A voter drops off her Vote-By-Mail ballot at the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections office on November 5, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Florida.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order to abolish mail-in voting, a move he said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin supported.

Mailing ballots is a popular option for voters to avoid waiting in line at polling places on Election Day. Election security officials say that voting has never been more secure and that the president has no role overseeing elections. But Trump has long railed against mail-in voting as vulnerable to fraud – despite election experts, including those in his first administration, who said mail-in voting is secure.

“We’re going to end mail-in voting," Trump told reporters Aug. 18 in the Oval Office. "It’s a fraud."

He reiterated arguments he made earlier in a social media post. He argued elections would be more reliable if everyone voted in person with paper ballots rather than through machines.

With in-person voting, “it’s very hard to cheat," Trump said.

His comments and social media post came after Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News on Aug. 15 that Putin, “smart guy, said you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.”

Trump’s announcement came while special House races are pending in Arizona and Tennessee; New Jersey and Virginia will be choosing governors in November this year, and some big-city mayors will be chosen in New York and elsewhere. The whole country will be voting on House races and one-third of the Senate 2026, and for president in 2028.

Mail-in voting is popular. Out of 155 million votes cast in 2024, nearly 47 million were mailed in, according to the Election Assistance Commission.

Not all states track mail-in ballots by party. But among those reporting, about 41% of the ballots were cast by Democrats and 38% by Republicans, according to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Trump's opposition to mail-in voting became more aggressive after he lost the election in 2020. His campaign aides told Congress his lead on Election Day was a "red mirage" before absentee ballots were counted and tipped the victory to Joe Biden.

A major looming dispute is over who runs elections. States traditionally set their own election rules, and federal authorities monitor the accuracy of the results, with the Justice Department potentially prosecuting fraud.

Trump contends states are “merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.”

“I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS,” Trump said on social media.

But election law experts say the president has no role in elections.

"This is wrong and dangerous," Rick Hasen, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles, said in his blog Aug. 18. "The Constitution does not give the President any control over federal elections."

Joyce Vance White, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama, said Trump was “spewing lies about elections.”

“Each state runs its own election,” White said on social media. “We don’t owe the president. It’s the president who owes us a duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.”

Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said mail-in voting is valuable to people with disabilities and others who need flexibility in casting ballots.

"President Trump's attempts to undermine a safe, proven, and reliable method of voting – that he himself uses – along with his attacks on voting technology, are just another part of his strategy to sow distrust in our elections and prevent voters from holding him accountable,” Lakin said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump threatens executive order to end mail-in voting; says Putin agrees

Reporting by Bart Jansen, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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