Trump's mail-in meltdown

0:01The president of the United States is throwing a two-day midterm pep rally in Dallas, Texas this week. Let's see what he had to say last night. If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, because of our economic, tremendous economic success, like in history, we've never had anything like what's happening. But because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for$5 ,000. Okay, so let's add buying votes to the list of midterm shenanigans. We just had dueling rulings in Missouri.

0:47The rhyme makes it sound fun, but the Supreme Court and the lower court keep butting heads over gerrymandered maps there. And don't even get us started on what's going on with mail-in voting on Today Explained from Vox.

1:23Stop reacting and start adapting. Visit kpmg.com slash US slash adaptability to explore the Adaptability Index and Pulse surveys today. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Getting better at something is hard, whether it's running, gardening, playing an instrument, or anything else worth doing. You need to commit to the process. It takes practice, patience, a willingness to be vulnerable. But it's also really rewarding once you get there. But anyway, BetterHelp is saying that better is a feeling defined by you. And for BetterHelp, it's a BetterHelp therapist who really gets you. It's a focus on global emotional well-being with thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries.

2:10It's progress. Sign up and get 10 % off at betterhelp.com slash explained. That's betterhelp.com slash explained. Your elections are crooked and you're crooked and Mr. Press is crooked and so is ABC and CBS. Today Explained. But Mr. President. Your one-sided crooked network. Sorry, let's call it quits because I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time. I'm Patrick Marley. I'm a reporter with The Washington Post. I cover elections and voting. Let me ask you this first and foremost. Is there now or has there ever been a significant issue with fraud in our mail-in voting specifically? I mean, voter fraud exists.

2:52It does happen. It does not happen in a large scale. It doesn't happen at a level that can swing certainly presidential elections. There are cases of fraud throughout the years in individual races where it has been significant, but it's not happening anywhere at the scale that Donald Trump would have you believe. Right, because if you were a close follower of the president of the United States, you would think that mail-in voting fraud is up there with immigration and the fact that D.C. doesn't have an arch in terms of importance. What has he been up to in terms of futzing with our election systems, especially as they pertain to mail-in voting.

3:41Well, as you know, Donald Trump has had a lot of concerns and thoughts about elections since even before he became president. Remember, we're competing in a rigged election. This is a rigged election, folks, OK? And I'm afraid the election is going to be rigged. I have to be honest. The election is rigged. It's rigged like you've never seen before. And mail voting in particular has been a fixation of his. He has called for its outright elimination in some cases. End mail-in voting. It's a fraud. Mail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots.

4:20Most recently, in March, he signed an executive order that would change how mail voting is conducted and put up a lot of logistical hurdles, I guess you could say, that would make states in the post office do some new processes that would determine who would get a mail ballot. And there's a significant risk that a number of people who would qualify for mail ballots would not be able to get them.

4:48Tell us the specifics. Who gets them, who doesn't? So what they want is for every state to upload onto a web portal to the post office a list of all voters in a state who are eligible to receive ballots. Then when the states would take in their actual physical ballots to a mail facility to be mailed, they would scan barcodes on the outside of these envelopes and compare that to the list of voters who had been provided by the state to the post office. and if they found even one mismatch, according to a whistleblower who has submitted a report to Congress, if they found even one mismatch in a batch of ballots, they would hold back the entire batch of ballots and send it back to the state or the county to rectify.

5:34And so you could theoretically have a situation where you've got one ballot where an address has changed or there's been a name change that doesn't match what the post office has most recently in a batch that It also has 9 ,999 eligible voters who don't have any issues with their addresses or their names. And the entire batch would be blocked. Okay. And you mentioned a whistleblower. Why is there a whistleblower? Is this not all happening, I don't know, out in the open? Well, first of all, everything is on hold right now because of courts. So what Trump has tried to do has been halted by the courts.

6:09It's on a rocket ship to the Supreme Court, probably. and we'll get an additional ruling between now and the election probably very soon. So everything's on hold. In the midst of the litigation, some unnamed person who is a federal official aware of what the post office is doing submitted a whistleblower report to Congress. And that document is public, although we don't know who the person is. They say that there has not been adequate testing of this online portal that I was talking about, that things have been very rushed, and that they see a lot of technical flaws that could result, as they put it, in catastrophic failure.

6:45Okay, so this unknown whistleblower says that this attempt to make our elections more legitimate and safer could actually result in, sorry, catastrophic failure? Catastrophic failure of this online portal to which states are supposed to upload their lists of voters. So in other words, a complete breakdown, potentially, because they believe it hasn't been tested fully. It has not been made available to the states as of this time that there would be this giant hiccup, backlog, inability for states to get their voter rolls in or for, you know, somewhere along the line for the post office to not be able to access the list when it needs to or compare it to the ballots that it has and that that would gum up the works.

7:30What's going on with the Supreme Court? You said that this is sort of being held up right now, but sort of sounds like it's also going ahead right now. So help us understand that. Well, the president signed it and then there were a bunch of lawsuits almost right away. A group of Democrats sued. States led by Democratic officials sued. Voting rights groups sued. These are in different courts. They get through in a federal district court in Massachusetts. And Judge Indira Talwani finds that this is going to be a problem and blocks key provisions of the executive order that would prevent the post office from doing this.

8:11That gets appealed and it makes it in August to the Supreme Court. The question before the Supreme Court at that moment is not, is this system okay? Can they do this? The question is, was the judge right to block it at this stage? And the Supreme Court said, yeah, this decision was rendered too early. The states don't quite yet have the right to sue. And so allowed the administration to move forward implementing the executive order. Then things just went right back to the lower court. The administration took further steps to advance it. It became clear that it was at a point where the states would have standing to sue.

8:50And she blocked it again, essentially on similar grounds that this was going to be very disruptive and that it was not ready to go for the midterms. And now Trump is trying to get it back to the Supreme Court for them to put it in place for the midterms.

9:09It sounds very messy. That's messy. Sure. Welcome to election litigation. I mean, this is the new world of elections. It's just, you know, a lot of changes, a lot of challenges, a lot of stuff going to the courts at the last minute, and then holding an election and then having a bunch more legal fights. Like, that's the new reality of democracy in America. So if ballots are already out in some states and the Supreme Court makes a decision, let's say, I don't know, later today, that recalls them, how much does that affect what the voter experience in Missouri or Kansas or wherever? Yeah. So first of all, I don't think you could say that any ballots would be recalled.

9:53North Carolina is the first state that needs to mail ballots in the country. It had to do it last week because it has a state law that says mail ballots must go out 60 days before an election to any voters who requested it. So 40 or 50 ,000 people had requested ballots, tens of thousands of ballots got put in the mail. I know at least a few jurisdictions of Wisconsin have started mailing ballots to voters. So there are ballots out there. Now, let's say tomorrow or today, the Supreme Court said that Trump could implement this plan. So it could be that the court would say those ballots are fine and any future ballots have to fall under these new rules.

10:33Honestly, we would probably have more litigation over what would happen to those particular ballots. But I think that's maybe less of a concern than the tens of millions of other ballots that would clearly fall under this new rule and that the states would have to comply to get those out the door. Okay. And is there anything further to say about the president? I mean, it seems sometimes, you know, he catches a lot of heat for being more concerned with his ballroom than the issues voters care about, be it inflation or the price of gas or, you know, the amount of debt this country has. But on the other hand, he seems very concerned, maybe not with those issues, but with the integrity of our elections themselves.

11:15What is that about?

11:21I don't know. It's a long time fixation of his. It is something he's been very concerned about and real about. I think anybody who even glancingly follows politics knows that he has many concerns about elections and the way they're run and wants to see big changes. He himself uses mail voting. He recently voted in Florida's primary by mail ballot. But he wants to see serious restrictions on that. You know, a challenge for him is that the Constitution says states run elections. And it does give Congress the power to step in and regulate them, but it doesn't have any explicit authority for the president.

11:58So he's trying to do a lot of things that many legal scholars say he just doesn't have the authority to do.

12:14Mail-in voting conspiracies feel like the president's new big lie. Remember the one about how he won the 2020 election? But it turns out the big lie is alive and well in 2026. And that's next up on Today Explained.

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16:13You've got mail. Fraud. Today's explain is the show. Andrew Kaczynski is the guest. He's a senior reporter at CNN and he recently reported on the 2020 election deniers running for big, important roles in 2026. The interesting thing is that we talked about in this article that we did on five, the five most key swing states, governor's races. We're talking Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and Georgia. These are all states that Trump won 2016, Biden wins 2020, then Trump wins 2024. And what we had talked about was how in each of these of the five most important states, there are candidates running for governor who in four of the cases just outright denied the results of the 2020 election.

17:07minute. You'd have 61 ,000 votes that by timestamp come into Donald Trump. And then the next thing you know, almost just within a minute or so, the exact same number goes to Biden and then a subtraction goes to Donald Trump. Who won the election in Arizona? Donald Trump? We don't know. We know that he won. How are these candidates in these five races faring? Does it look good for any of them? Well, with the caveat that we've seen some pretty big polling misses already in two of these states, most of these candidates are behind in the polls. But, you know, there's always the caveat that these are states that Trump won in 2024 and 2016.

17:53So they're going to be their true battlegrounds. So, you know, anything could really happen in them. And how much is their dispute lie about the 2020 election coming up in their races? Not a ton, but what we did see was when we did this story pointing out that in, you know, at least in four of the key states, these are candidates that outright denied the election. When we reached out to three of them, they immediately gave us statements saying they would accept whoever won in their states in 2028. They would certify the winner. They said that Biden did win in 2020. So we've seen, you know, election denial is kind of a liability, it would seem, for these candidates, especially because, just to give you the example of Michigan where John James has been down by like seven or eight or five or six in some of the polls.

18:51You know, he was somebody who originally he got elected in a swing seat in 2022 as a member of Congress after he had two failed Senate runs. And he was like, yeah, of course, Biden won in 2020. And then when he ran this time, he actually went the other direction when he maybe was trying to get Trump's endorsement. There's a rally where he said that Trump won Michigan three times, which obviously did not happen. Well, again, thank you, Mr. President, for coming back to Michigan where you've won three times. So you have a situation where, you know, it is probably a liability, but a couple of these candidates are running from him.

19:29But at least two of them, Andy Biggs and John James, didn't say that Biden won in 2020, didn't say they'd certify the winner and didn't really give us a comment at all on that. But three of them said they would certify the winner. Do you see this as part of like a broader effort on the part of this administration or the Republican Party more broadly to sort of legitimize the big lie into our institutions, into even election administration, which there's been lots of reporting about? Or is it just a coincidence? Are there so many election deniers now that like inevitably some of them are going to be running for office in key battleground states?

20:07Yeah, I think it's more the latter, which is just that we had all these people who like 20, I mean, I'll give you the example of Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin. It's just like election denial in 2020 was so through the Republican Party. You looked at that amicus brief in the Texas lawsuit that tried to throw out the results in those five key swing states before the election. You had like 100 members of Congress, I think, that like signed on to that, including Andy Biggs and Tom Tiffany, who are both running in this cycle. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, claiming they made unconstitutional changes to their laws before the 2020 election.

20:52When you diluted and changed wrongfully your laws on how to vote instead of going through the legislative process, etc., what you did is you actually watered down the votes of states that were following their laws to the letter. It was just so thoroughly embedded in the Republican Party in 2020, and Trump had such a stranglehold over the party. But in 2022, many of those big election denier proponents that he backed, like they did lose. So I do think it's more of a liability for these candidates. But, you know, it's also part of why Trump supports a lot of them, you know? So what you're saying is there's a bunch of proponents of the big lie, people who have propelled the big lie narrative running for office in key states.

21:44They're not crushing it, but they're contenders. And the big lie isn't a part of their focus. But obviously what that suggests is that dormant in all of these key elections is the possibility that when these candidates lose, they themselves will deny the results of the election. Does that feel like something that is concerning voters at this point or are people just mad about their gas prices? People are mad about the gas prices. like uh trump i mean dude like trump campaigned on what were his big things like no new wars and lower prices right and what do we have but also trans trans everything is trans everything's transgender everybody transgender that's all you hear about trans no wars lower prices and we have a war that like dude like he was the no war candidate like he was running in 2016 against like even though like dude i've covered this so much but like he said he opposed iraq he didn't oppose iraq um he was on record supporting it but like he lied and said that he did and that was a big part of his appeal was like we don't want dumb american foreign interventions and like it's almost like we have extremely high prices on everything that he said we'd bring down.

23:05They've gone up and we have a war. So like he's at 20 % with independence. And those are the people who are going to decide the election. And being so tied in with Trump is like not a great thing in some of these states, especially in Michigan with like Mike Rogers, like, you know, they're talking about his, you know, Abdul El-Sayed's ties to Hassan Piker, but like, it's a much bigger liability that Mike Rogers is so tied in with Trump, you know, like he's the president. We've got a lot of candidates who deny the results of the 2020 election running for office in 2026. We've got people who deny the results of the 2020 election administering our elections in various key battleground states.

23:48We've got the Supreme Court fighting with lower courts about what maps they can use. We've got the president trying to redraw the rules around mail-in voting. There's probably things I haven't even mentioned. And what do you think this all amounts to for President Trump? Is this about the midterms? Is this about 2028? Is this just a pastime of his? It's a pastime. Like that's it all runs through the fact that he thinks or is lying that he won in 2020, you know, and this is all just a part of it. It's all part of the same, you know, delusions about mail-in voting or fraud or this or that. And it's like, you know, like Arizona, like I'll give you, there's an example of like Andy Biggs, who's running for governor in Arizona.

24:40He was a huge, huge stop the steal proponent. And he was like, you know, the governor could have like decertified the results if they wanted to. That couldn't obviously happen. And it's like, that's what Trump likes. He likes candidates who like John, John James, who said at a rally with Trump, he won Michigan three times. Like Trump just likes that. Trump likes the candidates who lie and say that he won in 2020. it's just like a pastime of his trying to find this fraud that doesn't like obviously it exists like obviously people do commit voter fraud on very low like levels but like never has it been shown that it ever is on a large scale or enough to like change the election.

25:26That being said though it's a pastime that could have real tangible consequences in these 2026 midterms and potentially even in the 2028 presidential election. Do we have any sense of whether the frustration people have with Donald Trump and his real policies can overcome all of the shenanigans we're seeing around our elections so far this midterm season? Yes. I think if we have really close races in House, Senate, governor, that's where I think some of this stuff could come into play with people denying the election, saying they won, um trying to throw out ballots or this or that you know what i mean like election fights like that's where things could get into a shit show but i do think everyone was worried trump would deny the 2024 election right if he lost but then he won so we didn't talk about it if like democrats like do so well that we're actually seeing like their poll that showed sherrod brown up eight points in Ohio.

26:32Like, if that poll, like, that doesn't need to be accurate. But if he's up by, like, four points in Ohio, like, then it's gonna be a really bad year for Republicans. And I don't think we'll be talking about this if they win by, like, pretty, like, good-sized margins or it's as big of a wave as we say. And obviously, Trump can say whatever he says, but, like, the results will be the results if it's like that.

27:01Andrew Kay, CNN. Before him, it was Patrick Marley from WAPO. I'm Sean Ramos from Vox. Today Explained was made by me and Hadi Mawagdi and Dustin DeSoto and Miranda Kennedy and Gabriel Donatov and Arianna Spuru and David Tadishore. More tomorrow.