By Brad Brooks and Nathan Layne
Sept 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of President Donald Trump's bid to restrict mail-in ballots is unlikely to stop his attacks on voting by mail, voting-rights advocates and election officials said on Tuesday, though they are more confident now those efforts will not disrupt November's midterm elections.
“I was more scared a year ago than I am now," said Hannah Fried, executive director of All Voting Is Local, a voting-rights advocacy group, after
the Supreme Court on Monday blocked Trump's attempt to impose new restrictions on mail-in ballots that election officials feared would cause chaos in the run-up to the midterms.
But, she still expected Trump to falsely claim that bail-in ballots were vulnerable to widespread fraud, an assertion that election officials and the courts have repeatedly found lacks evidence.
In a Truth Social post on Tuesday lashing out at the Supreme Court ruling, Trump said the U.S. had a "totally CORRUPT and out of control Mail-in voting 'disaster.'"
Trump's proposed new regulation would have required states to provide voter-specific data and use Postal Service-approved mail-ballot envelopes that would be tracked using barcodes. The Postal Service could then refuse to send out ballots that did not comply with the new standards or were associated with voters who do not appear on the lists.
Mail voting is deeply embedded in how Americans cast ballots. Some 47 million people, roughly 32% of the electorate, voted by mail in the 2024 presidential election, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Nationally, mail voting skews Democratic: 37% of Democrats and 24% of Republicans voted by mail in 2024, per the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, said Trump's false claims about mail-in voting have created unnecessary challenges for local election officials. Still, he noted that this year's party primaries had all gone smoothly, despite months of attacks on voting by mail.
Asked if he feared Trump’s rhetoric could inject chaos into the electoral process, Becker said “I’m actually rather confident it won’t.”
Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, said the organization's staff and volunteers were speaking with voters in all 50 states and that, if anything, Trump's attacks on mail-in voting appeared to be motivating more people to make concrete plans to cast a ballot, whether by mail or in person.
Matt Dole, a Republican strategist in Ohio, said that despite Trump’s rhetoric on the issue, he did not anticipate widespread claims of fraud in the midterms.
Lisa Brown, clerk of Michigan's Oakland County, the chief election administrator, said voters' main worry was simply whether mail voting would remain an option, not its legitimacy.
Asked whether she was concerned Trump had laid the groundwork to claim fraud in November should his party lose control of one or both chambers of Congress, Brown noted that his previous allegations were never substantiated.
"He made claims of fraud in 2020. There was never any proof of that. That election was accurate, secure, and fair,” she said. “He can make whatever claims he wants. It doesn’t change how secure and accurate our process is.”
(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Michigan and Brad Brooks in Colorado; Additional reporting by Andy Sullivan in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin and Daniel Wallis)
