Attacks on Mail Voting are Attacks on the Working Class

Donald Trump loathes mail-in voting — except, of course, when he uses this method to cast his own ballot, as he did in a recent Florida special election.

Frustrated by Congressional inaction, Trump issued an executive order last week to restrict what he likes to call “mail-in cheating.” Actual proven cases of mail voting fraud? Those amount to a whopping 0.000043 percent of total mail ballots, according to Brookings experts. 

Trump’s real fear: that vote by mail gives Democrats an edge. In reality, broad, cross-partisan swaths of our electorate benefit from access to this convenient means of exercising our most basic democratic right. 

Low-income Americans of all political stripes have a particularly large stake in defending our existing patchwork of mail voting systems – and in efforts to make this option universal. 

Economic hurdles to voting

Economic hurdles to election participation drop when people can fill out their ballots at their kitchen table and pop them in a mailbox.

For one thing, you don’t have to worry about ticking off your boss by asking for time off to go to the polls. Currently, only 21 states require employers to give their workers paid leave for voting, and enforcement of this benefit is weak. 

Another seven states require the right to unpaid time off to cast ballots. But for workers who are barely scraping by, the choice between voting versus making a full day’s pay can be a tough call. Low-income voters are also more likely to have trouble affording costs associated with getting to the polls, such as securing childcare and transportation. 

The lack of universal mail-in voting rights is one factor driving the huge voter participation gap between rich and poor Americans. According to Census data, 76.0 percent of voters with household income of more than $150,000 voted in the 2024 presidential election, compared to just 34.7 percent of those making between $15,000 and $20,000. In other words, the richer the American, the likelier they are to vote. 

Mail-in voting and low-income voter turnout

In parts of the country that do allow vote by mail, research indicates that lower-income Americans participate at increased rates. Colorado’s switch to an all-mail election system in 2014, for instance, boosted participation among voters in the bottom income group by 10 percentage points, compared to just a 5-point bump for the state’s richest residents. 

A Utah study produced similar findings. In counties with all-mail voting, 79.1 percent of eligible voters in households earning less than $30,000 per year participated in the 2016 general election. In counties that had not yet adopted this voting option, only 74.6 percent in this income group voted. 

Utah and Colorado are now among the eight states (plus the District of Columbia) that allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail. 

Trump’s executive order on voting

What exactly would Trump’s new executive order do? It would require the Department of Homeland Security to compile eligible voter lists for each state, based on federal data from citizenship and naturalization records, Social Security records, and other databases. It also orders the U.S. Postal Service to regulate who can and who cannot receive ballots, based on these lists.

The American Postal Workers Union immediately blasted the order for contradicting the “fundamental purpose of the U.S. Postal Service and its workforce — to provide universal service to all.”

The Postal Service “cannot be used as a tool to disenfranchise voters,” the union stated. 

Twenty-three state governments and a coalition of voting rights groups have filed lawsuits to block the order, arguing that it violates states’ constitutional authority over elections. The ACLU points out that the order “risks mass disenfranchisement of eligible voters” because the federal databases it would rely on are outdated and unreliable. 

Our election system is already tilted against working class Americans in favor of the wealthy. The rich can spend unlimited sums to buy political influence while the poor face multiple barriers to exercising even their most basic democratic right. As a result, candidate platforms too often reflect the interests of those at the top, further discouraging low-income voters from participating. 

Instead of restricting mail-in voting, we should expand access to this method of participation in every state, as part of broader electoral reforms. Making the right to vote by mail universal wouldn’t fix every problem in our lopsided political system, but it would be one important step towards a stronger democracy for all.