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After President Donald Trump unsuccessfully tried to use the U.S. Postal Service to regulate mail voting this spring, polls showed that voters — particularly Democrats — had less confidence in election mail and might move away from mail voting.
With less than three weeks until Election Day, the data on whether that’s actually happening in Pennsylvania is mixed.
There are signs that at least some Democrats have been discouraged from casting ballots by mail. But how much of the dropoff in mail voting can be attributed to Trump’s actions, and what effect it may ultimately have on the election, is unclear.
“I think there’s some anxiety among some voters about what the Trump administration is saying it’s going to do,” J.J. Abbott, a longtime Pennsylvania Democratic strategist, said about what he has been hearing this cycle.
Trump’s March executive order sought to give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over mail ballots.
It would have required states to submit lists of mail voters to the Postal Service and potentially make changes to ballot envelopes. The Postal Service would then have only delivered ballots to voters on those lists, and only if the envelopes states used met the order’s requirements.
Opponents sued, arguing the order was unconstitutional because it intruded on states’ powers to run elections. The case moved through the legal system over the summer and early fall, with courts at times pausing the order from going into effect and higher courts reversing those pauses. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled in mid-September that the order could not go into effect for the 2026 election.
The whiplash raised concerns that the uncertainty could discourage some voters, particularly Democrats, from casting ballots by mail.
Polling from Harvard University recently found that people following news about mail voting said they were more likely to change how they planned to vote, and a Marist poll shortly after the Supreme Court ruling found that Democrats’ confidence in the Postal Service to deliver election mail on time had declined by 26 percentage points since 2024. Republicans’ confidence, meanwhile, remained steady.
Democratic organizers in Pennsylvania say that reflects what they’ve been hearing from some voters as well.
Justin Lotito, the strategic organizing director for the Pennsylvania House Democratic Campaign Committee, said his team has heard from some voters hesitant about using mail ballots.
“We did absolutely hear some concerns on the phones about voters and the executive orders from Trump about USPS,” he said, estimating 1 in every 50 voters reached through phonebanking operations brought this up.
As of Monday, 1.2 million Pennsylvania voters have been approved for mail ballots — fewer than at this point in the 2022 or 2024 elections
That doesn’t capture the full picture, however.
As of Oct. 19, mail ballot requests from Democrats are down 14% from the equivalent point in the 2022 election. By contrast, mail ballot requests are up by 11% for Republicans and 1% for independent and third-party voters. This partisan split could suggest that the overall drop is due, at least in part, to concerns about the Postal Service.
However, when the data from 2026 is compared to 2024, Democrats have been the least likely of those three groups to abandon mail voting. Compared to this point in the overall higher-turnout 2024 election, Democratic mail ballot requests are down just 34%, versus around 50% for both Republicans and independent and third-party voters. That suggests factors other than Trump may be at play.
For instance, the 2022 election took place amid a lingering pandemic and 2024 was a higher-turnout presidential election.
Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been tracking mail ballot trends around the country, said it is ultimately unknowable whether Trump’s executive order is responsible for the change in voting method.
“I don’t think [the data] can tell us anything about that in a causal sense,” Stewart said. “Even if the executive order does have a causal effect, it also has to be that there are other effects that are affecting these numbers too.” He cited the general decline in mail voting since the COVID-19 pandemic as an example.
Stewart added that the most important number is not how many mail ballots are requested, but how many are returned. So far in Pennsylvania, Democrats have returned 47% of the mail ballots that they have requested — higher than either Republicans (43%) or independent and third-party voters (36%).
However, the Democratic ballot return rate is lower than it was at this point in either 2024 (55%) or 2022 (51%).
Abbott, the Democratic strategist, said he’s not overly concerned that the decline in Democratic mail ballot requests means Democrats aren’t voting in this election.
“We’ve seen sort of a natural attrition of Democrats who aren’t turning away from voting, but are going back to voting in person from voting by mail,” he said. “So I think a lot of that difference from 2022 to 2026 is really people changing their method.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.