Trump voted by mail in Florida special election despite his rhetoric opposing it
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport on March 23, 2026 in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Public records show that President Donald Trump voted by mail in the special election occurring Tuesday for the statehouse district that includes his Mar-a-Lago estate in spite of his longstanding rhetoric against voting by mail and his efforts to push through the SAVE America Act, which includes restrictions on mail-in voting.
According to public records available on the Palm Beach County elections website, Trump voted by mail ballot in the special election for Florida’s 87th House district.
Trump has spoken critically about voting by mail for years. As recently as Monday, during remarks in Memphis, Tennessee, the president said that “mail-in voting means mail-in cheating — I call it mail-in cheating — and we got to do something about it all.”
A White House spokesperson, in response to a request for comment, said that Trump has supported “commonsense exceptions” to allow Americans to use mail-in ballots, including for “illness, disability, military, or travel,” but that he opposes universal voting by mail due to it being “highly susceptible to fraud.”
An analysis from the Brookings Institution from November 2025 found that voter fraud is rare in voting by mail.
“As everyone knows, the President is a resident of Palm Beach and participates in Florida elections, but he obviously primarily lives at the White House in Washington, D.C.,” spokesperson Olivia Wales wrote in a statement.
Trump frequently visits his Mar-a-Lago estate and was there as recently as Monday morning.
The SAVE America Act, promoted by Trump, would place some new requirements and restrictions on voting by mail.
Florida’s 87th House district special election was scheduled after Mike Caruso, who previously represented the district, was appointed to a county role. Democrats have been eyeing the district as one they could potentially flip, with an eye toward the irony of flipping the president’s home district. Trump and Republicans, meanwhile, have been promoting Republican candidate Jon Maples in an effort to keep the seat in GOP hands.
This is not the first time Trump has voted by mail while president. He voted by mail in the 2020 Florida presidential primary — after he switched his formal place of residence from New York to Florida in September 2019.
Other presidents have voted in elections in their home states while in office. Then-President Joe Biden, for instance, flew to Delaware to vote in the 2022 primaries.
ABC News’ Michelle Stoddart contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday overturned the state’s redistricting ballot measure, delivering a major setback to Democrats who hoped the new map would allow them to flip up to four congressional seats.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
The Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., March 18, 2026. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court appears poised to allow President Trump to turn away asylum seekers who approach ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border, a decision which would reverse a lower court ruling that the policy likely violates federal law and international treaties.
A majority of the court’s conservative justices signaled during oral arguments in the case Tuesday that the administration should have broad leeway over border control and that asylum seekers who have not yet stepped foot on U.S. soil probably do not have a legal right to file a claim seeking protection.
“Do you think someone who comes to the front door of a house and knocks at the door has arrived ‘in’ the house?” Justice Samuel Alito asked. “The person may have arrived ‘at’ the house.”
Immigrant advocates insist the Immigration and Nationality Act, which says a noncitizen who “arrives in the U.S. … at a designated port of arrival” must be allowed to apply for asylum, includes those who have “reached the threshold” of America.
“If an immigration officer determines that an alien who is arriving in the United States has expressed a fear of future persecution, then the immigration officer shall refer them for a credible fear interview,” argued Kelsi Corkran, an attorney supporting asylum seekers.
From the start of his second term, Trump has effectively blocked the entry of all noncitizens at the southern border, including those seeking to apply for refuge from credible fears of violence and persecution.
“You can’t ‘arrive in’ the U.S. while you’re still standing in Mexico,” argued Assistant Solicitor General Vivek Suri. “It is entirely lawful for the executive branch to prevent aliens from reaching U.S. soil and claiming those protections.”
The dispute largely turns on competing interpretations of what it means to “arrive in” the country.
“How close do you have to be to the border?” asked Justice Amy Coney Barrett. “If it’s not crossing the physical border, what is the magic thing or the dispositive thing that we’re looking for where we say, ah, now that person we can say arrives in the United States?”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that regardless of where the line is drawn, the law stipulates that the government can prevent people from filing an asylum claim if it wants to. “The government’s presumably going to stop you on the other side of that line and prevent you from getting to wherever the line is. Right?” he asked.
The court’s three liberal justices were critical of the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law.
“Imagine a polite asylum seeker who wants to do everything by the book,” posited Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “He approaches the border but does not cross, precisely because the law says you are not supposed to enter the U.S. without authority. Why on earth would Congress have intended or meant for his asylum request to be discarded, not taken seriously, not entertained, but someone who manages to enter the U.S. unlawfully…and requests asylum gets their application entertained? “
“That doesn’t seem to me to make any sense,” Jackson added.
At the heart of the case is the so-called “turn back” policy from Trump’s first term that kept asylum seekers waiting in Mexico as a method of “metering” access at border crossings that faced overcrowding. Border officials contend it was a temporary policy, imposed only when conditions required.
While the administration voluntarily discontinued the practice in 2021 after a lower court deemed it unlawful, the government now wants the justices to approve the ability to reinstate the policy if necessary. Trump has invoked alternate legal authorities to support his current border crackdown.
Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, an immigrant rights group representing several asylum-seeker plaintiffs, said a ruling for the administration could have a major impact, even if not immediate.
“We have no doubt the administration is seeking a decision that will give them even more leeway to restrict the rights of people seeking asylum,” Crow said.
Tens of thousands of asylum seekers who arrived at the U.S. southern border during Trump’s first term were forced to remain in Mexico for weeks or months in sometimes harrowing conditions in hopes they might have a chance to be interviewed about their fears of persecution.
Nicole Ramos, border rights project director at Al Otro Lado, an immigrant rights group and plaintiff in the case, says Congress had a more nuanced view when it drafted the law following the U.S. failure to accept Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
“The right to seek asylum at the border is a legal right and a moral right,” Ramos said. “The stakes are not theoretical. They are measured in lives.”
One of those lives was Benito, a Mexican asylum seeker who declined to give his last name to protect his identity and spoke through a translator at an event hosted by Al Otro Lado.
“I was partially tortured, had a lot of lesions, and emotional harm, and traumas and I’m still healing from that,” he said of the violence he was trying to escape. “I knew I could apply for asylum in that moment, on the side of Mexico, and so I did everything correctly. I came close; I told the [U.S.] immigration agents that I needed to apply for asylum because I was scared and thought I would be killed.
“I had scars on my body, on my face, and my head,” he said, “but they said to me that they couldn’t help me, couldn’t accept me.”
The court is expected to issue a decision on the Trump administration’s bid to resurrect the “metering” and “turn back” policy by the end of June.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media after departing Air Force One at Miami International Airport on March 27, 2026, in Miami, Florida. President Trump is traveling to speak at a summit in Miami Beach and then onto Palm Beach for the weekend. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — In a wide-ranging telephone conversation with ABC News, President Donald Trump on Tuesday claimed “we have complete regime change now” in Iran and said his administration is carrying out negotiations now with Iranian leaders who are “more moderate” and “much more reasonable.”
While the administration has been relatively silent on the people involved on the Iranian side of the negotiations, Trump said his administration is speaking to the country’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
Ghalibaf has been taunting the president on social media, but Trump said the new leadership is better than what Iran had before.
“Now we have a different group of people, and they are in control, but they’re much more moderate and, I think, much more reasonable,” he said.
Ghalibaf is known as a hardliner closely tied to the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
On Sunday, he posted a statement on X chiding Trump over his messaging during the conflict, insinuating that the president was trying to manipulate the market.
“Heads-up: Pre-market so-called ‘news’ or ‘Truth’ is often just a setup for profit-taking. Basically, it’s a reverse indicator,” he said. “Do the opposite: If they pump it, short it. If they dump it, go long. See something tomorrow? You know the drill.”
Trump brushed off Ghalibaf’s comments.
“I think if you notice, he’s toned it down a lot. He’s much better,” he said.
Trump, however, also offered what appeared to be a threat pointed directly at Ghalibaf.
“We know where he lives. Let’s put it that way,” he said.
Trump suggested that the soaring stock market before the war made it “a good time to do it.”
“The oil prices are going to go down. The stock market is going to go up. We had 50,000 [Dow Jones Industrial average] and we had 7,000 on the S&P. And I said, well, ‘I guess this is a good time to do it.'”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped by over 3,000 points and the S&P has dropped by nearly 500 points since the war began.
Global oil prices hovered around $117 a barrel on Tuesday, which amounted to a more than 50% price leap from pre-war levels.
Trump said that he’s negotiating on seizing Iran’s oil but didn’t provide further details.
The president was also coy about any military planning for Cuba, which he has also threatened over the last couple of weeks.
“I assume, in an orderly fashion, you’ve got to kind of finish up whatever you do in Iran first,” he said.
