Trump’s proposal to end mail-in voting could disrupt Missouri elections, county clerk says
Erika McGuire
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
President Donald Trump announced Monday he wants to change the shape of elections in the United States and eliminate mail-in voting and voting machines.
In a post on Truth Social the president said he would “lead a movement” to get rid of mail-in ballots, and get rid of voting machines. Trump made claims in his post about the accuracy of mail-in ballots and accused the process of being suspect to voter fraud, which are part of the dialogue and conspiracies he has commonly reiterated since his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.
Trump wrote he will sign an executive order ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, however that could face many legal challenges.
University of Missouri Political Science Professor Charles Zug said eliminating mail-in voting would be a long and complicated process, with only two possible options.
“To make mail-in voting illegal, that could be legal through various procedures so the Congress could pass a law making it illegal, that’s perfectly within the Constitution,” Zug said. “Or all the state legislatures could pass laws,”
However, Zug said, because elections are run by state officials and not federal officials, there is no procedure for the president to eliminate mail-in voting and voting machines.
“The only way to try to get states to do stuff like this would be to order, like the Department of Justice, to prosecute states that don’t do it, ” Zug said, “That would immediately get opposed in courts because the president doesn’t have the authority to do that,”
Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon said the president’s idea to end mail-in voting would have a negative outcome for the county. She said military members overseas and those who have a disability or illness would feel the effects the most.
“Those individuals would have a very tough time exercising their right to vote, so it would have a real impact on groups of voters disproportionately,” Lennon said. “Even though generally Missouri is not a wide open vote by mail state, the voting equipment would be incredibly disruptive to our elections,”
According to Lennon, in the November 2024 election, about 3,900 of the 30,000 absentees ballots cast were done so by mail. That included including about 360 military and overseas voters. The total turnout of the election was 68%.
In the November 2022 election, the first election with no-excuse in-person absentee voting was available, Lennon said of the 8,600 absentee votes that were cast, more than1,900 absentee voters voted by mail, including about 115 military and overseas voters. The total turnout for the election was 49%.
In the November 2024 election, Callaway County had 885 mail-in votes, according to Callaway County Clerk Rhonda Miller. For the November 2022 election Callaway County received 1,474 mail-in ballots, according to Miller.
Lennon said the elimination of both voting tools would be detrimental to the overall election process.
“I don’t know how we would get results on the same day. I don’t know how we would get results within the two-week certification period if we had to do hand counting,” Lennon said.
Lennon added, there are federal and state ballot questions and election workers are not just counting one ballot at a time, it overall comes down to counting the numbers of races.
“Not only is the counting itself something that is better to be streamlined through tabulators and then checked after, but the physical manpower that it would take to have people count all of those ballots, and be alert enough and awake enough and not exhausted at the end of working at a polling place in a 17-hour day would be extremely challenging,” Lennon said.
According to Lennon, Boone County uses 100 voting machines supplied by Election Systems and Software. She said each tabulator is tested before election day by a bipartisan team, which runs a stack of test ballots to confirm the results match exactly what is expected. This process ensures the machines count votes the way voters intended and that ballots are recorded accurately.
“Then we have Election Day, where we make sure that the bipartisan teams of election judges are making sure there’s no interference, that they are logging any sort of anomalies,” Lennon said. “If anything were to happen they bring those results back to our office on election night but even then, that is not the end of when we are verifying how the results are calculated.,”
Those results are called “unofficial results” and those results go through the certification process.
“We take a randomly drawn 5% of our precincts, and we have a bipartisan team that comes in and hand counts those ballots from those 5% precincts. Then they check those directly against what the tabulator said on Election Night,” Lennon said. “And if those don’t match then we would look at to why that didn’t match.”
Lennon said during her seven years of being the Boone County Clerk, those results have always matched.
When a voter requests an absentee ballot either in-person or by mail, Lennon says, the application is tied to that voter’s record. When a mail-in ballot goes out to a voter and the voter casts it, it is tracked.
“When we receive it, it is tied back to the voters record. It is batched and secured in a locked ballot box in our locked vault until they are processed and then county on election night,” Lennon said.
Mail-in and in-person absentee ballots are also processed through the tabulator.
Lennon said the tabulators are kept in a secure warehouse under lock and key. She added that bipartisan teams ensure the machines are not tampered with, using tamper-evident tape and plastic seals for extra protection.
Lennon said she has never seen evidence of fraud in Boone County elections.