US President Donald Trump had on Monday promised to end mail-in voting before the US mid-term elections – three days after claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin told him the practice makes “honest” elections impossible.
According to Reuters, Trump told Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity that “Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting” after bilateral talks in Alaska on Friday.
“He said there’s not a country in the world that uses it now,” Trump added.
Trump repeated this false claim on Monday in a social media post announcing that he would “lead a movement” to end mail-in voting in the US. Writing on Truth Social, Trump added: “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”
Research by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance shows that many countries (including Canada, the UK, Germany, Australia and Switzerland) allow mail-in voting in some form.
According CNN, Trump is a longstanding critic of mail-in voting, to which he partly attributes his defeat at the polls by Joe Biden in 2020. After Trump accused his opponents of voter fraud on Jan. 6, 2021, thousands of his supporters descended on the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election results.
However, Putin’s take on “honest” elections remains dubious given Russia’s human rights record.
Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024. In March that year, Putin won his fifth Kremlin term in the absence of any meaningful opposition.
Putin has also appeared to have influenced Trump’s stance on a Ukraine ceasefire after Friday’s Alaska meeting, while Trump backed away from his earlier pledge to pressure Moscow if no agreement was reached – a pledge that went unfulfilled.