'If You Can Keep It': Trump Takes Aim At Mail-In Voting

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🗓️ 25 August 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

"Corrupt" is the word President Trump is using, without evidence, to describe mail-in voting. It's how almost one third of Americans cast their ballots in the last election.

States including Florida and Pennsylvania also saw recent jumps in GOP mail-in ballots, after President Trump in his campaign called for votes by any means possible, including by mail.

And while mail-in voting has historically favored Democrats, there is no evidence of the fraud Trump is claiming. But his push to end it fits a pattern: our President wants to change how elections are run in the United States.

In this installment of our weekly series, “If You Can Keep It,” we get to the issue right at the very heart of U.S. democracy: the ability to cast a ballot in free and fair elections.

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems.
0:12.0	More information is at waltonfamilyfoundation.org.
0:28.3	You're listening to the 1A podcast. I'm Jen White, and this is in case you missed it,
0:31.4	where we bring you some of the week's biggest conversations you might have missed.
0:37.3	Last week, the FBI searched the Maryland home and Washington office of President Trump's former national security
0:38.4	advisor, John Bolton. Since he was fired from the administration during Trump's first term,
0:44.0	Bolton has turned into one of the president's vocal critics. In an interview this weekend,
0:48.7	Vice President J.D. Vance confirmed that the search was in part connected to a criminal investigation
0:53.9	over Bolton's handling
0:55.0	of classified documents and information. After the break, we're joined by Elliot Williams. He'll walk us
1:00.5	through this investigation and its implications. He's a legal analyst for CNN and served in the U.S.
1:05.6	Department of Justice from 2013 to 2017. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.
1:19.4	Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation,
1:23.2	working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems.
1:26.6	More information is at walton family foundation.org.
1:32.2	So let's start with where things began to go wrong between Bolton and the president.
1:37.2	We just mentioned he used to work for Donald Trump.
1:39.7	He was like, go from his position as National Security Advisor in 2019.
1:43.1	What happened?
1:43.8	Well, you say where things began to go wrong, and they were kind of always wrong between President
1:48.6	Trump and John Bolton. So Bolton was national security advisor after a long career in the
1:53.9	national security and international affairs apparatus in the United States. And from the beginning,
	...

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