President Donald Trump is ramping up his crusade against states' efforts to make voting by mail more accessible, but nearly two dozen members of Trump's family, administration, and campaign officials in his orbit have voted or tried to vote with mail ballots in the past decade.
On Monday, Insider's Tom LoBianco reported that Vice President Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen Pence are still registered to vote at the Indiana Governor's mansion, where they haven't lived in nearly four years, and just recently voted absentee in Indiana's presidential primary election this spring. (While unusual, a legal expert told Insider that the Pences continuing to vote in Indiana is not illegal or fraudulent).
Tom Bonier, a veteran Democratic strategist and political data analyst who frequently works with state-level voter files and databases of voter information, told Insider that he identified several officials who have cast mail-in ballots over the past decade, some of which he included in a lengthy April Twitter thread.
As of now, six states are set to send every voter a mail-in ballot for November's election, 28 states will allow voters to request a mail-in ballot without an excuse before the pandemic, and 12 states have relaxed their laws in response to COVID-19 to allow anyone to request a ballot for upcoming primary or general elections. Just four states are still set to require some or all voters to present an excuse to request an absentee ballot.
In response to critical coverage of Trump's remarks on absentee and vote by mail, some administration and campaign advisors have tried to distinguish between "legitimate absentee voting" for people away from their homes, which they see as a valid excuse, and a system of states pre-emptively sending a ballot to everyone, which they claim to see as increasing the chances of fraud.
Trump, however, often does not distinguish between the two in his remarks and, in sweeping terms, has demonized the entire concept of mail-in ballots, including threatening to cut federal funding to Michigan over the state's top election official Jocelyn Benson moving to send every registered voter an absentee ballot application.
In recent months, Trump has falsely claimed that an expansion of absentee and mail-in voting will lead to fraud and corruption (rates of absentee ballot fraud are very low), that expanding mail-in voting hurts Republicans (it confers no partisan advantage to either side), and raised baseless conspiracy theories that children in California will go around stealing ballots out of mailboxes and forging them, that postal workers will steal ballots, and that foreign countries will mail counterfeit ballots to voters and election offices.
Still, the sheer number of Trump advisors and campaign officials who have taken availed themselves of absentee and mail-in voting across several states over the past decade undercuts Trump's own argument that mail-in ballots are fundamentally vulnerable to fraud and corruption, and has led critics to accuse Trump of hypocrisy.
Here are the Trump family members, administration and campaign officials, and other staffers in Trump's orbit who have been reported to have recently voted absentee or mail: