Trump and Putin are both criticizing mail-in voting. Election officials are freaking out.

As President Donald Trump pledges to roll back mail-in voting, election officials are warning that steps to limit America’s voting systems will only make it easier for foreign hackers such as Russia to interfere in future elections.

On Monday, Trump announced in a post on Truth Social his intention to sign an executive order “to lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots,” along with ending the use of “Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES,” though he did not elaborate on what types of machines he was referring to.

Should Trump ban both mail-in ballots and voting machines, ballots would either need to be tediously and meticulously hand counted or the U.S. would need to create a system for voting online — which security experts warn could threaten the privacy and safety of America’s elections — providing an opening for Russia.

“There is no feasible way to hand count U.S. general elections,” said Harri Hursti, co-founder of the Voting Village at the annual DEFCON conference — where hackers can hunt for vulnerabilities in voting machines. “Humans are slow and error-prone and also sometimes dishonest … You would need to take a significant part of the whole labor force and dedicate those to election work for weeks.”

Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), ranking member of the House Administration Committee with jurisdiction over federal election issues, said hand counting ballots “is an open invitation to being able to mess with the results.”

“I don’t think serious people doubt that doing mail-in balloting and using modern technology is far more secure and, frankly, much more accurate than hand counts,” Morelle said.

Trump’s latest attacks on U.S. election infrastructure come after he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday. In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity following the meeting, Trump praised the Russian leader and suggested that he supported his debunked claims that the 2020 election was rigged.

“He said: ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,’” he told Hannity.

Russia has sought to influence elections around the world to peddle propaganda and to undermine global Western alliances such as NATO. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election, and Moscow has been accused in recent years of attempting to influence elections throughout Europe, including in Romania, Moldova and Georgia. In 2018, DHS’ top cyber official cautioned that U.S. election infrastructure is regularly targeted by hackers to “cause disruptive effects, steal sensitive data and undermine confidence in the election.”

Trump has long claimed that mail-in voting leads to increased voter fraud, though there has been little evidence to support this. Around one-third of the electorate submitted their ballots by mail in the 2024 elections.

The U.S. president’s attempts to change the voting process may also not pass legal scrutiny. State governments are in charge of holding elections, according to Article 1 of the Constitution, and any executive order or law seeking to overturn states’ rights on this issue is certain to be challenged in court.

Still, the Trump administration has taken steps in recent months to weaken U.S. election security in other ways. The administration froze efforts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to help protect election infrastructure and challenge election-related misinformation. In addition, a team that had responded to foreign election interference was disbanded in February.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D), the chief election official in her state, said Trump’s actions so far have “already made our elections less secure.”

“Trump is trying to grab power ahead of the 2026 election,” Griswold said of the recent actions. “This is a direct attack on democracy.”

The White House insists that Trump’s effort to end the use of mail-in ballots is meant to enhance election security.

“President Trump wants to secure America’s elections and protect the vote, restoring the integrity of our elections by requiring voter ID, ensuring no illegal ballots are cast, and preventing cheating through lax and incompetent voting laws in states like California and New York,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement.

But the timing of Trump’s announcement — right after a high-stakes meeting with Putin — has heightened concerns that Trump’s actions, nudged by Putin, are aimed at suppressing certain voters and downgrading election security by eroding trust in the electoral process.

Officials are also worried by Trump’s discussions with Putin about U.S. elections, given that Russia has limited election security and its electoral process is largely considered by observers to be a sham.

“The idea that an American president would look to Vladimir Putin for advice on how we should run our elections is beyond absurd,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and one of the lead lawmakers who investigated Russian interference efforts in the 2016 presidential election, said.

“Undermining confidence in these systems doesn’t make us safer — it hands a gift to our adversaries who want nothing more than to weaken Americans’ faith in their own democracy,” he added.

One former top U.S. intelligence official, granted anonymity to speak candidly for fear of reprisal, described Putin as a “snake,” stressing that “he has an established track record on election interference across countries he wants to influence and should never be trusted on anything.”

Nicole Markus contributed to this report.