WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin agrees with him that letting voters send in ballots by mail puts honest elections at risk.
“Vladimir Putin, smart guy, said you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting,” Trump told Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” after a nearly three-hour meeting between the leaders in Alaska. “He said there’s not a country in the world that uses it now.”
Trump, who promoted the false narrative that he, not Democrat Joe Biden, won the 2020 election, cited his agreement with Putin over absentee voting as he pressed his fellow Republicans to try harder to advance overhauls to the U.S. voting system that he has long sought.
Trump has voted by mail in some previous elections and urged his supporters to do so in 2024.
Putin, who has been Russia’s president or prime minister since 1999, was elected to another term in office with 87% of the vote in a 2024 election that drew allegations of vote rigging from some independent polling observers, opposition voices and Western governments. The most formidable opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony in 2024.
Russia’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his conversation with Trump.
The Russian president has previously said some U.S. elections were marred by fraudulent voting, without presenting evidence. The position mirrors Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud following the 2020 election.
Justice Department and Senate investigations found that Moscow tried to influence campaigns to help Trump win in the 2016 election. U.S. intelligence officials have said they believe Russia tried to do the same in 2020 elections and preferred Trump to win in 2024.
Trump and some of his top aides long have asserted that he and his presidential campaigns were falsely accused of colluding with Russia, a claim he brought up again in Alaska on Friday. The U.S. intelligence community never reached such a conclusion.
Trump, who has not ruled out seeking a third term in office despite a constitutional prohibition, on Friday showed impatience with Republicans for not prioritizing election reform legislation.
“The Republicans want it, but not strongly enough,” Trump said during the interview. “You can’t have a great democracy with mail-in voting.”
Some Republicans, echoing Trump’s claims, argue that changes like restricting absentee voting and requiring identification could reduce the risks of ballot tampering, impersonation or other forms of fraud that independent analysts say is rare.
Nearly three dozen countries from Canada to Germany and South Korea allow some form of postal vote, though more than half of them place some restrictions on which voters qualify, according to the Sweden-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental advocacy group.
The Trump administration has stepped back from commenting on the fairness or integrity of elections conducted by many foreign countries in a significant departure from Washington’s traditional approach of promoting democratic elections overseas.
(Reporting by Reuters Washington bureau; Editing by William Mallard)
