Tom Tiffany, regular absentee voter, says ‘I don’t believe we should be doing mail-in voting’

The presumptive Republican candidate for governor parrots a false claim by President Donald Trump to defend his desire to cut accessibility for hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters.

US Rep. Tom Tiffany, the presumptive Republican nominee in this fall’s election for Wisconsin governor, told a podcast host Thursday, “I don’t believe we should be doing mail-in voting,” making an exception only for members of the US Armed Forces.

More than 1.5 million Wisconsin voters cast absentee ballots in the November 2024 presidential election in Wisconsin, including about 600,000 that were mailed in, demonstrating its ongoing popularity. 

Records indicate Tiffany has voted absentee 12 times since 2016, according to an official with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. It was not clear if those ballots were cast by mail or in-person at his local election clerk’s office.

Tiffany made his comment while answering a listener question on the DrydenWire podcast.

“What are your thoughts on mail-in voting? From Carly,” asked host Ben Dryden.

“So, um,” Tiffany said in a long pause before responding. “I don’t believe we should be doing mail-in voting. I believe now for our service members, yes, you have to have a means for them to be able to vote, but you really have to have tight controls around it in order to make sure that you don’t have dishonest voting that is going on.”

There are no credible reports of any voter fraud among service members or the general population to the extent that it could cast doubts on an election’s results.

Tiffany then defended this stance by misquoting a report written in the wake of the disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida, a misstatement first made on Monday by President Donald Trump and repeated on Tuesday by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

“If you go back,” said Tiffany, “there was a commission that was formed after hanging chads in Florida. Some people will remember that in the 2000 election there was a commission created. President Carter was the lead Democrat on it and James Baker, a confidant of the first President Bush, they were the co-chairs of it. One of the things that came out of that, they said mail-in voting should be discouraged because it allows a greater chance for voting improprieties.”

But Carter said no such thing.

Statements made by Carter in the past, affirmed by The Carter Center, show his support of mail-in voting and absentee ballots. The 2005 report about Florida did say absentee and mail-in ballots can create opportunities for fraud, but also suggested ways to reduce that risk and encourage further research. There was no evidence of fraudulent mail-in or absentee voting back then, just as there was no evidence uncovered to support Trump’s claims after he lost to former President Joe Biden in 2020.

Tiffany went on to say that mail-in voting has led to “results where you get these questions around elections, so I think it would be better if we did not have it.”

The only questions being raised have come from Trump and supporters, without evidence. Trump also recently posted false information about Wisconsin voter registration rolls.

In the last Wisconsin gubernatorial election of 2022, about 707,000 absentee ballots were cast in a combination of mailed and in-person voting.