President Donald Trump says wants to end the use of mail-in ballots, targeting an option that Massachusetts’ top election official describes as popular, effective and secure.
Trump, writing on his social media platform Truth Social, said Monday that he plans to “lead a movement” to eliminate vote-by-mail, including with an executive order ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin said there’s no evidence behind Trump’s repeated claims that mail-in voting enables fraud.
Galvin, a Boston Democrat in office for 30 years, said Massachusetts has already gone to court to challenge a Trump order that would block the counting of mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received later.
“Responding to his rhetoric is a waste of time,” Galvin told GBH News. “He lies all the time and he exaggerates all the time, so there’s no point to it. What you do is you go to court, you show by facts, which we have here in Massachusetts. We’ve had a number of elections — and they’re continuing through this year with municipal elections — where people are choosing to vote by mail. They’re very comfortable with it.”
No-excuse mail-in voting became an option in Massachusetts in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lawmakers and then-Gov. Charlie Baker made it a permanent feature of state law in 2022.
A proposal that could go before voters next year as a ballot question seeks to repeal the vote-by-mail portion of that 2022 elections reform law and return to a system where only absentee ballots — which are available in more limited circumstances — could be cast by mail.
Trump’s Monday social media posts also took aim at electronic voting machines. Massachusetts uses paper ballots in its elections.
More than a third of voters opted in for mail-in ballots in the November 2024 election, and 62% of the people who voted in last September state primary did so by mail, according to Galvin’s office.
Galvin said Massachusetts has “shown how people can effectively vote by mail.”
“We have protocols in place to protect voters, make sure that nobody takes advantage of them, and any evidence of any kind of impropriety, we move on quickly,” he said. “For all these reasons, it’s worked here in Massachusetts.”
