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.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, center, and Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025. Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are petitioning the Government Accountability Office to investigate the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education.
In a letter first obtained by ABC News, the two senators call for nonpartisan congressional watchdog to conduct a comprehensive investigation into the department winding down its functions and transferring offices to other agencies.
“Students and families deserve better — we need a full independent investigation into the latest attempts to sabotage our schools,” Warren, D-Mass., wrote in a statement to ABC News.
Led by Warren and Sanders, I-Vt., and signed by Democrats Patty Murray of Washington and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, the letter alleges that the Education Department is illegally dismantling itself through its interagency agreement with the Department of Labor that allowed Labor to administer adult education, family literacy and career and technical education (CTE) programs previously homed in the department.
“We are deeply concerned that the administration’s decisions to implement CTE and adult education grant programs in this manner delayed crucial funding that millions of students and schools rely on,” the senators wrote.
They also said they worry that the decisions may have created “administrative inefficiencies, increased the cost of program administration, and compromised the quality of technical assistance provided to states and grantees.”
GAO is working through its process to determine the next steps in responding to the senators’ request, a spokesperson with the agency confirmed to ABC News.
Education Department spokeswoman Savannah Newhouse argued that the lawmakers’ request prioritizes bureaucrats over students.
“The Trump Administration will not sit idle while students, educators, and states suffer under our broken federal education system which undermines our economy, national security, and civic health,” Newhouse wrote in a statement to ABC News. “Also, as the Senators likely know, interagency agreements are a standard, lawful tool used across government — including by the Biden Administration’s own DOJ and Bureau of Prisons to allow the Department of Labor to administer grants under the First Step Act,” she added.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has also defended the department’s moves. She said in a statement in July that the way the education and workforce programs had been administered was “inefficient and duplicative” and they needed to be streamlined in order to best serve students and families.
The workforce development partnership between the two agencies launched last summer following President Donald Trump’s executive order entitled “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future.” In November, the Department of Education made an additional announcement that it would transfer some of its offices to other government agencies, including the departments of State, Health and Human Services, and Interior.
A senior department official said the interagency agreements (IAA) marked a “major step forward” in abolishing the agency and fulfilling McMahon’s mission of returning education to the states. The senators’ letter requested that GAO extend its probe into all of the IAAs because they allegedly attempted to transfer “statutory requirements” to other agencies. They’re requesting GAO determine whether the moves jeopardize services for students, weaken federal support to protect the rights of students, children, youth and families, and affect other indicators of program integrity and quality.
The GAO works to provide timely, fact-based, non-partisan information that can be used to improve government, per the agency’s website. The senators’ latest request is a part of Warren’s Save Our Schools campaign that she launched last year to investigate the administration’s attempts to shutter the education department.
Peoria Federation of Teachers union representative Michael Brix worries that the Education and Labor partnerships could roll back CTE progress for his students.
“When we hear of these changes, the Department of Education being dismantled, and then other departments then taking on similar roles — or the same roles — it’s very nervous not knowing what is coming ahead,” he said, adding, “It’s kind of scary.”
Editor’s note: This story’s headline has been updated to reflect that the senators want the GAO to investigate the Department of Education’s dismantling.
Becky Pepper Jackson competes in discus and shot put on the girls high school track and field team in her West Virginia hometown. (ABC News)
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday will for the first time wade into the heated national debate over whether transgender girls should be allowed to participate in girls’ and women’s sports.
The justices will hear arguments in a pair of cases from Idaho and West Virginia, where federal courts have blocked state laws that would prohibit trans girls from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity.
The outcome of the cases will determine the fate of those laws and similar measures in 27 other states. There are an estimated 122,000 transgender American teens who participate in high school sports nationwide, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School.
Lower courts have concluded separately that the bans discriminate “on the basis of sex” in violation of Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that has promoted equal opportunities for women and girls in athletics, and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
The states are asking the justices to overturn those decisions and reinstate their laws, arguing that sex and gender identity are not synonymous when it comes to women’s athletics and that allowing transgender girls to compete against cisgender girls is unfair and unsafe.
“It really comes down to one simple question,” said West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey in an interview with ABC News. “Is it legal and constitutional for states to delineate their athletic playing fields based on the immutable physical characteristics that people have that are associated with their sex that’s assigned at birth?”
Becky Pepper Jackson, a high school sophomore from Bridgeport, West Virginia, who competes in discus and shot put on the track and field team, brought the legal challenge to her state’s law in 2021. She is the only known openly trans athlete in West Virginia in any sport.
“Someone has to do it. Someone has to do this for all of us,” Becky, 15, told ABC News in an exclusive interview. “Otherwise these laws and bills are just going to stand.”
Transgender athletes make up just over 1% of the more than 8 million teenage student athletes nationwide, according to the Williams Institute.
Idaho college student Lindsay Hecox, a former track and cross-country runner who was barred from trying out for her school teams, sued over her state’s ban in 2020. Last year, she asked the court to drop her case because she no longer wished to compete in sports and didn’t want to be in the spotlight. However, Idaho fought to keep the case alive.
“Everyone has had the experience of being told, look, you can’t play. You have to sit on the bench, or you can’t make the team. And everyone knows how that feels,” said Sasha Jean Buchert, an attorney with Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ advocacy group involved with the cases.
“That’s what’s happening to transgender kids right now,” Buchert said. “And the scope of [these bans] is absolutely absurd.”
Becky, who has openly identified as a girl since third grade, said she has never undergone male puberty, thanks to puberty-blocking medication, and has no physiological advantage over her peers.
“She has testosterone from her adrenal glands just like every female out there, but that’s the only testosterone she has,” said her mother, Heather Jackson. “She’s actually not the biggest person on her team. There’s people taller than her; there’s people shorter than her. She’s just an average female teenager.”
As a young cross-country runner, Becky was consistently at the back of the pack. More recently, she earned a spot in the state championship for discus and shot put, where she placed third and eighth, respectively.
“I put in time over the summer and after practices just trying to improve my technique and get better,” she said.
Her performance at an eighth grade track meet in 2024 drew protests from other athletes who claimed she made them uncomfortable in the locker room and on the field.
“I just didn’t think it was right,” said Sabrina Shriver, 16, a former discus thrower who refused to compete against Becky at the meet and later quit the sport because of her participation in the league. “It was just, I don’t know, we all just felt uncomfortable and we’re just, we didn’t want any part of it.”
The competitive advantage boys and men have physically over girls and women has been well established in physically demanding sports by medical research and serves as a primary basis for distinctions between the sexes in athletics.
Studies have shown testosterone produced during male puberty does lead to more muscle mass, larger hearts and lungs, greater body height and longer limbs on average for boys and men, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.
Before puberty, however, “sex differences in athletic performance are minimal,” the group says research shows.
A key issue in the West Virginia case is a dispute over whether Becky, 15, possesses an advantage at all, given she has not undergone male puberty, takes estrogen supplements and does not produce high levels of testosterone.
“If [sports leagues] look at the medical records of individuals like the Olympic committee does, testing people — they test for performance enhancing medications or drugs that their athletes take — so if we can look at those levels, let’s look at her levels,” Heather Jackson said.
McCuskey says a testing regimen is just not practicable and that Becky can still compete, but on a boys team. “We have to be able to draw a line here,” he said.
“Becky is bigger and stronger and faster than the females that she’s competing against,” said the attorney general.
He has urged the Supreme Court to stay out of the debate, arguing in a court brief that West Virginia’s law “implicates ‘fierce scientific and policy debates’ that elected legislators are best able to resolve.”
The U.S. Olympic Committee, the NCAA and 29 states ban transgender girls and women from competing on teams consistent with their gender identity. The other 21 states do not have bans, including California and New York, which have laws explicitly allowing trans athletes to compete.
Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upheld a Tennessee law banning some gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors, rejecting claims that the law discriminated “on the basis of sex” and saying that states should have leeway to regulate health care in an area of scientific uncertainty.
In 2020, however, the Court concluded in a landmark decision that a Michigan transgender woman fired by her employer for being transgender was discriminated against “on the basis of sex” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Justice Neil Gorsuch explained in his majority opinion that her termination was “for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.”
Becky, Lindsay, and their attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal say the same reasoning should be applied to sports bans.
“There’s been a number of setbacks that we’ve experienced over the last few years in the courts, but I do have a sense of optimism with this case in light of the fact that the legal issues at play here are some of the same issues at play five years ago,” said Buchert, the Lambda Legal attorney.
Notwithstanding the legal arguments, 69% of Americans say transgender girls should only be allowed to play on boys teams, according to a June 2025 Gallup survey.
The Trump administration also supports the exclusion of transgender athletes from sports teams. An executive order signed in February 2025 says “it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.”
Becky says, while she understands public opinion, she is unable to “go against who I am.”
“I’ve been a girl forever,” she said, “and playing on the guys’ team is going backwards.”
Bill Clinton speaks onstage during the Clinton Global Initiative 2025 Annual Meeting at New York Hilton Midtown on September 25, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by JP Yim/Getty Images for New York Hilton Midtown)
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Bill Clinton, in his opening statement at his historic closed-door deposition before the Republican-led House Oversight Committee on Friday, denied any knowledge of the crimes committed by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, going on to say making his wife Hillary Clinton testify “was simply not right.”
In his statement as released, he stated that he will often say, “I do not recall” throughout his questioning because the events were “all a long time ago.”
“I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong,” Clinton said, according to the statement.
The former president is being grilled by the committee as part of its investigation into Epstein in Chappaqua, New York — marking a historic moment for a former president. Friday’s deposition is the first time a former president has been compelled to testify before a congressional panel.
He is facing questions under oath about his relationship with Epstein and photos that show the former president with both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s co-conspirator who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking and other crimes.
The former president’s testimony comes a day after the committee questioned former Secretary of State and first lady Hillary Clinton over the couple’s dealings with the convicted sex offender.
On Friday, Bill Clinton said he had to “get personal” and blasted the committee for forcing his wife to answer their questions.
“You made Hillary come in. She had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. Nothing. She has no memory of even meeting him. She neither traveled with him nor visited any of his properties,” he said in his statements as released. “Whether you subpoenaed 10 people or 10,000, including her was simply not right.”
In her deposition Thursday, Hillary Clinton said she did not know Epstein, could not recall ever encountering him and never visited him on his island or at his home or office.
Hillary Clinton, on Thursday, also gave a preview of how her husband, former President Bill Clinton, will handle his own deposition.
“I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of people who had contact with him before his criminal pleas in ’08 were like most people — they did not know what he was doing. And I think that that is exactly what my husband will testify to tomorrow,” she said.
Neither Bill Clinton nor Hillary Clinton has been accused of wrongdoing and both deny having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
No Epstein survivor or associate has ever made a public allegation of wrongdoing or inappropriate behavior by the former president or his wife in connection with his prior relationship with Epstein.
Bill Clinton said in his opening statement that he had “no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing.”
“No matter how many photos you show me, I have two things that at the end of the day matter more than your interpretation of those 20-year-old photos. I know what I saw, and more importantly, what I didn’t see. I know what I did, and more importantly, what I didn’t do,” he said in his statement as released.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer reiterated Friday morning that the Clintons have been called to testify to try to answer questions about Epstein.
“No one’s accusing anyone of any wrongdoing, but I think the American people have a lot of questions, and our House Oversight Committee is committed to getting answers,” Comer said Friday morning.
Bill Clinton’s association with Epstein was first noted publicly in 2002 after reporters learned of the former president’s flight that year on Epstein’s jet for a humanitarian mission to multiple African nations.
Bill Clinton told New York Magazine through a spokesperson at the time that “Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of 21st century science.”
Maxwell said in a recorded interview last year with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, that it was she, not Epstein, who had a friendship with Bill Clinton, and that she was the one who suggested and organized his trips on Epstein’s aircraft.
The Clintons were subpoenaed to appear under oath in front of the committee for a deposition in January, but failed to comply, arguing the subpoenas were without legal merit. Rather, they proposed a four-hour transcribed interview instead.
David Kendall, the Clintons’ lawyer, argued that the couple has no information relevant to the committee’s investigation of the federal government’s handling of investigations into Epstein and Maxwell, and should not be required to appear for in-person testimony.
Kendall contended the Clintons should be permitted to provide the limited information they have to the committee in writing.
Comer had long threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they failed to appear before the committee, so when they didn’t, a contempt resolution was drafted and put to a vote.
The Oversight Committee passed the contempt resolution with nine Democrats voting in favor of it, teeing it up for a full House vote.
At the last minute, just before the resolution was to be voted on in the House, the Clintons agreed to sit for a deposition, postponing further consideration of a contempt vote.
Democrats on the committee said they hope this week’s testimony from the Clintons spark Republican committee members to investigate more of Epstein’s ties to President Donald Trump.
Trump has repeatedly denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has said that he cut off contact with his former friend more than 20 years ago.
“We have said from day one that we want to talk to former President Bill Clinton, and the other person we want to talk to is current President Donald Trump,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, said Friday. “And so we should be very clear that now that we’re going to hear from former President Clinton, I hope that Chairman Comer and the Republicans will join us in demanding that the person who actually appears more times in the files than the former president who we want to speak with is President Donald Trump.”
While the Clintons have agreed to speak with the committee behind closed doors, they have still pushed for public hearings as part of the committee’s investigation.
“I will not sit idly as they use me as a prop in a closed-door kangaroo court by a Republican Party running scared,” Bill Clinton wrote in a lengthy post on X. “If they want answers, let’s stop the games & do this the right way: in a public hearing, where the American people can see for themselves what this is really about.”
