The president's tweets mischaracterized a recent policy change in Michigan. On Tuesday, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, announced that all of the state’s 7.7 million registered voters would be mailed absentee ballot applications for the August down-ballot primaries and November general election, not a ballot directly.

Responding to the president, the secretary tweeted that “I also have a name, it’s Jocelyn Benson,” and noted that her office was sending applications "like my GOP colleagues in Iowa, Georgia, Nebraska and West Virginia."

It is unclear who the president thinks needs to authorize Michigan's decision. Republicans in Congress for years have resisted efforts to inject federal oversight into state and local elections.

A spokesperson for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, also a Democrat, did not immediately return a request for comment on Trump’s tweet.

The president similarly threatened Nevada later Wednesday morning, tweeting: “State of Nevada ‘thinks’ that they can send out illegal vote by mail ballots, creating a great Voter Fraud scenario for the State and the U.S. They can’t! If they do, ‘I think’ I can hold up funds to the State. Sorry, but you must not cheat in elections.”

Nevada is sending ballots to all active voters in the state ahead of its June down-ballot primary. Following a lawsuit backed by national Democrats, election officials in Clark County, the state's most populous county, would also mail ballots to voters listed as inactive, along with a slew of other changes.

Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, previously announced in March that the state’s June 9 primary would be conducted predominantly by mail. Earlier this month, county election officials began sending absentee ballots to all active registered voters.

Election officials in both parties from states across the country have scrambled to hold elections in the middle of a pandemic. Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, recently touted the fact that 1 million people had requested absentee ballots ahead of his state's early June primary, after he made a similar decision to send ballot request forms to voters.

"For a state that previously had only around 40,000 mail ballots voted in past general primary elections, the surge to one million ballots sent out is a monumental accomplishment on its own,” Raffensperger said in a statement earlier this month.

It is unclear what federal funding the president would seek to block, or if he even has the authority to do so. Both Michigan and Nevada have requested emergency funding from the Election Assistance Commission to prepare election officials for holding an election during a pandemic. The CARES Act, coronavirus relief legislation passed by Congress in recent weeks, included $400 million in funding for election security.

House Democrats are pushing for drastically more funding for election officials in light of the pandemic. In the HEROES Act, a bill passed out of the House last week on a largely party-line vote, Democrats sought an additional $3.6 billion in election security funding. The bill also includes sweeping federal election mandates, a step congressional Republicans staunchly oppose.

“We as Republicans have a distinct, different philosophy on what the federal government’s role in elections should be. We believe that the states and localities are the best ones to get their voters to the polls and recognize what’s going to give everybody an opportunity to cast a vote,” Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), the ranking member on the House rules committee, told POLITICO last week.

Although numerous states have delayed their primary contests as a result of the ongoing public health crisis, Wisconsin controversially proceeded with its election on April 7 after the state Supreme Court blocked Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ last-minute executive order postponing in-person voting.

At least three dozen Wisconsin voters and poll workers have since tested positive for Covid-19, state health officials reported late last month.

Still, Trump has fought fiercely in recent weeks against efforts to expand mail-in voting, suggesting that such a shift in ballot-casting practices would yield unfavorable electoral results for the Republican Party and result in widespread corruption at the polls.

A recent study found that to be untrue — on the whole, voting by mail does not benefit one party over another. And even as the president rails against voting by mail, Republican political operatives have embraced it. Republicans recently flipped a House seat in California for the first time in decades in a predominantly mail-in election, while Republicans' superiority in getting their voters to return mail-in ballots in Florida has consistently given them the edge in close elections in the state.

Cases of election fraud in the United States are exceedingly rare, although some election experts acknowledge there are some slightly higher risks with mail-in balloting when proper security measures are not implemented. The most prominent, recent example came in 2019, after an election in a North Carolina House seat was tossed out following a Republican operative illegally collected ballots.