Arizona has voted by mail for 30 years. Trump wants to end that nationwide

President Donald Trump says he plans to eliminate the way that the vast majority of Arizonans vote: by mail.

The president says he will sign an executive order to abolish mail-in voting. He says “it’s a fraud.” But voting officials say it’s secure — and that the president has no role in how elections are carried out.

It’s setting up elected officials on both sides of the aisle for a familiar battle in Arizona where voters have been using mail-in voting for three decades. KJZZ's Camryn Sanchez joined The Show to talk about the history of mail-in voting in Arizona.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Has there ever been any evidence that mail-in voting is rife with fraud?

CAMRYN SANCHEZ: Well, no, but it is a topic of conversation that started about 2020. as you can probably recall, that was an interesting year, and Donald Trump since then has been on and off on kind of a crusade against mail-in ballots.

There was sort of a dip, but he's come back swinging just recently saying that this is a terrible fraud, as you mentioned, and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin supports him. which I don't know if people in Arizona are excited about Putin supporting this idea or not, but basically Trump is saying that he's going to decree through executive order that we can't have mail-in voting anymore.

GILGER: OK, so Arizona was a trailblazer of sorts in mail-in voting, right? I mean, take us back a few decades back.

SANCHEZ: OK. Well, I think technically we were beaten by Oregon and possibly California, but we were one of the very original states to do this back in the very beginning of the 1990s. We had absentee — they were called absentee ballots for anyone who wanted them.

You didn't have to prove that you needed one for any particular reason. you could just request one and that ended up being really popular and we had people going up and up and up and then the increase of how many folks in Arizona were using mail-in voting. and we even expanded it further in 2007 to create this Permanent Early Active Voter List so that folks can permanently do that without having to request it every year.

GILGER: Yes, OK, so we've got the president right now saying that Democrats want mail-in voting because it's the only way they win. But in Arizona, historically mail-in voting has, has benefited Republicans, right?

SANCHEZ: Right. Initially, it was mostly Republicans who were taking advantage of this, and we had Republicans in the government who championed those reforms that I talked about back in the ‘90s and the early 2000s. so it was great for them and they loved it, and they were winning elections here.

And then Democrats became a little bit more successful. They started to use mail-in voting more and more. And then eventually, as you saw in 2020, Democrats started winning some important races. And 2020, again, was really the turning point of all of this and the claims of fraud.

GILGER: Right. So how did 2020 change things? This was a year when we had the Republican presidential candidate on the ballot, Donald Trump, saying do not vote by mail. How did it affect GOP voting that year?

SANCHEZ: Well, in 2020 people voted by mail, but in 2022 there was a slight dip. I think that, you know, building up to that election, I don't know if Trump knew exactly how it was going to play out. but in Arizona, once he had lost and made all of these claims of fraud, we had an audit — and that was took up the better part of 2021 here and cost quite a bit of money and time and energy, only to result in not a whole lot.

Jeremy Stahl/Pool

GILGER: Right. So things went kind of nuts. I mean, we had, we had candidates claiming fraud. We had SharpieGate. We had, and you're referring to here, Cyber Ninjas, their kind of months-long mission to audit the 2020 election and find the fraud that everyone claimed was there. They were in the [Veterans Memorial] Coliseum at the state fairgrounds. Remind us of all of this.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, I mean, what a crazy time to be alive. Cyber Ninjas came in and they were supporters of President Trump, and there was a lot of funding that the GOP party did here in the state with the state Legislature to get folks. Support the audit and come out and volunteer and look at these ballots, individually hand, hand count them, and and look for a bamboo or, you know, UV or special secret watermarks.

There were a lot of interesting theories. They were like, you know, ballots had been stuffed in dumpsters or on planes. South Korean plane had taken a bunch of ballots. None of that was ever proven true, but these, these theories, SharpieGate was also rampant.

But the culmination of all of this was that actually [President Joe] Biden was shown to have won by slightly more votes than we initially thought

GILGER: Even in that Cyber Ninjas audit.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, that was the finding.

GILGER: So with all of that kind of appetite for election fraud and the discussion around it, it was this idea of mail-in voting — which what once had been sort of a model in the country — all of a sudden was kind of the opposite.

SANCHEZ: Yeah, I think Trump is sort of suggesting that if people mail their votes in, you don't know who they are, and it's impossible to track, and it could be fraudulent, and we don't know anything.

In Arizona, the system is that if people vote early, we check their signatures. And if there is a discrepancy, then we reach out in what's called a curing period so that folks can respond and say, "yes .. that's my ballot. That's what I meant to do."

And then we move on with tabulating, which is partly why it takes so long for Arizona to turn in our election results

GILGER: Yeah, which is another complaint about elections. Yes. OK, so in the last minute or so here, Camryn, give me a sense of how this conversation might affect the upcoming 2026 midterm elections. I mean, is this giving Democrats in Arizona, once again, sort of some, some red meat to chew on?

SANCHEZ: Well, Democrats are speculating that Trump's comments resurfacing about mail and voting recently are because he's worried about the midterm elections. You know, whether or not that's true, no idea. But they're saying that he's trying to sow doubt in case Republicans don't do as well as he wants them to, and then he can claim fraud again through mail-in voting.

It, I expect, would end up in a lawsuit. If and when he issues this executive order, I think it'll, it'll be a fight in court. But in terms of how it affects our Republicans in the state, I think you might see a decrease in folks using drop boxes and mail-in voting — which means you might see more people showing up on Election Day in person.

And in that case, maybe you would see longer lines. It could affect our Election Day operations.