If President Donald Trump were to issue an executive order to abolish mail-in voting, as he announced he would on social media on Monday, it would almost certainly be unconstitutional. It would also be baffling — because eliminating vote-by-mail would probably hurt Republicans more than it would help them in next year’s midterm elections.
Trump has been thrashing about for months looking for ways to manipulate the midterms. He is so afraid that Republicans could lose Congress that he persuaded Texas Republicans to conduct a mid-decade redistricting to carve out five additional GOP congressional districts. He ordered the Department of Justice to create a federal database of information on voters, presumably to hunt for illegal voting and serve as a precursor to federal control of state ele