Trump tells supporters they can vote by mail on 3 November, and says he still prefers a booth

President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday that his supporters could vote by mail in the 3 November congressional elections if they wanted to. He said he still preferred that people vote in person. The line repeated a campaign video he posted over the weekend: vote early, vote by mail, or vote in person on Election Day.

He spoke at the White House before leaving for a rally in Nebraska. "They can vote by mail if they want, because we seem to have no choice because a lot of people want to vote by mail, but a lot of very good people also want to vote in-person," he said. "You can do either." The sentence is a permission, not a new statute. States run elections. A president cannot open or close a mail option by a remark on the South Lawn.

The change in tone is the news. Trump has for years described mail ballots as a route for fraud, and he has said his 2020 defeat was produced by fraud, including mail ballots. Those claims have not been accepted by the courts that heard them. Reuters reported that it was not immediately clear why he shifted. The practical reading is electoral. Parties that tell their own voters to avoid a legal method lose those ballots. A weekend video and a Monday restatement are an instruction to Republicans to use the method he has attacked.

What the midterm calendar actually allows

Election Day is 3 November. Early and mail rules differ by state. Michigan, one of the states he has said he will visit, has no-excuse absentee voting. Clerks there began mailing ballots in late September to more than two million voters who had asked for them. A Supreme Court decision earlier this autumn left in place lower-court rulings that struck down federal mail restrictions imposed in March. Local clerks, not the White House, print and count those ballots. Trump's Monday line does not change Michigan's statute. It tells a voter who was waiting for a signal that the signal has been given.

The Nebraska stop on Monday was for Senator Pete Ricketts and Governor Jim Pillen, in a state the president described as one his party should hold. He has also said he will campaign in Michigan in about a week and a half. Mail advice delivered on the way to one rally and aimed at a second state is campaign logistics. The video's three options, early, mail, and Election Day, cover the full legal menu in states that offer all three. They do not cover states that limit mail to excused absences. A national sentence still lands on fifty different codes.

The fraud claim and the new permission sit side by side. He did not withdraw the claim on Monday. He said people could use mail because many want to, and because there seemed to be no choice. That is a campaign accommodation. It leaves election officials with the same verification rules they had last week: signature checks, deadlines, and cure periods where state law provides them. It leaves his own voters with a clearer instruction than they had when the public line was that mail ballots were the problem.

The count on 3 November will not record why a ballot arrived by post. It will record whether it arrived on time and whether it matched the voter. Trump's weekend video and his Monday answer are an attempt to raise the share of his voters who use a channel he spent five years describing as unsafe. The channel was already open. The new fact is that he has told them to use it.