots at a rate of roughly 37% in the 2024 election, the highest of any bracket.

People with disabilities make up roughly one-sixth of the entire U.S. electorate, and many depend on mail ballots to vote independently and privately, without needing someone else’s help at a polling place.

Military service members and their families, especially those stationed overseas, have used remote voting since the Civil War specifically because they can’t be in their home precinct on Election Day. That’s not a loophole, it’s the entire reason the practice exists.

Rural voters, who may live an hour or more from the nearest polling location, and working parents without flexible hours or reliable child care, rely on mail voting to participate without having to choose between their job and their ballot.

In 2024, nearly 30% of all voters nationwide cast a mail ballot, down from a pandemic-era high of 43% in 2020, but still tens of millions of people, spanning every state, age group, and political party. Trump himself has voted by mail in local elections.

This is not a fringe method used by a small, easily-dismissed slice of the electorate. It’s how a huge cross-section of ordinary Americans—grandparents, veterans, night-shift workers, wheelchair users, farmers—exercise a right that, on paper, everyone agrees they have.

Why Restricting It Is Voter Suppression, Not “Security”

Supporters of new restrictions frame them as protecting election integrity. But the actual evidence tells a different story. Even the Heritage Foundation, an organization that has spent years cataloguing election-fraud cases, has documented roughly 100 instances of noncitizen voting nationwide since the year 2000, out of an estimated 1.5 billion ballots cast in that span. That works out to a rate of about 0.000007%. Trump’s own 2017 commission on election integrity was disbanded after it failed to find evidence of the widespread fraud he claimed. Courts have rejected fraud-based challenges to mail voting more than sixty times.

When a policy change would burden tens of millions of legitimate voters to guard against a problem this statistically close to zero, it stops looking like a security measure and starts looking like something else: a way to shrink the pool of people who vote. Aimed, whether by design or effect, at exactly the groups most likely to be inconvenienced or turned away. That’s the textbook definition of voter suppression, not necessarily banning someone from voting outright, but piling on enough friction, paperwork, and uncertainty that eligible people don’t make it to a counted ballot.

The stakes of the current proposals make this concrete. The federal rule the Postal Service floated this summer would let the government maintain a national database of “approved” mail voters and refuse to deliver ballots to anyone not on it, even though inaccurate government records could easily catch eligible voters as “unapproved.” The SAVE Act, meanwhile, would require voters to show up in person with documents like a passport or certified birth certificate just to register, effectively ending most mail and online registration, even though married women who’ve changed their names, elderly voters without ready access to a birth certificate, and lower-income Americans without a passport are disproportionately likely to be turned away. Election officials themselves have warned that verifying these documents isn’t something most local offices are even equipped to do.

What’s Actually At Risk

Imagine a 78-year-old widow in rural Ohio who’s voted by mail every cycle for fifteen years, but no longer drives and doesn’t have a certified copy of a birth certificate from 1948. Imagine a soldier deployed overseas whose ballot arrives at a USPS sorting facility that flags him as “unapproved” because a data-matching algorithm didn’t recognize his APO address. Imagine a warehouse worker pulling a double shift on Election Day who has always mailed in her ballot the week before. None of these people are committing fraud. All of them could be locked out by rules justified in the name of stopping fraud that barely exists.

That’s why this fight matters beyond the specifics of any one bill or executive order. The right to vote is only meaningful if people can actually exercise it, and for a huge share of Americans, “actually exercising it” has meant being able to fill out a ballot at their kitchen table and put it in the mail. Take that away, or bury it under paperwork that few people can produce on demand, and you haven’t made elections more secure. You’ve just made them smaller.

GNP

Leave a Reply