No one challenged the validity of mail-in ballots until recently?
That question deserves serious consideration.
Voting by mail is not some new invention created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Americans have used absentee and mail-based voting for more than 160 years. During the Civil War, states developed systems that allowed soldiers serving away from home to cast absentee ballots. The practice became particularly important during the 1864 presidential election.
And who won that election?
Abraham Lincoln—a Republican.
The National Archives records Lincoln’s overwhelming victory in the 1864 Electoral College, 212 votes to 21 for Democrat George B. McClellan. (National Archives)
The historical context matters.
Mail Voting Did Not Begin With Democrats
The modern political debate sometimes makes mail-in voting sound like a partisan innovation. It isn’t.
Absentee voting developed because Americans recognized a simple principle: being physically absent from your polling place should not necessarily mean surrendering your right to participate in an election.
That principle was especially important during the Civil War, when hundreds of thousands of Americans were serving away from their homes.
Over time, absentee voting expanded beyond members of the military. States developed different rules governing who could vote absentee, why they could do so, and how ballots were returned and verified.
The system evolved.
But the underlying principle remained:
Your right to vote should not disappear simply because circumstances prevent you from standing in a polling place on Election Day.
So What Changed?
The question today isn’t whether election security matters.
Of course it does.
Every legitimate ballot should be protected. Voter registration should be accurate. Ballots should be securely handled. Signatures and other verification procedures should be enforced where required. Fraud should be investigated and prosecuted.
But there is a significant difference between protecting the integrity of mail voting and attempting to eliminate or severely restrict the method itself.
That distinction matters.
In 2026, the Trump administration has pursued significant restrictions on voting by mail. The Supreme Court recently allowed the administration’s mail-voting executive order to proceed while litigation continues; importantly, the Court’s decision did not resolve the underlying constitutional questions about the order’s legality. (AP News)
The issue has therefore moved well beyond a theoretical political argument.
It is now a question about the structure of American elections, the authority of the states, and the ability of eligible citizens to participate.
Election Security Should Not Become Election Suppression
There is nothing inherently conservative about making it harder for eligible citizens to vote.
There is also nothing inherently conservative or liberal about demanding secure elections.
Those principles should belong to all Americans.
If someone believes mail-in voting needs stronger safeguards, let’s have that debate.
If someone believes certain deadlines should change, let’s debate them.
If someone believes ballot-tracking, identification, signature verification, chain-of-custody procedures, or auditing should be strengthened, let’s examine the evidence and determine what works.
But eliminating an established method of voting should require far more than political suspicion.
It should require compelling evidence that the system itself is fundamentally incompatible with free and fair elections.
Remember What the Constitution Says
The Constitution gives states a significant role in determining the Times, Places and Manner of congressional elections, subject to congressional authority under Article I, Section 4.
That constitutional structure exists for a reason.
America does not have one centralized national election system. We have thousands of state and local election jurisdictions operating under state law and federal requirements.
That decentralized system can be frustrating.
It can also be a protection against concentrating too much control over elections in Washington.
Whether you support Republicans, Democrats, independents, or no party at all, we should be extremely cautious about allowing any political party to decide that a voting method used by millions of Americans is illegitimate simply because that method has become politically unpopular.
The Standard Should Be Consistent
Here’s the question I keep coming back to:
If mail-in voting was legitimate when Americans—including soldiers fighting a Civil War—used absentee ballots in 1864, why should we automatically assume it is illegitimate today?
Technology has changed.
Election administration has changed.
The rules have changed.
But the fundamental question hasn’t:
How do we allow eligible Americans to exercise their constitutional right to vote while maintaining a secure and trustworthy election system?
That is the debate we should be having.
Not:
Which political party benefits from mail-in voting?
Because voting rights should never depend on which party we believe might win.
Protect the Vote. Protect the Process. Protect Liberty.
Election integrity matters.
So does access to the ballot.
Those aren’t contradictory principles.
We can demand secure elections without declaring an entire category of voters suspect. We can strengthen verification without eliminating legitimate voting options. And we can debate election procedures without turning the right to vote into a partisan weapon.
America has used absentee and mail-based voting for generations.
It was not invented by one political party.
It did not suddenly become legitimate when one party benefited from it—or illegitimate when another party became concerned about it.
The right to vote belongs to the people.
And protecting that right means protecting both the integrity of the ballot and the ability of eligible Americans to cast one.
Don’t dismantle a system simply because the political winds have changed.
Protect access. Protect election integrity. Protect the vote. Protect liberty.