President Trump voted by mail ahead of Florida’s Republican primary on Tuesday, according to the White House, participating for at least the third time in a practice that he has railed against for years and has equated to cheating.
Mr. Trump voted by mail in Palm Beach County in 2020, and did so again earlier this year in the special election between Democrat Emily Gregory and Republican Jon Maples to represent the district in the Florida statehouse. Records show Mr. Trump has been registered to vote there since 2019.
Politico earlier reported that Mr. Trump had voted by mail in Tuesday’s primary, citing voting records from Palm Beach County, home to Mar-a-Lago, his private club. The New York Times could not access these records through the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections website, which said that Mr. Trump’s voting record was “protected from public disclosure.”
In an unsigned statement, the Palm Beach elections office confirmed that it had blocked access to Mr. Trump’s voting records, saying that the publicly available documents were “intended for use by a registered voter to determine his or her voter registration and voting status. Voters with protected information will not appear in this search.”
Olivia Wales, a White House spokeswoman, confirmed that Mr. Trump voted by mail in the primary, saying that “this is a non-story.”
“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.,” she said, repeating a White House statement about Mr. Trump’s last vote by mail, in March.
Mr. Trump has continued to push, for Republicans in Congress to pass legislation ahead of the midterms that would strengthen voter identification requirements and make mail-in voting significantly more difficult. There was not enough Republican support to push through the legislation this year, and senators abandoned the effort so they could get home to their states to campaign for re-election.
Mr. Trump has long fixated on mail-in-voting to bolster his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, and has called the SAVE Act one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in the country’s history. During his State of the Union address, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that “cheating is rampant in our elections” and called for “no more crooked mail-in ballots,” though states that vote entirely by mail see little fraud.
