President Donald Trump told governors to change their election laws and repeated falsehoods and misleading statements to make his case for new voting policies.
If states required “proof of citizenship, voter ID, paper ballots, one day voting,” Trump said, it would result in knowing “the results of your election by 10 p.m.”
What Trump leaves out: The vast majority of U.S. voters already use paper ballots; a majority of states require voter ID at the polls; and only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections.
Trump has a long history of falsehoods about voting, and his efforts to raise doubt about results that come after election night has led to election worker threats.
That isn’t how elections work in the United States.
“We have never officially known the results of a presidential or other elections on election night,” said Kim Wyman, a Republican and the former Washington secretary of state.
Media outlets project election winners before official results are known; local and state officials certify results for weeks after Election Day.
“States that are able to certify results faster, like Florida, have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize their laws and equipment,” Wyman said.
Here, we fact-checked Trump’s Feb. 21 remarks to the National Governors Association at the White House.
Trump: California ‘just finished up’ voting, and ‘there they were voting a week and a half ago.’
This is False.
California is often the last state to finish counting ballots because of its laws that provide long timelines for officials to verify and count all eligible ballots. Local elections officials have 30 days to count ballots after Election Day. California’s secretary of state certified the statewide results Dec. 13.
When federal lawmakers convened Jan. 6, they read aloud the tally of electoral votes from each state and certified results.
California Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Democrat, announced in December that he will propose legislation to speed up ballot counting.
Trump: Former President Jimmy Carter’s 2005 bipartisan commission concluded, ‘If you have mail-in voting, you’re going to have massive fraud.’
We rated a similar statement False. The commission, convened 20 years ago, generally took a dim view of absentee voting, but it didn’t go as far as saying that every time it results in “massive fraud.”
Carter and James Baker III, President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, cochaired the commission to recommend ways to improve the electoral process following Florida’s 2000 presidential recount.
Critics of voting by mail have repeatedly plucked one sentence from the 2005 report: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
The report said absentee voting worked in some places and called for more research and improvement, such as prohibiting people from handling absentee ballots other than for themselves or family members.
In May 2020, Carter urged political leaders to expand voting by mail.
Trump: France’s election ‘was over at 9 p.m.’ and the US is ‘one of the only countries that has mail-in voting.’
It’s unclear which of France’s elections Trump was referring to (France held parliamentary elections in summer 2024), but these statements are misleading.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance says 34 countries allow what it calls “postal voting,” according to its October 2024 report. Of the 34 countries, 12 allow postal voting for all voters, and 22 for some voters.
“Europe has the largest number of countries that make in-country postal voting available to all or some voters,” the report said.
France gets its election results faster than the U.S. because it has a different voting system. Voters in France can have just one contest on a single card, whereas ballots in the U.S. can stretch on for pages covering multiple local, state and federal contests.
Australia introduced postal voting more than a century ago, Graeme Orr, an expert on international electoral law at the University of Queensland in Australia, said.
The U.S. has had voting by mail since the Civil War.
Trump: ‘If you went to paper ballots in your voting … it costs exactly 8% of what the machines cost.’
This is misleading. In a statement to PolitiFact, the White House said Trump was referring to the costs of ballot marking devices that let voters select their choices on a touch screen. The device then prints a piece of paper showing the voter’s choices but does not store vote information.
A ballot marking device costs $5,000, according to a paper by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law . The White House cited that and another source that said the cost of printing a paper ballot is roughly 30 cents per ballot, although some states print for a lower cost.
Printing ballots for a precinct of 1,500 voters could lead to a cost of around $400, which is where Trump’s 8% calculation originated.
Most voters don’t use ballot marking devices. About one quarter of voters live in jurisdictions that use the devices for all voters, according to Verified Voting, a nonpartisan source of voting machines information.
Most jurisdictions primarily use hand-marked paper ballots but also provide ballot marking devices as an accessible alternative for voters with disabilities. The machines were developed in response to a federal law that all polling places must provide a means for voters with disabilities to vote privately and independently.
As with hand-marked paper ballots, most ballots prepared with ballot marking devices are counted by tabulating scanners, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting.
“If the idea is to hand-count all the ballots within a few hours on election night, that would require huge investments of staff and space even to get wrong,” Lindeman said. “Not only is it hard to hand-count even 50 or 100 ballots at a time, but to transcribe and aggregate the totals across a variety of contests and ballot styles is challenging and error-prone.”
Studies have shown voting machines produce more accurate counts compared with hand counts.
Stephen Richer, a Republican and a former Maricopa County, Arizona, elections official who is now a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, raised questions about Trump’s assumptions.
Ballot cost can vary depending on the poundage of paper, whether it includes printing on the front and back and whether it has multiple pages or cards. Plus there are expenses for items associated with mail ballots such as postage.
Trump: ‘If you went to paper ballots and same-day voting and if you went to voter ID and also one other thing, you want a proof of citizenship, those four things. … You would save tens of millions of dollars.’
Trump’s comments could give the impression that the U.S. doesn’t have paper ballots or voter ID and that’s why results aren’t available a few hours after polls close. That’s not the case.
Verified Voting said the majority of Americans are expected to use paper ballots in 2026, as they did in 2024.
About 36 states require voter ID at the polls.
Federal law requires U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections. When people register to vote, they sign a form attesting to citizenship. Noncitizens who vote face potential penalties such as jail or deportation.
Getting rid of voting by mail before Election Day would reduce access, including for military and overseas voters without new policies, and would also likely result in long lines.
The U.S. is already unusual among democracies for holding elections on a weekday work day — a throwback to agrarian times when most people spent Sundays in church and needed time to travel to a polling site. France held presidential elections on the weekend in 2022, and Germany held elections on Sunday, Feb. 23.
It isn’t guaranteed that changing these policies “would save tens of millions of dollars,” because it would cost extra money for staff, equipment and polling place locations.
States with limited in-person voting, such as Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and California, “would also need to buy substantial new tabulation equipment for polling places, as most have centralized tabulation equipment,” Wyman said.
A Pew Charitable Trusts study after a 2013 Colorado elections law that mandated that mail ballots be sent to all voters for most elections found that certain costs, including labor, declined.
Trump: Such election changes would mean we would ‘know the results of your election by 10 p.m. Everybody, it’s a beautiful system. It’s boxes of 5,000. Boom, boom. And you can go and examine each box. it’s so simple and so good.’
Trump has long wanted election results by 10 p.m., but some of his policy changes would add complexity.
Generally, state laws give local officials between one and four weeks to finish counting ballots.
Election officials research the eligibility of voters who were given provisional ballots at voting sites because their names didn’t appear in the voter registration list at their voting site on Election Day.
Abolishing voting by mail would slow things down, said Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona election official and chief program officer at the National Association of Election Officials. Some states with popular mail-voting programs, such as Florida and Arizona, are allowed to open mail ballots and prepare them for tabulation before Election Day, which helps them release results within minutes of the polls closing.
“For ballots cast at the polls it can be hours before those results come in,” Patrick said. “Voters may still be in line waiting to vote; poll workers may still be closing out the polls and doing their paperwork; the ballots and results may take awhile to transport to election central; results need to be uploaded, verified, and tallied into the total results.”
This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.
