The vast majority of Arizonans who voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024 cast their ballot by mail — a system ushered into existence and expanded by Republican lawmakers in the Grand Canyon State. Trump says he wants to ban it nationwide.
Despite calls to ban it from far-right lawmakers, political candidates and their supporters, casting a ballot by mail is the most popular way to vote in Arizona — and has been for decades. In the 2024 presidential election, around 75% of voters in the state cast their ballot by mail, even after Trump urged them to head to the polls instead. The number of Trump voters in Arizona who mailed their ballots outstripped those who showed up to the polls on Election Day 2024 by more than 4.5 times, according to data from the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.
On Monday, Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social that he planned to rid the country of voting by mail and the machines that count ballots before the 2026 midterms. Later that day, he promised to issue an executive order banning no-excuse mail-in ballots, which he called “corrupt.”
“And it’s time that the Republicans get tough and stop it because the Democrats want it,” Trump said. “It’s the only way they can get elected.”…
In 1991, it was Republicans who brought no-excuse vote by mail to Arizona, in part as a way to increase turnout when voter apathy was at an all-time high. And the move worked: turnout in the 1988 presidential election in Arizona was 67%, but in jumped to 77% in 1992.
Republican Gov. Fife Symington signed the bill into law in July 1991 that allowed voters to request an early ballot without having to provide an excuse. The Republican-controlled Arizona House of Representatives approved the bill 53-0 and the Senate, which had a rare Democratic majority, voted for it 21-9, with opposition from conservative Republicans.
Then-Republican National Committeeman Mike Hellon told the Pima County Rotary Club that their vote-by-mail outreach in the 1992 presidential election was so bad that he considered it “criminal negligence,” according to a Nov. 15, 1992 article in the Arizona Daily Star.
He said he particularly resented that Democrats “cleaned our clock” because “it’s our program.”
The state’s Republican-controlled legislature continued to vote to expand no-excuse vote by mail over the next two decades, including with the creation of the active early voting list in 2007.
The push to eliminate voting by mail is new, and It is only in the past 10 years that far-right Republicans began a true campaign to rid the state of no-excuse voting by mail. And while heading to the polls to cast a ballot in person has become more popular for Republicans during the past two election cycles, the effort to nix early voting by mail has failed to garner mainstream support due to its popularity among Democrat, Republican and independent voters.
The most extreme Republicans in the Arizona legislature have tried to pass laws banning no-excuse mail voting since 2020, after Trump falsely claimed that it was rife with fraud and blamed it for his loss that year to Joe Biden. So far those efforts, including a lawsuit from Arizona’s most infamous election deniers Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, and bills to change voting laws proposed by members of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus, have failed.
Trump-backed candidates who lost their elections for statewide office in 2022 were quick to praise Trump’s demonization of voting-by-mail on Monday.
“This is the best news I’ve heard in years!” Lake, who lost her bid for governor in 2022 and was defeated in the U.S. Senate contest in 2024, posted on the social media site X, formerly Twitter. “The people demand honest elections.”
Lake spent the two years following her narrow 2022 loss to Katie Hobbs attempting to convince Arizona courts to overturn the results.
“President Trump is going to fix our broken election system and I will be there to help all the way,” U.S. Rep. Abe Hamadeh posted on X. Hamadeh lost the race for Arizona Attorney General in 2022 to Democrat Kris Mayes by fewer than 400 votes. He also attempted to overturn the results with a legal challenge.
Bryan Blehm, a Scottsdale divorce attorney who represented Lake in her court challenges, and Shelby Busch, an election conspiracy theorist who testified during them, heaped praise on Trump for his demonization of no-excuse voting by mail during a livestream on X Monday.
“We’ve been talking for years about the danger of mail-in ballots,” said Busch, the first vice chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee.
Blehm, who was suspended from practicing law for two months last year for lying to the Arizona Supreme Court on Lake’s behalf, went on to claim — without evidence — that COVID-19 was intentionally released prior to an election year to force more voting by mail. ….