President Donald Trump said he will issue an executive order mandating voter identification for every voter, an announcement that follows his move in March requiring proof of citizenship in federal elections and baseless claims of voter fraud to argue the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

"Voter I.D. Must Be Part of Every Single Vote. NO EXCEPTIONS! I Will Be Doing An Executive Order To That End!!!," Trump said on Truth Social on Aug. 30. "Also, No Mail-In Voting, Except For Those That Are Very Ill, And The Far Away Military."

Trump has long questioned the U.S. electoral system and continues to falsely claim that his 2020 loss to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud. The president and his Republican allies have also made baseless claims about widespread voting by non-citizens, which is illegal and rarely occurs.

For years, he has also called for the end of electronic voting machines, pushing instead for the use of paper ballots and hand counts - a process that election officials say is time-consuming, costly, and far less accurate than machine counting.

Earlier in August, he said he would sign an executive order to abolish mail-in voting to bring “HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections," in Truth Social post, a move he said Russian President Vladimir Putin had endorsed.

Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News on Aug. 15 that Putin had told him that "you can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting."

"He said, 'Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting,'" Trump told Hannity.

Voters generally use mail-in ballots if they are travelling or want to avoid waiting in line at polling places on Election Day. Election security officials have said that the president has no role in 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.

The Nov. 3, 2026, elections will be the first nationwide referendum on Trump's domestic and foreign policies since he returned to power in January. Democrats will be seeking to break the Republicans' grip on both the House of Representatives and the Senate to block Trump's domestic agenda.

In March, Trump signed an executive order to overhaul how elections are conducted across the nation, including establishing new voter identification requirements to prove U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections. Non-U.S. citizens are already not allowed to vote in federal elections.

But under the order, the national mail voter registration form will require that applicants provide either a U.S. passport, a REAL ID driver's license or state-issued card compliant with REAL standards, or a "valid Federal or State government-issued photo identification."

Contributing: Joey Garrison and Bart Jansen, USA TODAY; Reuters

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump says he will sign executive order mandating voter ID requirement

Reporting by Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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