BURSTPresident Trump doubled down on his plans to end mail-in ballots and target voting machines, calling them ways to get Democrats elected while taking questions from reporters alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.
“We gotta stop mail-in voting. And the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it. Because they have horrible policy. If you have mail-in voting, you’re not going to have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting and the Republicans have to get smart,” Trump said on Monday.
He reiterated that he plans to sign an executive order that eliminates mail-in ballots nationwide ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, which he announced on Truth Social earlier on Monday.
“Mail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots and we, as a Republican party, are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots," he said.
"We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots. Because they’re corrupt,” Trump said. “You know that we’re the only country in the world— I believe, I may be wrong— but just about the only country in the world that uses them because of what’s happened, massive fraud all over the place.”
“We would get secure elections, we’d get much faster results,” he added. “With paper ballots, you have the results that night.”
At one point during his comments on U.S. voting, he turned to Zelensky. The two were meeting to discuss Trump’s push for the end to the war with Russia. European leaders were also at the White House for the Zelensky visit, which comes days after Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
“I hate to take your time on this,” Trump said, touching Zelensky’s shoulder.
He pointed to a reporter in the room, adding, “But I’m glad you asked me that question.”
“When you go to a voting booth and you do it the right way and you go to a state that runs it properly, you go in— they even ask me, they ask me for my license plate… I said, ‘I don’t know if I have it.’ They said, ‘sir, you have to have it.’ Very impressed actually,” he continued.
“But it’s very hard to cheat,” he said, adding that California is “corrupt” and claimed, without evidence, that people get multiple ballots sent to them.
The president has previously pushed unproven claims about widespread voter fraud involving mail-in ballots and insisted that the 2020 election, when he lost to former President Biden, was “rigged.”
Nearly a third of ballots cast in the 2024 election were submitted by mail, according to a U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) report released in June. In the 2020 election during the COVID-19 pandemic, mail-in ballots hit a record 43 percent level while they hit 30.3 percent in the 2024 election.
Efforts to dramatically overall the federal election system have faced legal roadblocks in recent months, including an executive order Trump signed in March that sought to prevent states from counting mail-in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day but arrived later.