Votebeat

Trump’s mail voting restrictions would create logistical nightmare for midterm elections

2026-08-31T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

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It has been a dizzying week of legal challenges and rulings that have scrambled plans for the November election. The end result is… more uncertainty!

The legal drama spanned three different courts and created a legal tilt-a-whirl that ultimately ended up right where we started: a freeze on the Trump administration’s efforts to impose new restrictions on voting by mail and a likely Supreme Court showdown fast approaching.

The U.S. Supreme Court kicked things off on Monday with a narrow procedural ruling that gave the Trump administration hopes it could move ahead with its plans for the November election. New rules briefly went into effect midweek, but the ruling triggered a new round of legal maneuvering that led U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani to impose a new 14-day freeze on the plans while she considers a permanent ban on putting them in place for this election. The Trump administration has already appealed the temporary order.

The whiplash is creating headaches for election officials with the first mail ballots for the November election set to go out to voters in less than a week and more court action the only certainty.

Since the U.S. Postal Service this month unveiled its proposal to implement the administration’s mail ballot restrictions in a 95-page plan, election officials have been scratching their heads as they try to figure out whether, and how, they’ll have to follow the guidelines.

Tammy Patrick, the chief program officer at the Election Center, a national nonprofit association for election administrators, said there was no way that states would be able to successfully shift to the new system in time for the November election.

Patrick said the rules have created widespread confusion among elections officials who have to rush to meet what seems like an impossible timeline to comply with the regulations.

“The U.S. Postal Service has been a very collaborative partner in delivering democracy,” she said. “This rule is a dramatic shift in both how election officials conduct elections and how the Postal Service delivers democracy.”

The first challenge for election officials are rules that require them to follow new uniform mail ballot envelope design standards. The envelope going to the voter and the one the voter returns each have to have unique barcodes that link the mail to the person casting the ballot. The envelope designs first have to be reviewed by the Postal Service, something Patrick said seems logistically impossible to do before November’s election.

“We have more than 10,000 election jurisdictions and there are 40 mail design analysts at the Postal Service for the entire country,” she said. “They would not be able to accommodate everybody redesigning the envelopes.”

This change could potentially have the biggest impact on rural counties with small teams of elections officials that sometimes hand-write names and addresses on mail ballot envelopes. Finding a company that could quickly design and produce the new ballot envelopes at this late date seems implausible, Patrick said.

The first mail ballots are set to go out to North Carolina voters this Friday, and a host of other states will also begin sending them out in the coming weeks. And it’s unclear how the federal government would treat ballots that don’t comply with the new requirements but are sent out before the new system is up and running.

During the short window when the Trump plan was in place, North Carolina said that it rushed to comply by submitting its envelopes to the Postal Service for “review and approval.”

“Our office is confident that the county boards of elections plan to send out absentee ballots to North Carolina voters who have requested them for this election, starting September 4, as required by state law, will happen flawlessly and smoothly,” said Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

The U.S. Postal Service did not respond to a request for comment on specific questions about how the new processes will work this year and pointed to an online FAQ that provides broad guidance about how the system is intended to work.

If and when election officials clear the envelope design hurdle, they would then have to compile a list of everyone who wants a mail ballot and help create a statewide list with detailed information — down to the barcode — for everyone eligible to vote by mail. The Postal Service says it will refuse to deliver a ballot to anyone who is not on the list.

Each state would have to submit its list to the Postal Service via a new online portal, and the rule says that would preferably be done 30 days ahead of the election, though that’s not a hard-and-fast deadline. The Postal Service has yet to unveil the new online portal.

Then, things get even more complicated. If a state sends out a large batch of mail ballots and one of them is sent to a voter who’s not on the list reviewed by the Postal Service, the Postal Service could reject all of the ballots in that batch, Patrick said. That could mean that one error might delay the processing of a huge number of ballots and create extra work for election officials. She emphasized that election offices in big counties routinely send out millions of ballots at a time. Election officials would have to check the rejected mail ballots and resend them once they address the problems.

On top of that, she said, the time it would take for the Postal Service to scan each barcode could overwhelm its staff as a flood of mail ballots come through the system.

“This is very, very difficult,” Patrick said. “All of this is untenable.”

The Trump executive order signed in March envisioned a much longer rollout period for the new system. But the legal challenges put the plans on hold until now, giving the Postal Service very little time to put the system into place. The Postal Service has expressed confidence that it can smoothly roll out the plans, but election officials are skeptical and wary.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Federal judge places new freeze on Trump mail-ballot rules, setting up likely Supreme Court showdown

2026-08-28T03:27:09+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

A federal judge on Thursday imposed a new freeze on President Donald Trump’s mail-ballot restrictions, the latest move in a back-and-forth legal battle playing out just weeks before the November elections.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked the U.S. Postal Service from moving ahead with plans to regulate mail ballots for at least 14 days while she weighs a more permanent ban on the agency’s new rules.

The temporary restraining order comes just four days after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted Talwani’s previous injunction against the order on narrow procedural grounds. However, voting rights groups and a coalition of two dozen states and the District of Columbia kept pressing their case against the order, arguing that the president had no authority to try and regulate mail ballots.

In her 11-page decision, Talwani agreed and concluded that Trump’s proposals were an unconstitutional attempt to usurp powers from the states over elections.

“The court is unaware of, and no party has proffered, any delegation Congress has made that would permit the USPS to regulate election mail,” Talwani wrote.

Talwani set a hearing for Sept. 3 on the request for a permanent injunction. The Trump administration is likely to quickly appeal her order, a move that will probably propel the case back before the Supreme Court.

In court filings opposing the temporary restraining order, the Trump administration argued that the Postal Service plan was an effort by the federal government to help ensure elections were run smoothly and that the agency was acting within its legal authority.

The monthslong, multicourt legal battle over Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting is taking on increasing urgency as the November election nears. Election officials preparing to send out ballots are faced with a whipsaw of directives.

Trump’s order, issued in March, directed the U.S. Postal Service to set up a new system that would allow the agency to block delivery of mail ballots to voters not on a list presubmitted by state election officials.

It quickly prompted a slew of lawsuits. In June, Talwani found that some of the order’s key provisions were unconstitutional and blocked them from going into effect for this year’s elections.

The Trump administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose Aug. 24 ruling paved the way for the U.S. Postal Service to roll out the new restrictions. But the Supreme Court’s ruling dealt only with the question of whether the injunction was premature, with the justices themselves acknowledging it didn’t address the legality or constitutionality of the plan. That set off a new and increasingly complex round of legal wrangling.

Earlier in August, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled its proposal to implement the administration’s mail-ballot restrictions in a 95-page plan that created widespread confusion among election officials.

The Postal Service rules require states to use a new online federal government system to send it a list of all voters who should receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would refuse to send ballots to anyone not on the list. Ballot envelopes would also have to meet new design standards, including unique barcodes that have to be checked by the Postal Service.

The states challenging the rules warned that they would not have the time, money, or people needed to comply in the short time between now and November. Talwani agreed and wrote that the Trump administration’s filings “offer no reply to Plaintiff States’ assertion that compliance for the 2026 midterm elections will be impossible for many of them.”

Democratic leaders across the nation have vowed a fierce fight to ensure that all voters that want to vote by mail are able to do so.

“Over my dead body is that rule going to go into effect,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said earlier this week, before Talwani’s latest order. “We are going to fight this tooth and nail in the courts.”

Read more Votebeat coverage of Trump’s executive order on elections:

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting, March 31, 2026
Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order, April 3, 2026
One line in Trump’s order would reshape how long states have to store election records, April 6, 2026
We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections, April 6, 2026
USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting, May 29, 2026
Trump’s moves to erect voting hurdles face race against the clock, June 15, 2026
Federal judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election, June 25, 2026
Trump administration asks federal judge to quickly lift ban on planned mail voting restrictions, July 2, 2026
Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow new mail ballot restrictions in the 2026 midterms, Aug. 3, 2026
Federal judge blocks Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting nationwide, Aug. 11, 2026
Supreme Court lifts 1 of 2 blocks on Trump’s mail-voting executive order, Aug. 24, 2026
Election officials wrestle with uncertainty amid legal battles over Trump mail ballot restrictions, Aug. 26, 2026

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Election officials wrestle with uncertainty amid legal battles over Trump mail ballot restrictions

2026-08-26T16:00:19+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, August 26, 1:27 p.m.: This story has been updated with the fact that, shortly after publication, a federal judge lifted an order that was blocking the U.S. Postal Service from putting new rules on mail ballots in place for the November election.

Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict mail ballots via executive order is procedural and narrow, but it’s fueling broad confusion and uncertainty as the November election grows inexorably closer.

On Wednesday, in response to the high court decision, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani removed the last legal block preventing the U.S. Postal Service from finalizing its proposed changes for the 2026 elections, even though she warned that the move could create “chaos” as the election closes in.

On Wednesday, a coalition of Democratic states at the forefront of the fight filed a new federal lawsuit against the Postal Service asking the court to block the changes, a move that will likely put them on a fast track back to the Supreme Court and leave election officials contending with messy legal rulings for some time to come.

“Across the country, states are already deep into preparations for the 2026 elections,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in announcing the lawsuit. “Now, at the last moment, the federal government is attempting to meddle in those preparations and potentially threaten countless Americans’ right to vote.”

In a separate case, voting rights groups and Democratic leaders on Tuesday also asked federal courts to block the changes from going into effect for this November’s election.

“The 2026 election has already begun, and this is sowing chaos,” said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College in Oregon and a founder of the Elections & Voting Information Center.

Meanwhile, as the fight rages over how the U.S. Postal Service will handle mail ballots, North Carolina is preparing to send the first ones out next week.

Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said the state is still planning to send out its ballots as expected.

“At this time, with so much left unresolved, we cannot comment on hypotheticals about what may or may not happen with the USPS and the executive order in the courts, as the situation is uncertain,” he said. “If it becomes necessary, we will do our best to comply with any court decisions.”

Monday’s high court ruling added to a messy snarl of court cases over Trump’s March executive order that sought to allow the U.S. Postal Service to reject delivery of mail ballots to voters in states that don’t meet new federal requirements.

The justices, who split along ideological lines, ruled only on a narrow legal argument and stressed their decision didn’t speak to the merits of Trump’s plan. While the case was pending, the Postal Service last week moved to finalize the new rules, action that a federal judge ruled Tuesday had violated a court order.

The Postal Service rules require states to use a new online federal government system to send it a list of all voters that should receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would refuse to send ballots to anyone not on the list. The envelopes would have to meet new design standards, including unique barcodes that have to be checked by the Postal Service.

Is it too late for changes?

While the matter works its way through the courts, states across the nation have already designed, ordered, and paid for ballots that don’t necessarily comply with the new design guidelines (though North Carolina’s Tyson says theirs do).

North Carolina’s ballots start going out Sept. 4. Seven other states, including New York, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, can start sending out their ballots the following week.

“I don’t know of a single state where this could be adopted and rolled out quickly, and that I think is a real problem,” she said.

Trump supporters who have been cheering his push to assert more control over elections hailed the court ruling but expressed concern that time was running out to set up the system for the November election.

Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the conservative, Texas-based anti-voter-fraud group True the Vote, said she supports the effort but acknowledged the Trump administration faces a daunting challenge in trying to set up the new system with fewer than 70 days to go before Election Day.

“It’s a tall hill to climb, but somebody’s got to do it,” she said.

Even if the courts block the Trump administration from moving ahead with the new plan for November, some voting rights advocates predicted that the president would still look for other ways to impose his policies.

Jared Davidson, an election law attorney at Protect Democracy, said that the Trump administration continues to face legal setbacks in its efforts to impose federal regulations on elections because the Constitution gives states primary responsibility for running elections.

“In the days and weeks ahead I think we can all expect that this administration will throw all kinds of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks,” said Davidson. “But the law could not be clearer that this is an effort to take control over elections by an executive where there is no authority to do that whatsoever.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Federal judge blocks Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting nationwide

2026-08-12T00:36:58+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, Aug. 12, 11:26 a.m.: This story has been updated to include comment from the Justice Department.

What happened?

A federal judge delivered another setback on Tuesday to President Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting during the 2026 midterms, blocking the U.S. Postal Service from taking steps to implement his election-related executive order from earlier this year.

It’s the second legal hold on the order, the first of which is currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Tuesday’s ruling makes it even less likely that the executive order will be in effect for the November election.

What’s the dispute?

Trump issued an executive order in March that called on the Postal Service to create a new system to regulate who could vote by mail and directed states to create special lists of who could request absentee ballots.

The order immediately drew several lawsuits challenging the executive order as unconstitutional. The League of Women Voters and a cross-section of states filed lawsuits in early April. The Postal Service unveiled draft rules to carry out the order in May, but U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked key pillars of the executive order in June as part of the case brought by the states.

At the time, Talwani issued an injunction specifically preventing the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) that brought the lawsuit. The list includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

On Tuesday, Talwani issued an injunction in the separate lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters and other nonpartisan voting groups — this one blocking the Postal Service from restricting absentee voting across the nation.

Talwani rejected the Trump administration’s argument that courts could not rule on the legality of the Postal Service process since the government has not yet set up the system.

“The court finds it prudent to review the EO now, where less than 90 days pending before the midterms and the millions of citizens who rely on mail voting require clarity as to how or whether they will vote in November,” Talwani wrote in her 27-page ruling.

“The EO—even in the absence of a final rule—is thus causing irreparable harm to Plaintiff Organizations’ members through the confusion it has engendered as to how they may vote in the fast-approaching midterm elections,” the judge wrote.

“This ruling reinforces the clear language of our Constitution: The president plays no role in our elections and he cannot turn the U.S. Postal Service into a tool for disenfranchising voters,” attorneys for the League of Women Voters said in a statement. “Millions of citizens rely on mail voting, and USPS has no authority to determine which of them should receive ballots.”

The White House also responded to the decision on Tuesday. “The entire Trump Administration will continue lawfully enacting the agenda President Trump was elected to enact – which includes the safety and security of American elections,” said spokesperson Lauren Bis.

What happens now?

The ruling throws another wrench in the Trump administration’s efforts to constrain absentee voting.

On July 27, Trump asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift Talwani’s June injunction by arguing that the lawsuit brought by the collection of Democratic states was premature. The high court is expected to rule on that question any day now, but Tuesday’s decision lowers the stakes of that decision. Even if the Supreme Court lifts the previous injunction, the newer one will still prevent the Postal Service from implementing the executive order, at least for the time being.

The Trump administration could appeal Tuesday’s ruling, just as it did the June one. On Wednesday, the Justice Department said it was “reviewing all options” and did not say how it would respond. “We disagree with the court’s ruling,” the department said in a statement. “The Department remains confident that President Trump’s order to secure federal elections will ultimately be upheld.”

But an appeal would burn precious time. There is already less than two months left before voters start casting absentee ballots — a nearly impossible time frame for the government and elections officials to set up the new system. Appealing Tuesday’s decision to the Supreme Court could take weeks off that ticking clock.

Read more Votebeat coverage of the issue here:

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Trump is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow new mail ballot restrictions in the 2026 midterms

2026-08-03T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Elections are back before the U.S. Supreme Court: The Trump administration is asking the justices to quickly lift an order blocking its efforts to put new restrictions on mail-in voting for the fast-approaching midterm elections.

It’s unclear how the justices will rule, but the case focuses on a narrow question of whether or not the lower courts issued premature rulings rather than the broader questions about the legality of the executive order.

But no matter what the court decides this time, a series of practical and legal challenges make it increasingly unlikely that the federal government can impose new rules giving the U.S. Postal Service the power to block Americans from voting by mail in November’s elections.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justice designated to handle emergency appeals from the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ordered the plaintiff states to respond by Monday to the Trump administration’s filing, and a decision could come any time after that. But there are already fewer than 100 days left until the election, and the U.S. Postal Service itself said in July court filings that it is running out of time to carry out the changes the president is demanding in time for this election.

The heart of the matter is President Donald Trump’s March 2026 executive order, which attempts to restrict mail-in voting by requiring creation of a series of lists of people eligible to vote, including one it requires the U.S. Postal Service to secure from states listing all voters eligible to use mail ballots. The order attempts to give the postal service unprecedented new power to prevent delivery of mail ballots to anyone who is not on these lists.

States, nonprofit groups, and Democratic party committees quickly sued over the order, which they argued was unconstitutional because the president has no authority over elections. Federal courts have since issued conflicting orders on the question of whether blocking major provisions would be premature because government agencies hadn’t yet taken final action to carry out Trump’s orders.

A judge in federal court in Washington, D.C. declined to block the challenged provisions, but last month, in a case brought by states, a federal judge in Massachusetts prevented the Trump administration from moving ahead with the plans, putting the whole issue on hold. Separate appeals courts have now upheld both rulings, leaving the Massachusetts injunction in place for now, which is what prompted the Trump administration to file its emergency appeal last week with the Supreme Court.

Still, “I think everyone agrees that it’s not going to be implemented for 2026,” said Derek Muller, an elections specialist at the University of Notre Dame Law School. “The logistics are so horrific.”

To be clear, the issue the court is now being asked to decide isn’t about the legal merits of the executive order itself, or whether Trump has the authority to issue it. The Trump administration is arguing that the federal courts blocked the executive order prematurely because the government is still drafting the rules, which haven’t been finalized. Until the rules are final, the Trump administration argues, the states can’t prove that there is any harm that should be blocked by the courts, or that agencies won’t carry out the order in a way that complies with the law.

The Massachusetts court’s injunction “is especially indefensible because the agencies are still deliberating over how (if at all) to implement the Order, yet the district court preemptively decided that whatever the agencies may choose to do will necessarily be unlawful,” the Trump administration argued in its 116-page filing.

That’s essentially what the other panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia concluded in a ruling Tuesday when it upheld a lower court’s decision not to block the executive order — though the plaintiffs in that case are nonprofit groups and party committees rather than states.

“The scope of the issues at play” before the Supreme Court “are really, really narrow,” said Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights and rule of law at the Campaign Legal Center, one of the lawyers involved in bringing the Washington, D.C. case.

And like Muller, Lang said it appears unlikely that the government would have the time to push through the changes before November.

“The kinds of dramatic changes they are asking for in election administration are not the kinds of things that you get done in a few months’ time,” Lang said. “As a practical reality, I don’t think they can do this in any non-chaotic way.”

If the Supreme Court were to side with the Trump administration this time, an army of lawyers across the country is prepared to again ask the courts to step in as soon as the new rules are finalized.

Even the appeals court judges in Washington that agreed the legal challenges were premature also suggested that they had some qualms about the executive order.

“Plaintiffs have identified a number of serious questions concerning the lawfulness of proposed actions if implemented on the threshold of the upcoming federal election,” the court said in its ruling.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Trump administration asks federal judge to quickly lift ban on planned mail voting restrictions

2026-07-02T17:29:31+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The Trump administration is asking a federal judge to quickly lift her recent ruling against major provisions of a presidential executive order on elections, arguing in an appeal that the court’s action will effectively prevent the government from putting new voting restrictions in place before the November election.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani halted President Donald Trump’s efforts to create centralized lists of adult citizens and give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who can vote by mail. Her 37-page ruling concluded that the president did not have the constitutional authority to regulate state elections, as his March executive order tried to do.

The executive order directed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to create a nationwide list of verified U.S. citizens over 18, and thus presumably eligible to vote in federal elections. It also called on the U.S. Postal Service to create a system to handle and accept mail-in ballots only from voters on preapproved lists.

Talwani’s order prevents the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) whose attorneys general and governors brought the lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts. The list includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

This week, the Trump administration appealed Talwani’s ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals and said it is still proceeding with its efforts to set up the new system for the rest of the states. But it warned that the judge’s order will make it impossible for the U.S. Postal Service to create a bifurcated system for the November election, even if the administration ultimately prevails on appeal. Government attorneys asked Talwani to lift her ban by Monday.

The request for a quick decision suggests that the Trump administration may be trying to speed things up so the case reaches the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as possible.

“Operationally, it would not be possible for us to put a two-tiered system in place where one set of rules apply to the ballot mail of the Plaintiff States, and another applies to the remaining states,” Steven Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer and executive vice president, said in a court filing. “Doing so would cause operational confusion and significantly increase the complexity and efficiency of implementing any final rule.”

But the Trump administration’s nationwide efforts to use the Postal Service to regulate who gets ballots also hit a separate legal roadblock this week when another federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the executive order violates a years-old agreement requiring the federal government to ensure voters who request mail-in ballots get them in time to ensure they can be counted.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan concluded that the Trump administration’s plans to send ballots only to voters on preapproved lists breached a 2021 agreement between the Postal Service and the NAACP meant to ensure that the agency prioritized ballot delivery. In contrast to Talwani’s ruling, Sullivan’s decision applies nationwide.

“These proposed rules directly undermine commitments that the Postal Service made to ensure mail-in ballots are delivered and counted,” said Anthony Ashton, senior associate general counsel for the NAACP, in a statement.

The U.S. Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Federal judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election

2026-06-25T15:14:37+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Update, June 25, 2:05 p.m.: This story has been updated to include comments responding to the ruling.

A federal judge on Thursday blocked key pillars of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overhaul the 2026 elections, declaring unconstitutional his attempts to create centralized lists of adult citizens and giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who can vote by mail.

The 37-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani concluded that the president did not have the constitutional authority to regulate state elections as he tried to do in a March executive order.

Live event: Will the midterms happen? Your election questions, answered

Talwani’s decision came one day after the head of the Postal Service said the agency would refuse to deliver mail-in ballots to voters that were not on lists approved by the federal government, making explicit what the agency’s proposed new rules had previously implied.

In her ruling, Talwani said that the federal government could not use the postal system to regulate who gets ballots.

“No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS,” Talwani wrote.

Talwani issued an injunction specifically preventing the federal government from enforcing those provisions of the order against the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) whose attorneys general and governors brought the lawsuit. The list includes most Democratic-led and swing states, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

However, the injunction applies only to this year’s elections. Talwani granted the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ legal challenges to the executive order as not yet ripe when it comes to future elections.

The White House implied that it would appeal the ruling. In a statement, Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman, said the administration is “confident that we will ultimately prevail.” The U.S. Postal Service didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some Democratic secretaries of state who brought the case hailed the ruling as a major victory for voters.

“Trump will not be able to use the Postal Service to control which voters receive a mail ballot, and cannot use the DOJ to intimidate election officials into following his unlawful order,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. “The Constitution is clear: States run elections, not Trump. This is a major victory for American democracy.”

The ruling is the latest in a series of judicial rebukes to Trump’s efforts to impose federal control over American elections, something that the Constitution leaves to Congress and the states.

The executive order is the second election-related one issued by Trump. The first one, issued in March 2025, sought to require prospective voters to prove their citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections and impose restrictions on states accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day. Federal courts have so far blocked major portions of the first executive order, including the effort to require documented proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

During the hearing in the case over the second order, in early June, Talwani expressed concerns about the executive order.

“What’s the harm if I say no one can use this list for the November election?” Talwani asked.

The Trump administration has cast the president’s efforts as an attempt to compel federal agencies to enforce existing laws barring noncitizens from voting in elections.

Trump has consistently targeted America’s electoral system and, without evidence, accused Democrats across the nation of “rigging” elections.

The president has repeatedly claimed that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020 when he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, even though federal judges, state elections officials, and independent investigations have repeatedly debunked those allegations.

Before Thursday’s ruling, the Trump administration had been forging ahead with implementing the executive order.

A different federal judge declined in late May to block major parts of the executive order, arguing that the issue was premature because the U.S. Postal Service had yet to take any steps to set up the new system. The following day, the Postal Service unveiled its proposed rules, which would give the agency the power to block delivery of mail-in ballots to Americans across the nation unless they were on a verified list of voters.

And in early June, the Trump administration said that it was taking steps to create a new nationwide mechanism aimed at verifying voter citizenship, per the executive order.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Trump’s moves to erect voting hurdles face race against the clock

2026-06-15T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

President Donald Trump is in a race against time.

Since returning to office last year, Trump has repeatedly tried to remake American elections, including by issuing two executive orders that would erect new federal rules and restrictions on voting and various aspects of elections. Voting rights advocates and a variety of states have filed lawsuits that have already frozen key tentpoles of Trump’s first executive order on voting and could do the same for the second. If Trump wants to see these measures impact this November’s elections, his administration has to move fast.

In recent days, the Trump administration has taken new steps to erect the architecture it would need to implement key pieces of the president’s most recent election executive order, which called in March for the Department of Homeland Security to create “State Citizenship Lists” of all U.S. citizens who are over 18.

In response to the order, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled plans to set up a special system by the end of this month — then revised its plans just days later, showing how quickly the administration is moving to try and put these measures in place.

The executive order also calls on the U.S. Postal Service to set up a new process where it could block voters from receiving mail-in ballots if they are not on a vetted list provided to the federal government 60 days before an election, and the agency has proposed new rules to do so. Many election officials say the move could cause chaos, and is beyond the president’s authority.

Setting aside the constitutional questions around the efforts, voting rights advocates say that it could be practically very difficult for the agencies involved to create a workable system before the November election.

“Elections are like a battleship, it’s not like you can turn them around on the fly,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA political science professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “It seems exceedingly unlikely that any of this will be in place by November.”

The administration’s court filings hint at some of the difficulties.

On Friday, June 5, the Trump administration filed a four-paragraph notice to a court in Boston overseeing a legal challenge to the March executive order. In that notice, the Department of Homeland Security said it was moving ahead with plans to allow states to check voter eligibility by submitting their entire voter lists to a federal database known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

It also said the department would create a portal that would allow state election officials to “securely access citizenship-related data” from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Department of State — by June 30.

But three days later, this past Monday, the Trump administration changed plans and filed a new notice with the court, outlining a new memorandum rescinding the previously stated policies. Per the notice, that memo walks back some of the specifics of the earlier implementation plan, promising only to provide by June 30 “a mechanism for States to receive secure, state-focused citizenship-related information from each agency.”

The previously mentioned portal would come sometime later this year, the revised notice said, and the new memo also rescinded the proposal that would let states submit their voter rolls to SAVE because, the notice said, that approach wasn’t specifically called for in the executive order.

Some states have already used the system — which was previously used to verify immigrants’ eligibility for benefits — to check voter eligibility after the administration revamped the database and vigorously encouraged states to do so, but others have questioned the accuracy of the SAVE system and declined to use it.

The initial notice also said that the Homeland Security department “contemplates working with” the U.S. Postal Service to access its data on mail ballots and use it to “monitor mail-in and absentee ballot flows, identify anomalies that may suggest voter fraud or misuse, and generate authorized investigative leads.”

In the second notice, the administration instead told the court the two agencies were having “preliminary conversations” on potential data-sharing, and decisions would be contingent on final legal and policy determinations.

Beyond the logistical challenges, the proposals are facing legal challenges that could block them from taking effect. A coalition of Democratic party committees and some nonprofit groups have challenged the Trump executive order as unconstitutional. And while a federal judge in Washington, D.C. declined to immediately halt major provisions in that case, a federal judge in Boston could still do so. That judge expressed concerns last month during a hearing on a separate case brought by Democratic officials from twenty-three states, the District of Columbia, and a different group of nonprofits, and is expected to rule soon.

John Davisson, deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the latest Trump administration move “a five-alarm fire for the protection of privacy and voting rights” across the country.

“Building a citizenship registry is beyond the federal government’s power, illegal under the Privacy Act, impossible to construct without introducing catastrophic error, and guaranteed to cause untold numbers of perfectly legal voters to be denied their right to vote if implemented,” he said.

The Trump administration says its efforts are a way to integrate federal systems to help ensure there is no fraud in the country’s electoral system.

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for comment. In April, Lauren Bis, a spokesperson, said SAVE “is a critical tool for state and local governments to safeguard the integrity of elections across the country.” The Trump administration has sued a majority of U.S. states in an effort to secure access to their voter registration databases.

Votebeat Brunch: Is your election rigged? Separating fact from fiction.

California’s primary election set off a new wave of unsubstantiated allegations — including from Trump — that the vote was rigged. To separate fact from fiction, Votebeat spoke to Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an expert in disinformation. DiResta served for five years as technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and co-led a nonpartisan Election Integrity Partnership that studied misinformation during the 2020 election. The interview was conducted in writing and has been lightly edited for clarity, brevity, and style.

Q: The California election has triggered a new flood of unsupported allegations that the vote is rigged. What advice do you have for voters trying to separate fact from fiction?

Many election rumors spread because they are emotionally compelling, not because they’re supported by facts. When people encounter a claim that an election was “rigged,” they should ask a few questions:

- What is the original source of the claim?

- Is there any evidence, or just screenshots, anecdotes, or speculation? “It just seems weird” isn’t evidence.

- Have election officials, courts, or independent observers said anything?

- Do multiple credible sources support the claim?

People should also be careful about treating isolated irregularities as proof of widespread fraud. Every election has some mistakes, and administrative errors. Those are not automatically evidence that they were manipulated. Officials will often explain what happened quickly, but you sometimes have to go check because their posts generally don’t go viral. A useful rule of thumb is: The stronger the claim, the stronger the evidence must be.

Q: What are some tools people can use to get reliable information amid a flood of misinformation?

A good starting point is official election information from state and local election offices, since they can provide direct information about procedures, vote counting, and certification, and they know the local rules better than anyone else. Fact checks are helpful as well. Keep in mind that getting answers takes time. Asking an AI for facts isn’t going to get you an immediate answer in most cases because it has to work with what’s out there, too. Asking Grok or another AI can help, but it’s sometimes dependent on how recent or specific the issue is. Be wary and double check, or check again later.

Q: Is there more state and federal officials should be doing to address election misinformation?

Election officials who communicate quickly and responsively about voting procedures, counting, audits, and certification tend to leave less room for rumors to thrive. Communicating in advance can help, too. And strengthening influencer disclosure rules would go a long way toward shifting incentives.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting

2026-05-29T23:25:16+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

The U.S. Postal Service proposed new rules Friday that detail in part how the Trump administration intends to carry out its contested mail-ballot executive order — revealing a plan that, if it survives legal challenges, would create new barriers for mail voting and new burdens for election officials.

Under the proposal, all states would be required to send the federal government a list of all registered voters to which they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots in key federal elections. The proposal appears to give the postal service new power to block delivery of ballots to people that are not on the list and allow the agency to refuse delivery of ballots that do not meet new federal standards outlined in the proposed rule.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group and a former Colorado election administrator, said that the proposal would create onerous new regulations that could be difficult and costly for local elections officials to follow, especially in rural counties which do not currently have the technology to produce the required barcodes. Such systems cost thousands of dollars.

Morrell said the rules represent an unnecessarily broad attempt to crack down on extremely rare examples of voter fraud.

“This proposal would fundamentally change the rules to address a problem that is extraordinarily rare,” she said. “This is adding significant complexity and new administrative burdens that can add additional costs with little-to-no evidence the current system is failing.”

Release of the proposed rules created widespread confusion among local elections officials unsure how they would work, and sparked broad condemnation from voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders who accused the Trump administration of trying to take unconstitutional steps to deny Americans their right to vote.

“Tens of millions of eligible voters could be prevented from voting by mail if states do not fully submit to this new federal mandate being rushed ahead of the 2026 election,” said U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat who previously served as California’s secretary of state. “Serious and consequential questions remain over how this new list will work with the Trump Administration’s ongoing illegal effort to create a national voter list.”

Friday’s proposed regulations, which require a 30-day comment period before moving forward, are the latest step by the Trump administration to overhaul election rules and impose unprecedented new federal oversight on the voting process.

Since returning to the White House last year, President Donald Trump has directed his administration to take sweeping new steps to alter an election system he has accused, without evidence, of cheating him out of the 2020 election. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in January seized ballots in Fulton County, Georgia as part of a probe of the 2020 election. He has issued two executive orders that attempt to assert broad presidential control over elections, though the Constitution gives authority over elections to the states and Congress. Both orders were quickly challenged in the courts, which froze major provisions of the first order, ruling the president exceeded his authority.

Release of the rules came one day after federal judge refused to block the most recent executive order on mail-in ballots because the Postal Service had not yet released its proposed new regulations. Another challenge to the order is pending in Boston, where a federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments June 2 in cases brought by voting-rights groups and a coalition of states.

Counties face steep compliance questions

Local election officials and experts said the proposal raised urgent operational questions about whether existing ballot envelopes comply with the new standards, whether counties and vendors can produce unique barcodes for outgoing and return ballots, and whether USPS could reject ballot mailings if voter data is missing, late, or mismatched.

“I don’t know how the states would potentially interpret what they need to do in order to comply, and what happens if the state doesn’t?” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer for the Election Center, which represents state and local election officials. “Does that mean the postal service will reject the ballots? I don’t think so. The postal service will deliver any mail provided to them so what happens if a state doesn’t do it?”

In addition, Patrick added, “I haven’t seen much here that is giving me much confidence this can be done by the fall without creating a lot of confusion and potential chaos.”

Patrick said many of the Postal Service’s proposed standards are best election-mail practices, many of which she worked on for years. But turning them into federal mandates could collide with state laws and leave local officials with no clear way — or funding — to comply.

“Some of these things are actually really good,” Patrick said, though election officials have been unable to adopt them in the past, and there’s no funding in the executive order to help.“Who is going to pay for it?”

Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state, said implementing the changes before the 2026 midterms would place another burden on election officials who are already underfunded and understaffed.

“Especially in situations like this, where there is no funding being provided and no time for election officials and voters to absorb the required changes, this means that voters will bear the brunt of a poorly planned, last minute attempt to upend electoral processes,” said Boockvar, a Democrat. “You can’t just snap your fingers and change how elections are run overnight.”

A technical rule with major implications

Among the most concerning pieces of the 20-page proposal, voting rights advocates and election officials said, is a new requirement that every ballot envelope — both the one sent to the voter and the one used to return the ballot — carry a unique Postal Service barcode.

Election officials would have to send those barcodes to USPS along with voters’ names and addresses, allowing the agency to check whether outbound ballot mailings match the state-submitted list before accepting them. The postal service said the new rules wouldn’t apply to primary elections or to military and overseas ballots, but critics said it could force some jurisdictions to redesign envelopes, update vendor contracts, and build new ballot-tracking systems before the next federal election in November.

That could be difficult. For example, Thad Hall, the election director in Pennsylvania’s Mercer County, said that while some of his outgoing mail envelopes have intelligent barcodes, not all do. Officials in other Pennsylvania counties have in the past said their vendors do not use intelligent barcodes.

Gideon Cohn-Postar, director of federal affairs at the Institute for Responsive Government, a nonpartisan think tank, characterized the proposal as a confusing attempt to comply with Trump’s recent executive order.

“The executive order they are trying to fulfill is incoherent in and of itself,” he said.

Cohn-Postar said the proposals could have the biggest impact on small jurisdictions that may not have the funding to comply. In a small jurisdiction of about 2,500 voters, ordering new envelopes costs about $10,000 — a significant expense that requires them to learn entirely new technology.

For those jurisdictions, he said, the proposal could be a “big change.”

“Right now, in the heat of the midterm election cycle, election officials should be given the space and resources to focus on critical work like improving cyber and physical security,” he said. “More bureaucracy only pulls them away from those mission-critical priorities.”

Correction, May 29: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a quotation to Mercer County Election Director Thad Hall.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Federal judge refuses to block Trump executive order on mail voting — for now

2026-05-28T13:28:23+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

This is a breaking story.

What happened? A federal court judge Thursday declined, for now, to halt two major provisions of President Donald Trump’s second executive order on elections, which would give the U.S. Postal Service sweeping new authority to regulate mail ballots and would force major changes to the administration of the midterm elections.

Judge Carl Nichols found that the U.S. Postal Service has not yet acted to implement the president’s order, and until it does, the nonprofit groups and Democratic Party committees that brought the legal challenge cannot show they had been harmed in a way that merited the court’s immediate intervention. He also declined to block a second provision that requires the U.S. Homeland Security Department to create lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state, saying it wasn’t yet clear the department would carry out the president’s order in a way that violated federal law.

But Nichols, a Trump appointee, signaled that once the agencies do act, the outcome in court could be different. “The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws,” Nichols wrote. “Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur.”

What’s the dispute? Multiple nonprofit groups, Democratic Party committees, and states sued Trump, the U.S. Postal Service, and other federal agencies over the president’s March 31 executive order on elections, which give the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail ballots. Some of those cases were consolidated before Nichols in federal court in Washington, D.C., and he is the first federal judge to address the order.

The plaintiffs argue the Constitution doesn’t give the president authority over elections.

The executive order works by requiring or asking for the creation of multiple lists of eligible citizens and voters who can use mail ballots, though it’s not always clear how the lists intersect. First, the order requires the U.S. Homeland Security Department to create lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state that, plaintiffs argue, cannot be assembled without violating federal privacy laws.

The order also says states may also create lists of voters and provide them to the U.S. Postal Service, which in turn would only be authorized to deliver ballots from people on a third list, to which states would be allowed “to routinely supplement and provide suggested modifications or amendments.”

Plaintiffs argued the DHS lists would inherently be inaccurate and unreliable, and that no federal law allows the U.S. Postal Service the ability to regulate mail-in voting. At a hearing before Nichols earlier this month, U.S. Justice Department lawyer Stephen M. Pezzi acknowledged that “no list is ever going to be perfect,” but said that states acting responsibly wouldn’t throw voters off the rolls just because they weren’t on the list provided by the federal government.

Pezzi argued that federal agencies have yet to take action on the order, and that their eventual actions could comply with federal law. Danielle Lang, a lawyer for the nonprofit watchdog group Campaign Legal Center who is representing some of the nonprofits, argued that the order’s timing, with primary elections underway, will cause chaos. And although the order does not require states to use the lists they receive from DHS, Lang said at least some will certainly feel pressure to do so.

The March 31 executive order is Trump’s second attempt to exercise oversight of federal elections. Federal courts blocked many provisions of Trump’s first executive order on elections.

What happens now?

The lawsuit remains pending before Nichols, and a separate case is pending in federal court in Boston. The executive order instructed the U.S. Postal Service to initiate a rulemaking on how it would carry out the order within 60 days of when it was issued, a deadline which falls at the end of May.

Read more Votebeat coverage of Trump’s March 31 executive order on elections:

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting, March 31, 2026

Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order, April 3, 2026

We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections, April 6, 2026

Two reminders that the rules of the 2026 election are still in flux

2026-05-11T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

With less than six months until the general election, and state primaries already well underway, you’d think that the rules of engagement for the 2026 midterms would be set by now. But two developments last week should quickly disabuse you of that notion.

Redistricting risks confusing voters and costing states millions

First up: Multiple states are plowing ahead with redrawing their congressional districts in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. As we reported in last week’s newsletter, the flurry of mid-decade redistricting has already diluted the voting power of millions of people. But there’s another consequence to redrawing maps specifically at this late juncture: It will throw primary elections that are actively underway into disarray, confusing voters, forcing election officials to scramble, and costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

For example, after the Callais decision ruled Louisiana’s congressional map unconstitutional, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, quickly issued an emergency executive order suspending the state’s May 16 congressional primary for U.S. House candidates — even though voting had already started. Approximately 42,000 voters had already cast absentee ballots with those races on them.

Under Landry’s order, the rest of the primary will go ahead, but votes in those U.S. House races won’t count.

Legal challenges to his order are still pending, voters are confuzzled, and election officials are warning that adding a second primary election just for U.S. House elections will be expensive. “This election cost about $212,000 to $215,000, and so if we still go forward … and have to add the other closed party primary, that’s going to be more money,” Louis Perret, the Lafayette Parish clerk of court, said in an interview with KADN-TV. Perret estimated the statewide cost at around $8 million.

In Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed a new map on May 4, county election supervisors say they’re preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars sending voters updated information about their new districts and clarifying where they’ll be voting. Alabama has petitioned courts to let it use a previous version of its congressional map, which would require new primary elections this summer, and a state fiscal note attached to the legislation estimates that could cost $4.5 million over two fiscal years.

Tennessee, which enacted a new map on Thursday, also enacted a law that eliminated the requirement for counties to notify voters by mail when their precincts and polling places change, according to the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, though counties can still get reimbursed by the state if they choose to send the mailings. This would save money but leave voters responsible for figuring that out themselves. “When polling places or precincts are changed, more effort should be made to reach affected voters, not less,” the coalition wrote.

In Virginia, the state Supreme Court on Friday overturned the congressional map voters passed in a referendum late last month, citing problems with the process lawmakers followed in putting it on the ballot. That means the millions of dollars the state spent on the election was essentially for naught.

It does also mean that state and local election officials will avoid the “very, very time-consuming, incredibly detailed process” of assigning voters to the new districts while preparing to administer the upcoming August primary election, said Chris Piper, who was Virginia’s chief election official until 2022.

“In order to make those changes, it takes quite a lot of work,” he said.

The feds aren’t sure what to do with Trump’s mail voting executive order

Redistricting isn’t the only thing that could turn the midterms on their head. On March 31, President Donald Trump issued a second executive order on elections that would have given the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail ballots, which immediately drew legal challenges.

Democrats, voting rights groups, and states all filed lawsuits challenging the order. In a May 1 filing in a lawsuit consolidating some of those challenges, the U.S. Department of Justice asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuits and not issue a preliminary injunction blocking the order. That was no surprise, but more notable was their reasoning for it: The department argued that the lawsuits were premature because federal agencies haven’t even started to implement the order yet.

The order called for the creation of three separate lists of potential voters, including a list of citizens over age 18 residing in each state. But as Votebeat reported, it didn’t specify what any of these lists had to do with each other or, really, anything about how the order was supposed to work.

In statements accompanying the filing, leaders at the U.S. Postal Service and Social Security Administration basically said they were still figuring out what the order means for them. And the DOJ essentially agreed with many of the order’s critics who had pointed out that the order provided no direction on what to do with the lists it created.

“The Order does not specify any particular purpose or intended use for the State Citizenship Lists,” the department wrote in the filing, “and (other than their creation by the Department of Homeland Security … and transmission to States) does not require anyone inside or outside of the federal government to do anything with those lists.”

The administration’s inaction on implementing Trump’s executive order at least makes it less likely it will change anything for voters or election officials in the 2026 election, even if the courts decline to block it. But if there’s one thing we learned this week, it’s that politicians aren’t afraid to upend election administration if their motivations are strong enough, so the status of the order’s implementation bears watching into the summer and fall.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

One line in Trump’s order would reshape how long states have to store election records

2026-04-06T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Deep inside the executive order on mail voting President Donald Trump signed March 31 is a technical-sounding line: “States and localities should preserve, for a 5-year period, all records and materials — excluding ballots cast — evidencing voter participation in any Federal election (e.g., ballot envelopes, regardless of carrier).”

But the line is a bigger deal than it sounds like, should the executive order go into force (it’s currently facing four federal lawsuits asserting the president exceeded his authority with it).

Right now, federal law requires such records to be kept for 22 months. The order more than doubles that requirement, and does so without specifically defining what counts as evidence of “voter participation in any Federal election.”

That puts state and local election administrators in a familiar bind: trying to comply with a sweeping directive without clear boundaries, and without any obvious plan for how to store what could be a massive increase in materials. County budgets and state laws — and the realities of available physical and digital storage — weren’t built with this kind of expansion in mind.

The order’s use of the word “should” is telling, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former DOJ voting rights attorney. Taken as a whole, he argued, the order is broadly unconstitutional. And in this specific instance, its language appears to acknowledge a key limitation: the president cannot compel local jurisdictions to retain more election records than federal law requires.

The 22-month retention period in existing law was deliberately chosen, he said — long enough for investigators to pursue credible evidence, but finite, so election administrators can prepare for the next federal cycle.

“You can’t have every election that’s ever been held be stored constantly forever,” Becker said. “Paper takes up room, and voting machines have to be reprogrammed for the next election.”

The sentence in the order explicitly exempts cast ballots from the five-year retention period, though it isn’t clear why. The White House did not respond to a request to explain that. Still, the order would include storage of a wide range of materials that show a voter cast a ballot and how that ballot was processed. In practice, that could include envelopes with voter information and signatures, poll books and electronic check-in records, absentee ballot logs that show when ballots were sent and returned, provisional ballot envelopes and affidavits, and more.

Overwhelming numbers of boxes, bytes, and mandates

The scale of election record storage is already substantial. Across a federal election cycle, jurisdictions manage thousands of sealed boxes of ballots, envelopes, and related materials that must be securely stored and organized for potential audits. That amount of paper takes up a lot of space. In Fulton County, Georgia, for example, the FBI seized roughly 700 boxes of election materials related to the 2020 election from a single jurisdiction. That was just a subset of what Fulton County stores, and an even smaller subset of what the state stores. Across Georgia, thousands of boxes full of hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper from across every election held in the past 22 months are stacked and waiting. That helps illustrate the type of storage space that would be required to comply with this provision.

Available evidence suggests storage space is already a constraint, particularly for under-resourced jurisdictions. Many rural counties have few secure storage facilities that could accommodate this influx of paper, and some counties struggle even more to retain digital files.

Tammy Patrick is the chief program officer at the Elections Center, a resource hub and training center for local election officials. She told Votebeat this week that many elections offices “don’t have a designated computer.” In some smaller counties, election work is part time and resources are shared with other less-than-full-time offices. Ultimately, the capacity of various elections offices to expand their physical and digital storage demands will differ widely by jurisdiction.

In some cases, digital storage limits have already affected operations, like in Bexar County, Texas, where accumulated election data strained system capacity and delayed primary results earlier this month. Election offices also already handle thousands of physical records that must be kept in secure, often climate-controlled environments. Texas officials have warned that paper-based systems create “new challenges for storing and securing materials.” Those needs have grown as more and more counties returned to the use of paper ballots and other physical records. Groups like the Bipartisan Policy Center have for years noted that “many election offices are under-resourced, with limited storage capacity.” The system mandating this election-records Tetris is built on a relatively short list of federal laws. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1960, states must preserve “all records and papers” related to federal elections, including ballots and ballot envelopes, for 22 months. Separately, the National Voter Registration Act requires states to keep voter registration and list maintenance records for at least two years. Together, these laws set a mandatory baseline that already gives the federal government access to a wide range of election materials.

State laws build on that baseline in uneven and disparate ways. Many mirror the 22-month rule for ballots and ballot envelopes but extend retention for other records, particularly those documenting voter participation. For example, California keeps ballots and vote-by-mail envelopes for 22 months but retains voter participation records, such as rosters showing who voted, for up to five years. Texas uses detailed records schedules that require multi-year retention for materials like poll lists, voter registration files, and administrative records, sometimes allowing electronic storage.

The executive order layers another requirement on top of all of that.

The order also directs the attorney general and federal agencies to “take all lawful steps to deter and address noncompliance with Federal law,” including to prioritize enforcement of statutes covering non-citizen voting, voter registration fraud, and a range of other voting-related crimes.

Becker said the rhetoric is part of a familiar pattern — “a drumbeat that we hear from this administration that prosecutions are coming.” Trump has echoed that message repeatedly, including in remarks at the World Economic Forum in January.

Read in that context, the five-year retention provision appears designed to preserve records that could be relevant to future investigations. Ballot envelopes and related participation records can contain voter-identifying information, signatures, tracking information, and other data showing whether and how a ballot was issued, returned, and processed.

Still, Becker said he’s telling election officials not to worry.

“The executive order can say whatever it wants to. It can say that the AG can investigate people and have them do a little dance. Ultimately, what the attorney general does — what the DOJ does — is investigate violations of federal law,” he said. “It’s hard to investigate criminal wrongdoing when none has taken place.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica atjhuseman@votebeat.org.

We still have questions about Trump’s new executive order on elections

2026-04-06T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

When reviewing President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting on Tuesday evening, election lawyer Aaron Blacksberg noticed something odd.

The order provides for the creation of not one, not two, but three separate lists:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security must use various federal databases to compile a list of citizens over age 18 residing in each state and send it to the chief election official in that state.
States are invited to send the U.S. Postal Service a list of eligible voters to whom the state intends to provide a mail-in or absentee ballot.
The U.S. Postal Service must provide each state with a list of people “who are enrolled with the USPS” to get their ballots delivered by the Postal Service in that state. The Postal Service would not be allowed to deliver any ballots from people not on this list.

But Blacksberg, the federal policy counsel for the Institute for Responsive Government, noticed that the order doesn’t specifically say what, if anything, these three lists have to do with one another.

“This executive order doesn’t make clear how the administration will even do what they say they’re doing, which is limiting mail-in voting based on who they say are citizens and eligible voters,” Blacksberg said.

Blacksberg’s guess is that the U.S. Postal Service will take List 2 (the list of mail voters provided by the states) and cross-reference it with List 1 (the list of adult citizens, though the order says Homeland Security is providing that to states, not USPS) to generate List 3 (the list of people allowed to vote by mail).

But the order doesn’t actually specify any of that.

Blacksberg noted that the order directs the U.S. Postal Service to propose rules by May 30 governing the process of creating List 3, so we may get more clarity then. But as of right now, the first two lists aren’t explicitly required to be used for anything at all. They just … exist.

Of course, many experts and state officials say the president doesn’t have the authority to mandate the steps outlined in the executive order anyway, and multiple federal lawsuits challenging it have already been filed. But the Case of the Three Lists is only one of several mysteries about how the order would actually work, should courts allow it to go into effect.

The White House also released a fact sheet on Tuesday that aimed to summarize the order and make it easier to understand — but it ended up muddling at least one key provision instead.

As mentioned, the executive order decrees that the Postal Service “shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual” (emphasis ours) who isn’t on List 3. But the fact sheet says, “The Order requires the USPS to transmit ballots only to individuals” on List 3. Those, of course, are different things.

Presumably the language in the executive order, not the fact sheet, is what’s operative. But the error in the fact sheet raises questions about what the White House thinks its own order does.

One thing that’s clearer in the order is how Homeland Security should assemble the list of citizens over 18 residing in each state. It calls for the list to be “derived from Federal citizenship and naturalization records, [Social Security Administration] records, SAVE data, and other relevant Federal databases.” SAVE is a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services database the Trump administration overhauled last year and has been urging election officials to use to verify voter citizenship.

But that specificity doesn’t mean the process will be straightforward. “It’s not a feasible thing to do with any accuracy for every citizen in the country over 18,” said John Davisson, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit that advocates on privacy rights.

He said that while, in theory, multiple federal databases could be combined to verify residency, in practice there is “no reliable way” to integrate systems that weren’t designed to communicate with one another, or for this purpose.

Doing so would almost certainly result in incomplete or inaccurate results, Davisson said. In addition, the order notes the need to comply with all applicable federal laws, including the Privacy Act. That law, Davisson said, places strict limits on the government’s ability to acquire and use personal data, but how those restrictions would apply here is unclear, since the agencies’ plans for compiling the lists will depend on rulemaking that has not yet been developed.

Votebeat this week sent the White House a list of questions about the executive order and how it would work, including to ask how the different lists it calls for would interact with each other and about the differences between the language in the order and the White House fact sheet.

A White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, responded with a general statement saying, in part, “Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump.”

But Jackson did not respond to any of our specific questions.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Trump administration sued by states over mail voting executive order

2026-04-03T20:11:05+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

A coalition of Democratic officials from 23 states, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and the attorneys general of California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Washington, are suing the federal government over President Donald Trump’s new executive order to regulate mail voting.

The lawsuit, which is being filed in Massachusetts, says the order violates the U.S. Constitution by usurping the states’ power to administer their own elections. The Constitution delegates states the primary authority to run elections, subject to rules set by Congress, but gives the president no role.

“The U.S. Constitution makes clear that elections are to be run by the states, and here in Pennsylvania, we believe that the administration of elections should be nonpartisan,” Shapiro said in a statement.

Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that mail voting is rife with fraud and has sought to curtail it. On Tuesday, he signed an executive order that directs the U.S. Postal Service not to deliver mail ballots from any voter not on a pre-approved list of voters who will receive mail ballots and requires each authorized mail voter’s envelope to have a unique barcode.

The order also directs the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of adult citizens residing in each state and provide that list to states 60 days before a federal election.

The order isn’t Trump’s first attempt to push into how states run elections. Last March, he issued an executive order that, among other things, tried to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. States sued over that order on similar legal grounds, and courts have so far blocked most of that order’s major provisions.

This week’s lawsuit named Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Social Security Administration, the U.S. Postal Service, and several federal officials as defendants.

“The President’s latest attempt to interfere with the States’ administration of their elections is as unprecedented as it is unconstitutional,” the lawsuit said. “Neither the Constitution nor any act of Congress confers upon the President the authority to mandate sweeping changes to States’ electoral systems or procedures.”

The lawsuit is at least the fourth that has been filed against the executive order since Trump signed it late Tuesday. Two separate coalitions of voting-rights advocacy groups sued Thursday, with one filing a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts and the other in Washington, D.C. Democratic Party groups filed the first lawsuit in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.

“Only Democrat politicians and operatives would be upset about lawful efforts to secure American elections and ensure only eligible American citizens are casting ballots,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “President Trump campaigned on securing our elections and the American people sent him back to the White House to get the job done.”

Shapiro, along with Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, had immediately decried the order when it was signed on Tuesday and signaled legal action was forthcoming.

Shapiro joined the lawsuit in his capacity as governor, rather than on behalf of the state. Suing on behalf of a state is a responsibility that generally falls to the attorney general, and Pennsylvania’s current attorney general Republican Dave Sunday.

The attorneys general who joined the suit represent Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia.

The new lawsuit is only the latest judiciary clash between the Trump administration and the states over election issues. The U.S. Department of Justice has sued 30 states, including Pennsylvania, plus the District of Columbia over their refusal to turn over complete versions of their voter rolls. The Pennsylvania Department of State argues turning over the data would be illegal because it contains private information.

Pennsylvania’s motion to dismiss that case is currently pending.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Votebeat editor-in-chief Carrie Levine contributed.

Trump issues second executive order on elections, giving U.S. Postal Service unprecedented control over mail voting

2026-04-01T00:43:36+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a second executive order on elections, this one giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented oversight over who is voting by mail, a move experts and state election officials said will quickly draw legal challenges.

The order, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” says that states can send the U.S. Postal Service a list of voters “to whom the State intends to provide a mail-in or absentee ballot” 60 days before any federal election, and directs the Postal Service to create “unique ballot envelope identifiers, such as bar codes” for those voters.

The Postal Service would only be authorized to deliver ballots from people on an approved list, which states would be allowed “to routinely supplement and provide suggested modifications or amendments” to.

Separately, the executive order also directs the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration and use other federal databases to create a list of all adult citizens residing in each state and send it to the state’s chief election official, though it noted that voters would still be required to register to vote in accordance with state law.

While signing the executive order Tuesday evening, Trump told reporters at the White House that the order was about ensuring voter integrity. “We want to have honest voting in our country, because if you don’t have honest voting, you can’t have, really, a nation.”

Experts say executive order is legally and logistically dubious

Experts said the order will be immediately challenged and that, practically speaking, even if it weren’t, it would be difficult to implement before the November election.

“The president has no power to direct the creation of any of these lists or to restrict the delivery of mail ballots to any given list,” said Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which represented plaintiffs suing over Trump’s first executive order on elections.

Trump issued that order just over a year ago. Among other things, it attempted to require registering voters to provide documented proof of citizenship and prohibit the counting of mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward. However, federal courts have repeatedly ruled the president lacks the authority to rewrite election law and have so far blocked the order’s major provisions.

Lang said those court rulings “provide a clear roadmap” for challenges to this one.

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states and Congress the power to make laws governing elections, not the president. Despite that, the White House has promised for months that a second executive order on elections was forthcoming, sparking widespread speculation about what it would include. The order Trump issued Tuesday was less sweeping than some had expected.

Rick Hasen — a professor of election law at the University of California Los Angeles — said the executive order is “pretty mild, given what could have been, but it’s still unconstitutional and not something that could really be implemented in time.”

Asked whether the U.S. Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security could realistically implement the changes in time for the November election, Hasen was blunt: “No way.” He added that if the administration attempted to move forward anyway, “courts would stop it.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service, Jeffery Adams, reached by phone, did not immediately respond to questions about whether the agency would, or could, comply with the executive order. “We’re reviewing the executive order right now,” he said.

Even in the absence of immediate court intervention, Hasen warned the effort “is going to conflict with all kinds of state laws that provide for a late sending of mail-in ballots to newly eligible voters and to voters who simply put in a late request.”

More fundamentally, Hasen emphasized that the proposal misunderstands the constitutional structure of election administration. “The fundamental point is that the Constitution doesn’t give DHS any power over elections,” he said. “The power to run state elections rests with the states. The power to run federal elections rests with the states,” except where Congress chooses to act — and, he noted, “the president is not Congress.”

Small changes, big consequences for ballot design

To facilitate much of the tracking envisioned in Trump’s new order, it mandates that all mail ballots use official election envelopes with Postal Service intelligent mail barcodes, whose design would have to be approved by the Postal Service.

Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at The Election Center, a nonprofit association of election officials, noted the order draws on a ballot-tracking barcode system she helped develop with the Postal Service. She said barcodes and official election mail logos are legitimate best practices — but that the executive order misapplies them without providing funding or a path to implementation.

The system was designed to help the Postal Service identify and prioritize ballots, not to serve as a universal mandate — and many local election offices lack the capacity to implement it, she said.

Patrick also said the proposal conflicts with state laws and voting timelines. “The vast majority of states” allow absentee ballot requests much closer to Election Day, in some cases as late as the “Monday before Tuesday elections,” meaning the changes could disenfranchise voters, including “conceivably tens of thousands” who move shortly before an election.

Patrick said ballot envelope design is “way more complicated than one would ever believe it to be.” Even small changes — like folding ballots for machine processing — can affect how they’re tabulated. She noted that resources to implement barcodes and automation vary widely across jurisdictions, and many states have strict legal requirements limiting changes.

“More than a third of our election offices don’t have a full-time employee. Some of our election offices don’t have a designated computer,” she said. Given those constraints, she believes it will be impossible for many offices to comply.

State election officials express alarm about the order

State election officials agreed that the order would upend the way they do their jobs and, were it to go into effect, would be extremely challenging to implement. Multiple state officials, including those in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wisconsin, also signaled that they plan to sue.

Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said she was most concerned by the requirement that states provide the Postal Service with a list of mail voters at least 60 days before an election, noting that Wisconsin law allows voters to request mail ballots far closer to Election Day. Jacobs said she was not reassured by the fact that the executive order allows states to suggest additions to the list. “What if the federal government says no? What happens to those voters?”

The executive order also holds that states violating it would forfeit their federal funding. It’s not clear if the order threatens to withhold just federal money designated for elections, or further federal funds beyond that. Jacobs said Wisconsin wasn’t counting on getting additional federal funds for elections but that it would be “rather extreme” for the state to lose additional federal funding.

The executive order also appears to authorize the U.S. attorney general to prosecute election officials who send ballots to ineligible voters, even unknowingly. Jacobs called that measure a “great way to make sure nobody wants to work in elections.”

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, called the executive order “a disgusting overreach from the federal government.” He said it would upend the state’s voting, which is predominantly conducted by mail, and pledged to fight it in court.

“This move is nothing more than a push to weaponize the sensitive personal information of voters in this country, an effort my office will continue to fight unrelentingly,” he said in a statement.

Arizona’s mailed ballots also already have tracking barcodes on the outer envelope. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said the state’s existing vote-by-mail system has “been used safely and securely for decades” and accused Trump of “trying to control who gets to vote.”

“We will use every legal tool available to defend Arizona’s elections, Arizona’s voters, and Arizona’s constitutional right to run its own elections,” she said.

In Colorado, a state where nearly everyone votes by mail, Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said elections officials are “already in conversations with our attorneys general.”

“We look forward to this unconstitutional overreach being stopped by the judiciary,” she said.

Other officials similarly expressed confidence that the order would not stand up in court.

“It’s just an empty threat,” said Scott McDonell, the clerk of Dane County, Wisconsin, adding that his attorneys had told him not to even worry about it.

“The courts will strike it down faster than a cheetah on meth,” he said.

Trump is still pushing other election law changes

Trump has tried passing his election agenda through legislative means, but so far he hasn’t had much success. Two bills that would require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote, the SAVE Act and the SAVE America Act, have passed the House but stalled in the Senate, where the filibuster rule effectively means legislation needs 60 votes to pass. The president has repeatedly called on Republican senators to eliminate the filibuster and pass the legislation, which he has said is his top priority, but they’ve so far been reluctant to do so.

Republicans have had a bit more luck changing election law in GOP-led states, multiple of which have passed proof-of-citizenship requirements and moved mail-ballot receipt deadlines up to Election Day.

But Trump, who has long railed against mail voting, has repeatedly signaled that piecemeal action would not be enough. He has previously posted on social media that he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and said in February that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

The executive order does not address other items from Trump’s elections wish list, but at the signing ceremony, Trump hinted he may not be done trying to change election policies. “We’d like to have voter ID, we’d like to have proof of citizenship,” he said. “That’ll be another subject for another time. We’re working on that.”

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Despite the SAVE America Act stalling, Trump is reshaping election policy in many states

2026-03-30T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Presidents have no constitutional authority to oversee elections or dictate how they are run.

That hasn’t stopped President Donald Trump from a sweeping effort to reshape elections during his second term in office. Legislation on Trump’s election priorities has so far stalled in the U.S. Senate, and federal courts have for now blocked key provisions of an executive order on elections he signed last year.

But his efforts are affecting laws at the state level.

Since Trump resumed office last January, at least 10 states have passed legislation reflecting one or more of his preferred election policies, including Florida’s passage of a proof-of-citizenship registration requirement earlier this month. In total, at least one-third of state legislatures have seriously considered bills that align with, or seek to counter, Trump’s aggressive push to reshape the nation’s electoral system.

This all comes as Trump attempts to exercise his influence over elections in practically every way possible, from encouraging states to use a newly overhauled — but unreliable — federal database to identify noncitizens on voter rolls, to appointing officials who have repeatedly questioned election results or attempted to overturn them — not to mention his efforts to tip election outcomes in his party’s favor by pushing for partisan redistricting.

His influence is not without limits: No state has so far adopted his calls to nearly eliminate mail voting and passed a law to that effect.

Still, lawmakers in the states that have passed or advanced legislation aligned with the president’s preferred election policies have often cited him as the reason, or taken action following statements he’s made. In some cases, such as Texas’ midcycle redrawing of political maps, state lawmakers were responding to direct pressure from Trump.

“The process of spreading legislative ideas is one that always takes place in any administration, any political environment,” said Gideon Cohn-Postar, director of federal affairs at the nonpartisan Institute for Responsive Government and a historian of election law. “This one has been far more explicit.”

And to a lesser extent, some blue-state legislatures are aiming to counter Trump’s push into state election policy through, in one example, a new law that would block federal troops at voting locations.

Trump speaks, states follow

The president has sought to impose new documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements for registering to vote, end post-election grace periods for mail ballots and severely restrict their use, and redraw congressional maps. He’s often lobbied state officials directly, including at a gathering of governors last month, pushing election policy to the forefront of legislative agendas.

A Votebeat analysis of legislation found that since January 2025, when Trump took office for his second term, at least 13 states have advanced legislation out of at least one chamber that aligns with an election administration policy Trump has expressly demanded.

For example, in 2023, very few states introduced bills to require documentary proof of citizenship from voters, compared to nearly half in 2025, according to Chris Diaz, director of legislative tracking at the Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that tracks all state legislation on voting and elections.

For years, Arizona for years was the only state that required documented proof of citizenship, though New Hampshire and Louisiana passed new requirements in 2024. But since the beginning of Trump’s second term, as he has relentlessly promoted concerns about potential noncitizen voting, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Utah passed a proof of citizenship requirement, and bills are currently headed to governors’ desks in Florida and Mississippi. Iowa’s legislature is also considering a similar bill.

Proponents of the bills have openly said they are acting to carry out the president’s wishes. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, a Republican state representative in Florida who sponsored the proof-of-citizenship bill there, said it “fully answers the president’s call” when she initially introduced it. Chuck Gray, Wyoming’s secretary of state, said in a statement that state’s measure was “key in supporting President Trump’s pivotal work to have proof of citizenship for registering to vote.”

And while states aren’t introducing as many mail voting-related bills compared to the 2021-2022 period, Diaz said the one area many states are still legislating on is accepting mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterwards.

“I think you can really trace that and the rise in proof of citizenship legislation back to the president’s executive order last March,” he said.

During the 2024 election, 18 states and the District of Columbia allowed mail ballots to be counted if they arrived within a legal grace period and were postmarked by Election Day. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case over the legality of that practice this week, but some states aren’t waiting for a ruling. Five Republican-controlled states have moved to eliminate their grace periods for late-arriving mail ballots, with four of those doing so after Trump directly called for its end in his March 2025 executive order.

In Ohio, one of the primary sponsors of a bill to end the state’s four-day grace period explicitly cited the executive order.

Presidential pressure on redistricting, voter rolls

In some cases, Trump, and his appointees in the federal government, have pressured state officials even more directly.

Last year, Trump pushed reportedly reluctant Texas Republicans into redrawing its congressional districts, setting off a midcycle redistricting war amongst the states, arguably Trump’s most profound influence on election policy. He tried the move again, unsuccessfully, in Indiana, calling out state legislators by name and promising to support primary opponents if lawmakers didn’t do as he wished.

Micah Beckwith, the Republican lieutenant governor of Indiana, also said unnamed members of Trump’s administration threatened the state’s federal funding if it didn’t redistrict.

And as tensions rose earlier this year over immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested in a letter that the state should hand over its unredacted voter rolls to the U.S. Justice Department, which has sued for access to them. State officials said they perceived her letter as a demand made in exchange for potentially withdrawing ICE agents from the city.

Cohn-Postar, from the Institute for Responsive Government, said while it isn’t uncommon for presidents to push for federal election policy or even comment on state laws, as Biden did with a controversial election bill in Georgia in 2021, it is unusual for them to directly call on states to take specific action. But what sets Trump’s actions apart, he said, is the direct calls for change coming from the president and the speed at which states seem willing to change their laws in response.

Utah, for example, has had universal mail voting since 2012, meaning that counties could conduct their elections entirely by mail by sending all registered voters a mail ballot. By 2019, all counties in the state had adopted this system, and more than 80 percent of voters in 2024 were very or somewhat confident that their votes were being counted accurately. But last year, the state nevertheless opted to move to an opt-in mail voting system starting in 2029.

“These states have taken policy decisions that they might not have in another political environment,” Cohn-Postar said. “I think that’s not coming from inside the house. That’s coming from outside the house.”

Blue states push back

Meanwhile, a handful of states led by Democrats are taking steps explicitly aimed at preventing Trump from interfering with elections, as well as countering his redistricting push.

Trump’s calls to nationalize elections and the federal seizure of 2020 election records in Fulton County, Georgia, and Arizona, among other moves, have heightened concerns that Trump may try to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections, including by deploying federal troops or ICE agents to polling places.

While some members of his administration have said it won’t happen, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin the question during his confirmation hearing last week, and he did not absolutely rule out the possibility. Steve Bannon, who was an adviser to Trump during his first term in office, has said the recent deployments of ICE to airports could be used as a “test run … to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.”

In anticipation, some states are considering steps to strengthen restrictions on federal law enforcement at voting locations, including New Mexico, which in February passed a bill making it a felony for federal troops or armed law enforcement to be at polls.

Democratic attorneys general are also coordinating on what possible actions they could take should Trump attempt to interfere in the midterms.

Last month, Colorado went a step further, becoming the ninth state — and first in Trump’s second term — to pass its own version of the Voting Rights Act, in part as a reaction to concerns that the federal statute faces threats from the current administration.

Changes could prompt voter confusion

A risk of all this new legislation, and the potential litigation that could follow, is that it confuses voters.

“They hear that this law gets passed and then signed by their governors, and then it gets challenged, and then there’s a temporary restraining order,” said Jessica Jones Capparell, director of government affairs at the League of Women Voters, which has sued over Trump’s executive order.

“And so they have to figure out what’s going on, what they have to bring with them when they go to vote, what do they need to do to register, update their voter registration.”

The biggest question is what happens in the few months before the November election, Diaz, from the Voting Rights Lab, said. Legislative sessions are still underway in some states, and he pointed to Florida as a potential barometer for where laws on election administration might go in the months and years ahead.

“These next few weeks especially will be really important to watch what happens,” he said. “Their legislative session is probably gonna wrap up pretty soon, and I think that will sort of be a big sign of how serious are legislators taking this as a policy goal versus a talking point. I think if Florida did enact a proof-of-citizenship bill this year, I think that could be something that really sets a tone for other states to start doing it.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

New federal ruling is latest defeat to Trump administration’s election agenda

2026-01-13T20:10:57+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

A federal judge on Friday became the third one to block key provisions of President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at revising election rules nationwide, ruling that the Constitution gives states and Congress —not the president— the authority to exercise power over elections.

The administration signaled it is likely to appeal the decision, the latest blow to Trump’s agenda on elections.

His March executive order sought to require proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form, mostly ban the use of machine-readable codes when tallying ballots, and prohibit the counting of ballots postmarked Election Day but received afterwards.

The administration has appealed two earlier rulings in other cases against the executive order. The cases could ultimately reach the U.S. Supreme Court, but election law experts told Votebeat the president faces long odds.

The White House has said the president is planning a second executive order on elections, though it’s unclear what will be in it, and federal court rulings so far show the approach has limitations.

“The court is very clear that the Constitution gives no authority to the president to do any of these things, and that federal law doesn’t either,” said Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

The president has also pushed for congressional action to change federal election laws, though federal legislation so far has stalled. He’s called on state lawmakers to advance his policy goals and some states, including Ohio, have repealed grace periods for mail ballots postmarked by Election Day but not received until afterwards.

In rulings in the two related elections executive order cases last year, federal judges struck down provisions of the order requiring those who registered to vote using the federal voter registration form to provide documentary proof of citizenship and requiring federal voter registration agencies to “assess” the citizenship of individuals who receive public assistance before providing them a voter registration form.

“It keeps getting worse for him,” David Becker, an election lawyer who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and now leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, said about Trump. “The more courts look at this executive order, the more they come to the conclusion that the president vastly exceeded his constitutional authority.”

Court ruling meant to ‘restore the proper balance of power’

In his Friday ruling, U.S. District Judge John Chun sided with the states of Oregon and Washington in his ruling against provisions of Trump’s order. He ruled against aspects of the order that require documented proof of citizenship on a federal voter form, call on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to revise certification guidelines to prohibit certain voting machines, and stop absentee ballots arriving after Election Day from being tallied, even if they are postmarked by Election Day.

He also struck down provisions of the executive order tying federal election funding to complying with the proof-of-citizenship provisions and the one banning ballots arriving after Election Day from being processed.

Chun, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, cited a long history of federal authorities — courts, politicians, and the Founding Fathers — recognizing the potential dangers in giving the president unilateral presidential powers of elections.

The intent of his decision, he said, was to “restore the proper balance of power among the Executive Branch, the states, and Congress envisioned by the Framers.”

Chun specified that his rulings blocking provisions denying election funding and banning ballots arriving after Election Day would apply only to Oregon and Washington, states that primarily rely on mail voting and which brought the lawsuit. But he barred the U.S. EAC from altering the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship and altering the agency’s Voluntary Voting System Guidelines to exclude machines that tally ballots using barcodes or quick-response codes.

The Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Executive order fails in court but inspires some action elsewhere

There are just two available constitutional paths for people in the federal government to change election policy in the states, Becker said: an act of Congress or persuading a state Legislature to change state election law.

Outside of some Republican-majority states banning mail-voting grace periods, he added, Trump’s desire to change state-level voting policy has been largely ineffective — states have hardly changed their practices.

Clinger said that the executive order is having a more tangible impact within the federal government.

For example, he said, the order instructed the U.S. Department of Justice to prioritize violations of election laws. The agency has filed 23 lawsuits so far against states unwilling to provide unredacted voter data to the government, which the Justice Department said it needs to make sure federal election laws are properly followed, and many of those lawsuits cited Trump’s executive order.

“Even if the executive order isn’t accomplishing its goals, it does come off as marching orders to the rest of the federal government to pursue related goals,” he said.

Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Marymount University who advised President Joe Biden’s administration on democracy and voting rights, said Trump’s election agenda boils down to “project power that he doesn’t have,” in hopes that the public will lose confidence in election results “even if the rules don’t change one bit.”

Levitt said doesn’t think the public will buy the hype, mostly because Trump and his allies don’t appear to have an actual plan for advancing their agenda. As he has in the past, he likened it to a South Park episode in which gnomes steal underpants as part of a three-step scheme — except they can’t explain the step between collecting the underpants and turning a profit.

A strategy missing the middle, Levitt said, “encapsulates quite a bit of the Trump administration’s approach to elections.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Judge rules against Trump’s call for proof-of-citizenship requirement for voters

2025-10-31T21:15:08+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

What happened?

A federal judge Friday permanently blocked a key provision of the sweeping executive order on elections President Donald Trump issued in March.

The ruling, from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, blocks his direction to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to take steps to require documentary proof of citizenship from people registering to vote.

“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

What’s the dispute?

Multiple nonprofit groups and Democratic Party committees sued Trump, the EAC, and other federal agencies over the order he signed in March calling for broad changes in how elections are administered. The plaintiffs argue that the Constitution does not grant the president authority to set rules for elections.

The lawsuits challenge multiple provisions of the executive order, including one that directs the EAC to add a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form; another requiring the agency to withhold federal funds from states that don’t comply with its requirements; and one prohibiting states from accepting mail ballots postmarked before Election Day, but received afterwards.

The Justice Department argued the order is legal under existing federal laws.

Kollar-Kotelly in April issued a preliminary injunction halting some provisions of executive order, including this provision. Her order Friday made that permanent.

Who are the plaintiffs?

Two of the lawsuits were filed by a collection of nonprofit groups, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, and others. Another was filed on behalf of Democratic national party committees and leadership. Additional lawsuits challenging provisions in the executive order are pending in other federal courts, including one by Democratic attorneys general in 19 states and another by the states of Oregon and Washington. A second federal judge also issued a preliminary injunction in June in the case filed by Democratic attorneys general.

What are they asking for?

The lawsuits asked the judge to stop the government from implementing or enforcing the provisions of the executive order under challenge, and, ultimately, to find them unconstitutional.

What happens now?

Kollar-Kotelly has yet to rule on challenges to additional provisions, and the remaining lawsuits in connection with the executive order are still pending. The Justice Department did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment on the ruling, which could be appealed.

Read more Votebeat coverage of the challenges to Trump’s executive order on regulating elections:

Trump’s executive order on elections is partly blocked by federal court, April 24, 2025
Judge hears challenges to Trump’s executive order on regulating elections, April 17, 2025
With Trump’s executive order, thousands of military voters could see their rights curtailed, April 10, 2025
First lawsuits against Trump’s election order cite text of Constitution, April 7, 2025
Democratic attorneys general sue Trump over elections executive order, April 3, 2025
New Trump order targets barcodes on ballots. Why? And what will that mean? March 28, 2025
Trump orders an overhaul of how elections are run, inviting a likely legal challenge, March 25, 2025

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Trump leans on voter ID politics as he tests the limits of his power

2025-09-08T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

President Donald Trump is promising another executive order on elections — this time to make voter ID a national requirement. Voter ID requirements have always been popular with Republicans, but now Trump is hinting at imposing one using federal power, in ways even conservatives used to reject.

Elections — I know, I know, I am repeating myself — are managed by the states, with oversight from Congress. There’s a whole clause about it in the Constitution that you can read yourself. Sure, he lacks constitutional authority over elections, but the point may not be policy alone — it’s also politics, and possibly a dangerous power grab.

Democratic leaders typically oppose voter ID requirements as an unnecessary barrier to voting, but the politics around voter ID have always been really good for Republicans. “If you persuade people that you are the party trying to make sure elections are controlled by American citizens and that Democrats are doing everything they can to make sure that illegal immigrants can vote by the busload, that’s a good position to be in,” former Texas state Rep. Todd Smith, a Republican, told me back in 2016, after he was booted from office for not writing a strict enough voter ID bill.

A Gallup poll conducted in October 2024 found that 84% of U.S. adults backed requiring a photo ID to vote. Nearly every Republican (98%) is on board, but even two-thirds of Democrats support it. It’s one of the rare voting policies with such broad bipartisan agreement.

That’s not to say it’s a simple proposition. The logistics of implementing a nationwide requirement would be messy: 36 states currently have some type of ID requirement for voters, but they vary widely on what types of IDs are accepted, for example, and what to do if a voter doesn’t have an ID. How ID requirements are enforced when it comes to mail ballots is even more confusing.

Trump’s social media posts don’t speak to the full details of the policies he plans to put in place.

As for the authority he plans to cite, that’s not clear, either. In a social media post on Aug. 18, he said that “states are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them.” That’s false, but it’s revealing.

In an interview on the Sept. 2 episode of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” Cleta Mitchell, the founder of the Election Integrity Network and an advocate for citizenship checks of voters and strict restrictions on mail ballots, among other things, acknowledged that the president’s authority over elections is limited.

But she hinted at a possible path forward: The president can intervene, she said, when “there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States, as I think that we can establish.” She went on to say that the president could be considering exercising emergency powers “to protect the federal elections going forward.”

Since returning to office earlier this year, Trump has repeatedly issued emergency declarations to justify sweeping executive actions in other arenas — including tariffs, immigration measures, and policing the streets of large, Democratic-led American cities. He appears poised to take the same approach to elections, a space where conservatives have long warned about the threats posed by “national ID cards” and federal overreach.

Trump could normalize that, all in the name of “election integrity.”

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Trump’s executive order: Work on new voting system guidelines is already in motion

2025-06-30T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Several provisions of President Donald Trump’s executive order on elections have run into obstacles in court. But others are quietly moving ahead, at least for now, with big potential implications for state and local election officials and the voting systems they rely on.

In Montgomery County, Ohio, for example, residents can choose to mark their ballots either by hand, or using a ballot-marking device that prints out a paper ballot with a summary of their choices, alongside a machine-readable code reflecting those choices. Voters can verify their selections before submitting their ballots into a tabulator, which scans the code and records the votes.

At least 85% of voters in a typical election choose the option that relies on the machine-readable codes, Jeff Rezabek, the county elections director, estimated.

So Rezabek is closely watching what happens with a provision in the executive order that calls for mostly banning the use of such codes (except where required for disability access), and what it would mean for the millions of dollars’ worth of already-certified voting equipment he can’t easily or quickly replace.

Experts consider systems with a voter-verifiable paper record to be the gold standard for election security. But some critics have argued that when these systems use a code for faster counting, voters have no way of knowing whether the code accurately reflect their choices, even though the results can be checked later.

The executive order instructs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to work the barcode ban into a revision of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, the certification standards that most states rely on for their voting equipment. And the multistep process of altering the standards is already beginning.

An initial step is set for July 2, when the U.S. EAC has called a meeting of its Technical Guidelines Development Committee, a group of mainly election officials and technical experts.

The EAC’s meeting notice says the technical committee, which currently has several vacancies, will consider a draft of updated guidelines at that meeting.

EAC Chairman Donald Palmer, in an emailed response to questions from Votebeat, said there have “been security concerns expressed by the Executive Branch, state legislatures, and stakeholders on both sides of the aisle” about the use of barcodes and QR codes, and the July 2 meeting is a required step in the EAC’s regular update process.

“With this review, the EAC is being responsive to election officials’ needs and the evolving security demands of our elections,” he said. “Gathering feedback from our boards and the public is a chance for the community to provide its essential input on those changes.”

Building voting systems to new standards, testing them in federally accredited laboratories, and certifying them takes a long time. The last set of revised guidelines, VVSG 2.0, were adopted in 2021, but no systems certified under those guidelines have yet hit the market, though some are going through the process now.

It isn’t clear what the EAC will do if the technical committee declines to endorse revised guidelines on the barcodes. But election officials know the general public isn’t closely following the federal rule-making process, and may not understand that equipment certified under the previous guidelines can be used securely and produce accurate results. They are worried that the executive order has already sown public doubt about the integrity of voting equipment.

“It doesn’t entirely matter what happens through the standards process because voters are not going to hear that part,” said Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors. “Voters are hearing the president said this, and so that optics challenge is going to be very difficult for elections in 2025 and beyond.”

State lawmakers, too, could also try to act on their own to carry out the president’s priorities, regardless of what happens with the executive order. That could prove expensive for local jurisdictions. Rezabek said Ohio state lawmakers recently considered legislation that would require localities to use election equipment certified to VVSG 2.0, which would require buying new machines.

“Then we’re in trouble because one, I have no funding,” he said. And even if he did, he said, “the manufacturer doesn’t have it to give to us.”

Rezabek, a former Republican state lawmaker, worked with Ohio’s election officials association to address their concerns and lobby state legislators against that. They haven’t adopted such a requirement — yet.

Election officials in other states are also worried. In Texas, state Elections Director Christina Adkins told county election officials on a call this month that her office has been “in discussions,” with the EAC, which she said “understands the impact of any decisions they make in this area.”

“I want to make it very clear, though, that we are bound to the federal certifications,” Adkins said. “Our state law requires that, so any changes to the federal certifications would generally apply to Texas systems as well.”

Some counties are already moving to replace equipment because of the executive order. In Williamson County, Texas, commissioners voted to spend more than $1 million to replace their current voting system, which relies on barcodes, with equipment that does not, according to local news reports.

Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest voting jurisdiction, uses customized voting equipment, and publicly posts a key to deciphering its QR code, to reassure the public that the codes can be checked to verify that they accurately reflect voters’ choices.

Election officials have been “assessing the impact” of having to modify or replace more than 31,000 ballot marking devices that are valued at more than $141 million, county elections chief Dean Logan wrote in court filings connected to one of the lawsuits challenging the executive order.

Money is just one consideration.

“Even if the EAC goes forward, changes these standards, and tries to apply them to existing voting systems, the time frame for making that kind of significant change to a voting system … that is usually a multiple year process to do that,” Logan said in an interview with Votebeat. “So part of what is not well-constructed in that order is understanding the timeline.”

Votebeat Texas reporter Natalia Contreras contributed.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Parts of Trump’s executive order on elections blocked by a federal court

2025-06-13T13:36:09+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

What happened?

A federal judge Friday issued a second preliminary injunction blocking some provisions of the sweeping executive order on elections that President Donald Trump signed in March.

Judge Denise Casper blocked provisions ordering the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to take steps to require documentary proof of citizenship from people registering to vote and requiring federal voter registration agencies to “assess” the citizenship of individuals who receive public assistance before providing them a voter registration form. Those provisions were also blocked by a federal judge in Washington D.C. last month in a separate case.

Casper also blocked parts of the order telling the U.S. Justice Department to enforce a ballot receipt deadline of Election Day and ordering the EAC to withhold federal funds from states that did not comply with it. Casper wrote that the states challenging the provisions had “shown the risk of irreparable harm” if they were permitted to go into force, and the provisions would require the costly and difficult process of revamping states’ voter registration processes, as well as hampering “the registration of eligible voters, many of whom lack ready access to documentary evidence of citizenship.”

Casper specified that the part of the order blocking enforcement of the Election Day ballot receipt provisions applies to 13 of the 19 states that filed the challenge: California, Nevada, Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Rhode Island.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

What’s the dispute?

Democratic attorneys general in 19 states together sued Trump in April over his sweeping executive order on elections, arguing that the president has no power under the Constitution to set election rules.

Trump’s March 25 order would require people to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote. It would also set Election Day as the national deadline for receiving mail ballots, require the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to rewrite voting machine certification standards, and withhold federal funds from states that don’t use compliant machines, among other things.

The states challenged multiple provisions of the order, including the proof-of-citizenship requirement and the instructions to federal agencies responsible for instituting it; the mail ballot deadline; and the threat to withhold federal funds for noncompliance.

The order “interferes with States’ inherent sovereignty and their constitutional power to regulate the time, place, and manner of federal elections,” the states wrote in their lawsuit.

At a June 6 hearing, Justice Department lawyer Bridget O’Hickey said the order sought to impose uniformity on a patchwork of state laws in order to boost public confidence in elections, the Associated Press reported.

The states’ lawsuit is one of several challenging Trump’s executive order on elections. In April, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking some provisions, including the one requiring documentary proof of citizenship. That ruling came in a separate lawsuit brought by a coalition of nonprofit groups that had been consolidated with one brought by Democratic Party groups.

Who are the plaintiffs?

The named plaintiffs are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. All are Democrats. The litigation was led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford.

Separate lawsuits challenging the executive order are pending in other federal courts, including the consolidated case filed by nonprofits and Democratic Party groups pending in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and a separate case filed by Oregon and Washington state pending in the Western District of Washington.

What are they asking for?

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts and assigned to Casper, who was nominated in 2010 by President Barack Obama. The states asked Casper to declare the challenged provisions of the executive order null and void, and prohibit federal officials from enforcing them.

Read more Votebeat coverage of the executive order on elections:

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Trump’s executive order on elections is partly blocked by federal court

2025-04-24T18:05:09+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat’s free national newsletter here.

What happened?

A federal judge Thursday issued a preliminary injunction halting some provisions of the sweeping executive order on elections President Donald Trump issued in March.

The injunction blocks his direction to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to take steps to require documented proof of citizenship from people registering to vote, and a provision requiring federal voter registration agencies to “assess” the citizenship of individuals who receive public assistance before providing them a voter registration form.

“Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a 120-page opinion.

Citing deliberations among the original framers of the Constitution, she wrote: “Executive regulatory authority over federal elections does not appear to have crossed the Framers’ minds.”

Kollar-Kotelly declined to halt some other provisions of the executive order, including one telling the U.S. Justice Department to enforce a ballot receipt date of Election Day against states and ordering the EAC to withhold federal funds from states that do not comply. She said the challenges to those provisions were “premature” or needed to be presented by the states themselves. She noted that states were filing those challenges in separate cases.

What’s the dispute?

The Justice Department argued the order is legal. At a court hearing earlier this month, Michael Gates, a deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s Civil Rights Division, who represented the government at a hearing Thursday, said the provisions of the executive order that are under challenge — including the one concerning a documented proof-of-citizenship requirement — are legal under existing federal laws.

He also argued the plaintiffs hadn’t suffered harm because the government had not yet taken action.

Who are the plaintiffs?

What are they asking for?

The lawsuits by the Democratic and nonprofit groups were filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and assigned to Kollar-Kotelly, who consolidated them. Kollar-Kotelly was nominated in 1997 by former President Bill Clinton. The lawsuits asked her to stop the government from implementing or enforcing the provisions of the executive order under challenge, and, ultimately, to find them unconstitutional.

What happens now?

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the preliminary injunction. In response to a request for comment, a spokesman for the Justice Department said the agency “will continue to fight in court to defend President Trump’s agenda.” The lawsuits remains pending before Kollar-Kotelly.

Read more Votebeat coverage of the executive order on elections:

Update: April 24, 2025, 5:45 p.m.: This story has been updated to include Justice Department comment.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Judge expected to rule next week on challenges to Trump’s executive order on elections

2025-04-17T22:29:03+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

What happened?

A federal judge said she planned to rule by April 24 on a request to stop parts of President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order on elections from being enforced or implemented.

What’s the dispute?

Multiple nonprofit groups and Democratic Party committees sued Trump, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and other federal agencies over the order he signed in March calling for broad changes in how elections are administered. The plaintiffs argue that the Constitution does not grant the president authority to set rules for elections.

The Justice Department argued the order is legal. Michael Gates, a deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s Civil Rights Division, who represented the government at a hearing Thursday, said the provisions of the executive order that are under challenge — including the one concerning a documented proof-of-citizenship requirement — are legal under existing federal laws.

He also argued the plaintiffs hadn’t suffered harm because the government had not yet taken action.

But Sophia Lin Lakin of the ACLU and Danielle Lang of the Campaign Legal Center, lawyers for the plaintiffs, argued that it had taken action. They pointed to a letter sent by the U.S. EAC on April 11, which cited the executive order and asked state election officials for input on adding a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form. Consulting with state election officials “is part of the statutory process required to change the federal form,” Lakin said during the hearing.

Gates told the judge he had been unaware of the letter when he filed his brief, but that it was an “extra step,” not a formal one, and administrative law processes mean it will take the agency months to add a requirement to the form. The letter “was more or less a brainstorming and an initial first blush to get feedback from elections officials about their initial thoughts,” he said.

Who are the plaintiffs?

What are they asking for?

The lawsuits by the Democratic and nonprofit groups were filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and assigned to Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who consolidated them. Kollar-Kotelly was nominated in 1997 by former President Bill Clinton. The lawsuits asked her to stop the government from implementing or enforcing the provisions of the executive order under challenge, and, ultimately, to find them unconstitutional.

What happens now?

Kollar-Kotelly said she plans to rule before April 24.

Read more Votebeat coverage of the executive order on elections:

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Why Arizona college students are fighting Trump’s elections executive order

2025-04-14T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

Expect hearings to begin soon on the lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to overhaul elections.

The cases were filed by a long list of national groups commonly active in voting rights litigation, such as the NAACP and the League of Women Voters. Among them this time is a lesser-known local wildcard: the Arizona Students’ Association.

It might seem strange that a group of Arizona students have an immediate concern about a federal order dictating how elections must be run. But Kyle Nitschke, the organizing director of the Arizona Students’ Association, said in an interview this week that his organization felt it had a responsibility, on behalf of the students it represents, to intervene.

That’s because the Arizona Students’ Association tries to register college students across Arizona. Because of the state’s unique laws requiring proof of citizenship, they have had a front-row view of how the requirements may be leading to the disenfranchisement of eligible Americans.

The order tells the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to alter the federal voter registration form to require people who are registering to vote to provide documents proving their citizenship, such as a passport.

Arizona is one of the few states in the country already limiting voting for those who don’t prove citizenship by providing a qualifying document. Such voters receive a ballot with just presidential and congressional contests, and are marked as “federal-only” voters. This applied to less than 1% of the state’s voter roll, or 34,933 out of around 4.4 million active voters eligible for the November 2024 presidential election.

A close look at the state’s federal-only voter list provides clues as to which voters nationally might struggle to provide citizenship proof. And as Nitschke knows well, and as Votebeat confirmed in an analysis last year, that definitely includes college students.

Votebeat analyzed the list of federal-only voters eligible to vote in the November election, and found that at least 6% of them live in just three precincts at the center of each of the state’s three public universities’ main campuses. That percentage doubles if expanded to include nearby precincts that include student housing.

Federal-only voters make up 29% of the voters in those three precincts, compared with 0.8% of the overall voter roll.

Though Votebeat can’t be certain that the federal-only voters in these precincts were all enrolled in the nearby universities, the analysis also found that federal-only voters were significantly more likely to be younger than 25 compared to the Arizona voting-age population in general.

All of this points to potentially disproportionate consequences for college-age voters.

When conducting voter registration drives on college campuses, Nitschke has told Votebeat in the past, the students’ association often runs into students originally from out of state who can’t provide proof of citizenship on the spot. That’s because many don’t have Arizona IDs, and they didn’t bring their birth certificates or passports with them to school.

The vast majority of such students are able to write down the last four numbers of their social security number, he has explained, but that doesn’t count as proof of citizenship under Arizona’s law.

When students can’t provide an in-state ID at a registration drive, the association provides them with a federal registration form so they can become a federal-only voter.

In the few months leading up to the November 2024 presidential election, half of the 3,500 students the association registered to vote used the federal form, Nitschke wrote in a declaration filed in the case this week, and therefore probably landed on the federal-only list.

That provides a glimpse of how many college students — just in the few months leading up to a presidential election — would probably not be able to register on the spot at voter registration drives in Arizona if the executive order was in effect. Nitschke wrote in the declaration that the potential harm from the order is “immediate and irreparable.”

“The EO causes fear and confusion for ASA members who have read or heard about it and are worried that they may not be able to register to vote despite being eligible to do so,” he wrote.

It isn’t the first time the association has pushed back against voter citizenship requirements. It’s also a plaintiff in the Mi Familia Vota v. Fontes case challenging two 2022 Arizona laws attempting to further restrict voting for Arizona residents who don’t provide citizenship proof.

In trial testimony for that case, Nitschke told the judge that if the new laws were in place, the organization would change its practice. Instead of helping students get registered as federal-only voters, it would turn the students away instead.

“I think we would see less students getting registered to vote in the state and see more students registering out of state or staying [registered] at addresses where they are not currently living — at their parents’ address,” Nitschke testified.

If the executive order requiring documented proof nationwide goes into force, these students may not end up registering at all.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

With Trump’s executive order, thousands of military voters could see their rights curtailed

2025-04-10T16:08:41+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Thousands of Michigan voters — including scores of military members and their families — could see their voting rights curtailed if President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on voting is allowed to take effect.

The order, issued late last month, introduces major changes to how elections would be run. Among its most concerning provisions for those who serve in the military or live outside the U.S.: a requirement that all voters submit proof of citizenship and that all ballots, including those coming from abroad, must arrive by the close of polls on Election Day to be counted.

Voters who live overseas or serve in the military are largely protected by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, known as UOCAVA. It guarantees that those living away from their home states or around the world can still cast their ballots.

The order represents the latest in a series of Republican attacks on UOCAVA voting, which has historically seen bipartisan support. Conspiracy theories have stoked the belief that the program — which has shown no evidence of fraud — might be used in some way to steal elections. But for the nearly 22,000 Michigan voters who used the program to cast their ballots last year, this new assault could simply make voting more difficult.

Trump’s order would change several key aspects of election administration, but it offers two key components that could hurt military voters. The first: voters registering would have to prove their citizenship. Citizenship is already required to vote in U.S. elections although documentary proof is not, and violators face harsh penalties.

“Somehow voters are going to have to find a way to send a passport, or maybe a picture of a passport, but I can tell you that can pose a security risk of identity theft,” said Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, founder of the Overseas Vote Foundation. “Email goes through multiple servers before it’s delivered, and it could go through countries we don’t realize. Is it going to bounce? Can that email be intercepted? Or should we send a paper version of our passport? That shouldn’t travel around.”

Voters who live abroad already have to jump through a number of hoops to cast their ballot, she said. While it could be possible to go to the closest consulate cto prove citizenship, the U.S. has been considering closing some of these offices in several countries.

“This isn’t very well thought through,” she added. “The requirement to show up in person would decimate us.”

While many people who live overseas have a passport, which would be an acceptable verification of citizenship under the order, there is no requirement for members of the military to have a passport. Servicemembers can use their military IDs to travel for work if needed — another ID named in the order — but those don’t typically have any indication of citizenship. The Department of Defense has remained quiet on what that could look like for those serving overseas.

One of the other most significant changes would be the declaration that all ballots must be in by Election Day to be counted. Michigan is one of several states that allows military and overseas voters to return ballots within a few days after the election as long as it is postmarked in time.

That’s not just state law — it’s a right that was amended into the Michigan Constitution when voters overwhelmingly approved Proposal 2 in 2022. Previously, those ballots had to be received by the close of polls, but voters living out of the country now get six additional days for their ballots to arrive and still be counted.

That helps to combat not only the complex process of getting mail from overseas but also recent problems with the U.S. postal system as well, said Barb Byrum, Ingham County Clerk, after the order was announced.

“This would disenfranchise many of our military and overseas voters,” she said.

Cheri Hardmon, spokesperson for the Michigan Secretary of State’s office, confirmed that 1,440 ballots came during the extended window in November, including more than 300 military ballots.

Across the U.S., each state sets its own deadline for UOCAVA ballots to come in. Michigan and Texas each give voters six days after the election, while Pennsylvania voters get a week. In Arizona and many other states, though, the ballot is due by the time polls close on Election Day. The deadlines for the return of UOCAVA ballots are typically independent of the deadline for mail ballots for local voters.

Michigan has been at the center of many of the fights over overseas voting. For example, the Republican National Committee sued Michigan and other battleground states last year after Trump alleged without proof that Democrats would use UOCAVA to receive ballots by email.

In the Michigan suit, the RNC took issue with Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s guidance to local clerks. In it, Benson advised them that a “United States citizen who has never resided in the United States but who has a parent, legal guardian, or spouse who was last domiciled in Michigan is eligible to vote in Michigan as long as the citizen has not registered or voted in another state.”

Such an allowance is standard under UOCAVA to cover the adult children of U.S. servicemembers who grew up overseas, for example. Those people are considered Michigan residents under voting law. But the RNC alleged such advice meant the state was allowing non-Michigan residents to cast ballots. A Michigan Court of Claims judge slapped down the suit shortly before voting started last year but the case is now making its way through appeals.

The Secure Families Initiative, one of the groups that has filed lawsuits against the executive order, alleges that Trump overstepped his office when issuing the order. Secure Families is a group of military family members who focus on protecting the military vote and civil rights, including filing an amicus brief in the RNC suit with the ACLU of Michigan.

Their lawsuit against Trump’s executive order, joined by the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Arizona Students’ Association, is one of several in the weeks since the order was released.

Nicole Meek, an Air Force spouse who works with SFI’s voting rights leadership team, said it has already been hard for military families to vote, and those real and perceived barriers further limit participation.

“Increasing any one of these restrictions would only further disenfranchise military voters,” Meek said.

Her family lives in a different state than the one she votes in, and even just renewing her driver’s license for her home state can be difficult and require months of planning. Casting a ballot often feels like an even bigger task, one that requires voters to know they’re planning to vote as soon as their ballot arrives so they don’t risk postal failures or other timing issues.

She’s seen it happen to her husband, to her friends — basically everyone she knows has struggled to get their hands on a ballot then get that ballot back to where it belongs.

“Even when you’re following all the rules, there’s so many stories like this,” she said. “Military voters should get the benefit of the postmark date. That’s the case in many states, but eliminating that would disenfranchise so many people.”

Continued attacks on a secure way of voting could be dangerous, Dzieduszycka-Suinat said. UOCAVA has always been bipartisan, not to mention secure and increasingly efficient. The new executive order has come with limited guidance and the federal government entities who might provide support have remained silent.

“”People say, ‘well, how am I going to do that?’ Then they panic,” she said. “Everybody knows that every time you add another step into the process, you chip away at the number of people doing it.”

She found some comfort in the idea that the order is likely to be gutted by the courts, but the introduction alone was enough to give her pause.

“The rights haven’t been taken away, not yet,” she said, “but ... if it’s really going to happen, this is definitely going to be a scourge on all overseas voters and suppress participation in elections.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Why Trump wants to ban barcodes on ballots, and what it means for voters and election officials

2025-03-28T17:02:34+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump’s new executive order on regulating elections is striking for the way it asserts broad powers for the executive branch that go far beyond what’s prescribed in the Constitution or sanctioned by courts. Experts expect the order to face legal challenges for that reason.

But what’s also striking about the order is how it seeks to dictate some arcane details of the way voting systems work in some of America: Specifically, it bans the machine-readable barcodes or QR codes that are sometimes printed on ballots to help speed up vote counting.

Trump framed this move as a return to secure, paper-based voting. But in reality, the vast majority of Americans already use paper-based systems to vote, and barcodes and QR codes are an integral part of some of those systems. Getting rid of them as quickly as Trump envisions could create confusion, hassles, and steep costs for the jurisdictions that use them, which include some of America’s largest cities. It would slow down vote counts, and wouldn’t necessarily improve their accuracy.

So the language of the Trump order naturally raises questions about how barcodes and QR codes are used in our voting systems, and why the administration is directly targeting these codes as an urgent threat to election security and integrity.

Here’s a closer look at some of those questions:

How are barcodes and QR codes used on ballots?

A fairly typical voting system that’s widely accepted in U.S. elections involves hand-marked paper ballots. Voters check or fill in boxes for their choices, or write them in, and then insert the completed ballot into a machine that reads the selections and tabulates the results.

Some counties in recent years have adopted a different system. In these jurisdictions, including some of the largest metropolitan counties in America, voters use a computer with a touchscreen display to make their selections. Once they’re finished, the computer prints out a completed paper ballot that includes both a human-readable summary of their selections and a barcode or QR code that encodes the same information. Voters have a chance to review the printed ballot before inserting it into a tabulation machine for counting. The machine reads the coded selections, while leaving a paper record that can be double-checked by a human later.

Not all machine-printed ballot systems rely solely on the codes. In many cases, the tabulators can read the marked bubbles or text selections, as with the hand-marked ballot systems. But counties that use barcode-based systems say they allow for faster, more efficient counting without sacrificing accuracy.

What did Trump’s executive order say about QR codes on ballots?

While the Constitution gives state legislatures and Congress the power to determine how elections are run, Trump is aiming to regulate them in part through the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an agency that helps develop guidelines for states and local governments to ensure that their voting systems are secure and accurate, and oversees certification of new systems.

Trump’s order directs the EAC to amend the federal Voluntary Voting System Guidelines to say that voting systems are not allowed to use QR codes or barcodes in the counting of votes, except when necessary to accommodate voters with disabilities.

Trump’s order gives the EAC 180 days to review and potentially recertify voting systems under these updated standards, and rescind certifications based on previous guidelines.

The VVSG sets minimum standards for how election systems should operate. Although they’re officially voluntary, most states use them as benchmarks when choosing election equipment, and many states have laws requiring new voting equipment to meet current VVSG standards, effectively making compliance mandatory at the state or local level.

On Thursday, a coalition of civil rights groups released a letter to the EAC saying it would be illegal for the agency to take action in response to Trump’s executive order. The president “has no authority to direct the Commission” to modify the VVSG, the groups wrote, adding that any such changes must follow the timelines and processes set in federal law.

What is Trump’s concern with systems that use barcodes and QR codes?

The concern involves the demand for voter-verifiable paper records, a system that blends paper ballots with machine verification and tabulation for accessibility, efficiency, and security. Election security experts consider this the gold standard because it ensures that voters can check their selections before casting their ballot, and it creates a physical record that can be used for an audit or recount later if needed. Nearly all U.S. states have transitioned to these types of voting systems, including some that rely on barcodes or QR codes. (Louisiana and some parts of Texas still use electronic systems that produce no paper records.)

Trump’s executive order affirms support for voter-verifiable paper records as the nationwide standard. But his opposition to barcodes responds to the concerns of critics and some election security experts who say barcode-based systems don’t produce voter-verifiable paper records, because what the machine tabulates is based on a code, not the selections that humans can read. The voter can’t truly verify what the machine is reading.

The QR code could theoretically be inaccurate, or manipulated to misrepresent votes, without the voter’s knowledge, these critics argue.

This debate isn’t new. Colorado’s Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in 2019 that the state would eliminate QR codes from ballots as a proactive step to avoid any vulnerability. And former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein fought, unsuccessfully, to have this type of voting machine decertified in Pennsylvania on these grounds.

Georgia passed legislation last year requiring QR codes to be removed from ballots by 2026.

Have there been inaccuracies involving ballots with QR codes in past elections?

One notable case is from Northampton County, Pennsylvania, in 2023, where the choices represented by the machine-generated code differed from the selections that appeared on the human-readable printout. But in this case, county officials said, it was the code that accurately reflected the voter’s choices. A programming error had caused the text version to incorrectly display voters’ choices in a judicial retention race. But the votes were tabulated correctly based on the code.

Barcodes or no barcodes, every state but Alabama requires post-election audits to ensure the accuracy of results.

Which states or counties will be most affected by this order? What would banning QR codes on ballots mean for them?

According to Verified Voting, an organization focused on election technology, there are 1,954 counties spread across 40 states that use voting machines that print QR or barcodes. Some have only a small number for use only by voters with disabilities (and would therefore not have to get rid of them), while other jurisdictions use them for all voters.

Among the users are some very large jurisdictions, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Dallas. The executive order would require those jurisdictions to replace or update all of their machines on a short timetable, costing potentially millions of dollars.

In debates leading up to Georgia’s ban, the costs associated with eliminating QR codes were estimated at up to $66 million for new equipment and software updates.

Portage County, a 70,000-person county in central Wisconsin, just spent $750,000 to switch to ExpressVote machines, which print voters’ choices on a paper ballot and encodes them in machine-readable barcodes — the type of voting machines that may be disallowed under this order.

What’s currently allowed under the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines?

The most updated guidelines, VVSG 2.0, were passed in 2021. No voting systems designed to these standards are yet on the market, but the agency has three systems currently in its certification process.

The VVSG 2.0 guidelines require a voter-verifiable paper trail, according to Kristen Muthig, the EAC’s director of communications. Barcodes are allowed if they “include human-readable representations of the ballot for a voter or auditor to verify,” Muthig told Votebeat. This means codes can be used to speed up machine tabulation, but they cannot be the sole record of a voter’s choices — there must also be printed text that clearly reflects those choices.

How would this change affect voting?

Counties using barcode-assisted systems would need to replace expensive equipment, retrain poll workers, and educate voters, all under tight timelines ahead of the November election. That could cause disruptions and confusion during the initial implementation phases.

Moreover, the removal of QR codes could affect the speed and efficiency of vote tabulation, as optical scanning systems can process QR codes more quickly and accurately than human-readable text.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Trump orders an overhaul of how elections are run, inviting a likely legal challenge

2025-03-26T02:37:05+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

President Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order Tuesday that would dramatically change the administration of U.S. elections, including requiring people to prove their citizenship when registering to vote, but experts and voting rights advocates said they expect the order to face quick legal challenges.

The order, titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” also would change the certification standards for voting systems, potentially forcing states to rapidly replace millions of dollars in voting equipment, and it would prohibit the counting of ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterwards, which 18 states and Washington, D.C., currently permit.

Voting rights advocates and legal experts said the bulk of the executive order will certainly be challenged in court, as the Constitution grants authority over elections to states and to Congress, not the president. Should it take effect, they say, millions of voters could be disenfranchised.

Danielle Lang, senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, said: “There are many moving parts here, but the short answer is that none of this is within the province of the president, and I would expect that he’ll be met with legal challenges.”

Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law School and expert on election law, told Votebeat he expects litigation over the issue to be filed immediately.

Hasen said the order assumes that the White House has more power over independent agencies — in this case the U.S. Election Assistance Commission — than was previously understood. “It was thought to be that he has no power over the Election Assistance Commission,” he said. “This would be quite the sea change.”

While much of the order may ultimately be unenforceable, he said, it offers insight into Trump’s election priorities: “It’s a messaging document even if it’s not successful.”

Trump and his allies have made repeated claims of voter fraud, especially involving the 2020 election, and suggested that it is widespread enough to affect the outcome of elections, even though audits, recounts, and the courts have consistently found no evidence of significant problems. While signing the executive order Tuesday, Trump said that “this country is so sick because of the elections, the fake elections, and the bad elections, and we’re going to straighten it out one way or the other.” He also promised his administration would take “other steps” on elections in the coming weeks.

Trump’s executive order directs federal agencies in some instances to withhold federal funds from states that are unwilling to comply, or share information with federal agencies as laid out in his order. It’s unclear how effective a cudgel that will be. States have long complained that Congress allocates little money for elections, and much of it has long since been spent. In its most recent spending legislation, Congress allocated $15 million in grants that must be divided among the 50 states and U.S. territories.

“I would love for there to be more of a pool of money at jeopardy here,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in California, who was a civil-rights official in the U.S. Justice Department and a former adviser on voting rights to the Biden administration.

“‘Would you like me to take away a penny?’ That’s what he’s essentially saying to states,” he added wryly.

Many officials were still assessing the ramifications of the executive order Tuesday, though it drew quick praise from Trump’s supporters and some Republican secretaries of state, including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who lauded the citizenship documentation requirement. Some provisions, such as directing the Justice Department to prioritize enforcement of laws against voting by noncitizens, fall within a more traditional view of presidential power.

But some Democratic secretaries of state said they were considering asking the courts to intervene. In Michigan, the Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon, but Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson wrote a post about the order from her personal social media account and tagged state Attorney General Dana Nessel.

“If the election denier-in-chief tries to interfere with any citizen’s right to vote, we’ll see him in court,” wrote Benson, who is running for governor. Nessel’s office said it was reviewing the order.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said that he and state Attorney General Kris Mayes are already discussing whether to sue over what he described as “an attempt to federalize elections.” He also called the order “a massive unfunded mandate.”

Fontes said he believes the intent of the order is to make it look as though something improper occurred in the conduct of the election, so you can justify “canceling the election later.”

“It’s very methodical, and very, very dangerous,” he said in an interview with Votebeat Tuesday. “You have to pay attention not to what the executive order says, but what the end game may be. I believe the end game may be that Donald Trump wants to stay in office in perpetuity.”

Push for proof-of-citizenship laws accelerates

Trump and other Republicans have long been calling for requiring proof of citizenship when people register to vote, which they have portrayed as a necessary check against the threat of voting by noncitizens.

Noncitizen voting is already illegal and carries harsh legal penalties — including prison time and loss of residency status — and audits and investigations have found it to be extremely rare. People who register must already attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury.

Nonetheless, Republicans have accelerated their push for federal and state-level legislation to require proof of citizenship for new registrants, and in some cases, already-registered voters.

As early as next week, the GOP-controlled U.S. House could consider a bill, known as the SAVE Act, to require documented proof of citizenship. Multiple states have passed such legislation, and others, including Michigan and Texas, are considering it. Arizona already requires documentation of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, but after a legal fight that went to the U.S. Supreme Court years ago, must permit voters without such proof to vote in federal elections.

Congress has considered imposing this type of requirement before, but so far, it hasn’t adopted it.

Trump’s executive order would circumvent Congress to require documented proof of citizenship by ordering the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to update a national mail voter registration form that most states are required to accept under the National Voter Registration Act.

Levitt said courts might be reluctant to let the president give the EAC such powers while Congress is considering legislating similar actions under its own authority.

And there are other considerations. Six states are exempt from the NVRA, including Wisconsin, where, in 2023 a conservative Waukesha County judge blocked election officials from using the federal form.

“Under the Constitution, states are, in fact, tasked with the administration of elections,” said Ann Jacobs, the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s Democratic chair. “So you’d have a conflict between a federal law and a state judge.”

In addition, voting rights advocates have said millions of Americans do not have ready access to documentation that would meet the requirements, or the ability to show it to election officials in person. In Michigan, for example, many local clerks work only part-time, which means it can be hard for a voter to go in person to show documentary proof of citizenship.

“This would impact Michigan’s rural voters tremendously,” said Barb Byrum, the clerk in Ingham County, Michigan.

Byrum said she thought such a requirement could be the end of online voter registration. And automatic registration, which Michigan residents use when they get a drivers license or state ID, “appears to be essentially nullified,” said Michael Siegrist, the clerk in Canton Township, Michigan, a Detroit suburb.

This could increase the workload for local election officials, which has already grown in recent years because of what Siegrist called a “gross misunderstanding of how secure our voter rolls are.”

“What I find most concerning about all of it is that there are some points where it’s a regurgitation of election conspiracies, whether it’s this false notion that non-citizens are voting or election systems are attached to the internet,” he told Votebeat by text message.

More instructions for the EAC on voting machines

Donald Palmer, chair of the EAC, said the agency is reviewing Trump’s order “and determining the next steps in enhancing the integrity of voter registration and state and federal elections.”

“We also anticipate consulting with state and local election officials,” he said in a statement.

State and local officials deal with the EAC on a largely voluntary basis. The agency oversees the minimum standards used to test and certify voting machines — Voluntary Voting System Guidelines — which many states have adopted.

The order requires the EAC to update the guidelines to disallow the use of QR codes or similar barcodes that get printed on ballots produced by voting machines, and to require the use of voter-verifiable paper records. Within 180 days, the order says, the EAC must review and potentially recertify voting systems under these updated standards, rescinding certifications based on previous guidelines.

VVSG standards were updated in 2021 to require paper records, but they currently do not ban QR codes. The executive order encourages all states to use machines compliant with the new standards, and directs both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to “heavily prioritize” allocating funding to local and state agencies whose systems are compliant.

While the new standards have been approved, there are currently no voting machines on the market that have been certified to these standards. So no jurisdiction in the country currently uses such systems — nor could they begin to within 180 days, because none are available for purchase.

Levitt said the president does not have the authority to direct the EAC to update guidelines that were previously passed by the independent agency. “He’s presenting this as an order I don’t think they have to pay attention to,” he said.

Many jurisdictions — including some in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the entire state of Georgia — use systems that record votes as a barcode printed on the ballot, along with a written record of the voters’ selections. Some critics of this process have argued that since the machine actually records votes via the barcode and not the written text, and since humans cannot read barcodes or QR codes, systems like this do not actually produce voter-verifiable records.

This became an issue in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, in 2023, when a programming error caused the written portion of the results to incorrectly display voter’s choices in a judicial retention race, but county officials said the barcodes recorded the selections accurately.

Order says late-arriving ballots can’t be counted

The executive order also asserts that federal law does not allow mail and absentee ballots to be counted if they arrive after polls close on Election Day. It relies on the same logic as a ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently invalidated a Mississippi statute that allowed counting ballots that arrived up to five days after the election. The ruling has been criticized by legal experts, and similar litigation is working its way through federal courts in California.

Eighteen states, plus Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, allow ballots that are received in the days after the election to be counted, as long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day. The number of days varies by state. Utah — which Trump carried by more than 20 points — counts ballots received up to the day the vote is canvassed, which may be more than a week after Election Day.

Most likely to be impacted by a change in the rules are military voters, who are given leeway in several states if their ballots arrive late. In Michigan, for example, voters amended the state Constitution in 2018 to allow military and overseas voters six extra days to get their ballots in as long as those ballots are postmarked by Election Day. Trump’s order allows no exception for military ballots, and would throw the Michigan law into doubt, said Byrum, the clerk in Ingham County.

DOGE gets power to inspect voter rolls

The executive order envisions a new role for federal agencies in scrutinizing the voter rolls maintained by states and municipalities. It allows the Department of Government Efficiency, the newly created arm of government led by billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk, and the Department of Homeland Security to view publicly available voter files and other unspecified “available records” to ensure the rolls are being cleaned to federal standards.

Trump attempted something similar when he established his Presidential Commission on Election Integrity in 2017, shortly after he took office in his first term. Delbert Hosemann, then the Republican secretary of state in Mississippi, said at the time that the commission could “jump into the Gulf of Mexico” before he would comply with the request for records.

“Trump has more control over the party than he had before,” said Hasen. “Now, of course, [Hosemann] couldn’t call it the ‘Gulf of Mexico.‘”

Levitt said he does not anticipate as much Republican pushback either. But he said he does not believe states are OK with “giving Elon the voter rolls and having him tell us what to do with them.”

DOGE is already facing multiple lawsuits about data privacy as it prods other areas of the government for purported waste. Levitts said he expects the same here. Every complaint in those lawsuits, he said, “applies on steroids to DOGE deciding to amass a national voter file, which is essentially what this is.”

Correction, March 26, 4:35 p.m.: A previous version of this story misstated when the U.S. Election Assistance Commission adopted the most recent version of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. It was in 2021, not last year.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Trump’s quick executive actions could redefine who counts in our democracy

2025-01-27T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

The tense final days of President Joe Biden’s administration and the frenetic early hours of President Donald Trump’s second term muddied the waters on critical issues that could reshape our democracy.

First, Biden. News of his final days in office centered on his use of presidential pardon power and his announcement that he considered the Equal Rights Amendment to have been ratified by the states, a legally controversial opinion that still requires more steps before it goes into effect. The proposed constitutional amendment enshrining gender equity was approved by Congress and sent to the states more than 50 years ago.

Then Trump came into office, and immediately raised his own set of constitutional questions. He issued sweeping pardons to people charged or convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

He also rescinded a raft of Biden’s executive orders, including one related to the census, signaling that he may revisit an abortive effort from his first term to alter the scope of the decennial count.

The 2021 Biden order had reaffirmed the U.S. Census Bureau’s longstanding practice of counting people “without regard to immigration status.” It cited the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which calls for representatives to be apportioned by “counting the whole number of persons in each State.”

“There are very few constitutional clauses that are as clear as that,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel in the democracy program of the Brennan Center for Justice. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts have long held this to clearly mean that every resident of a state must be included in the count, whether they’re citizens, legal permanent residents, or living in the U.S. under other circumstances.

The census numbers are used for many purposes, including allocating resources to states and determining congressional representation, which means that the Trump-Biden back-and-forth has high stakes.

During his first term, Trump had tried to use the 2020 census to ask questions and amass data on people’s citizenship status. That was seen as a step toward letting states draw voting districts based on the number of voting-age citizens rather than total population. In 2016, Li points out, the Supreme Court left open the possibility for states to use such alternative methods.

The Supreme Court shut down Trump’s effort to include the citizenship question on the 2020 census, but it didn’t preclude adding such a question in the future.

Trump’s second term won’t include a decennial census, but preparations for the next one must start long before 2030, and Trump’s revocation of Biden’s order signals that he intends to influence it, especially on the issue of citizenship.

Indeed, look at Trump’s move in the context of his own executive order limiting birthright citizenship to the children born to American citizens or legal permanent residents.

This order challenges the longstanding reading of the 14th Amendment, which says in the first sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That amendment also guarantees equal protection of the law to “any person.”

Writing for the majority in the 2016 Supreme Court ruling Li referenced, Evenwel v. Abbott, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg quoted founding father Alexander Hamilton as saying, “There can be no truer principle than this — that every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.”

Naturally, challenges to the legality of Trump’s citizenship order are coming in fast. At least 22 states have signed on as plaintiffs in a wave of lawsuits. On Jan. 23, a federal judge temporarily blocked it, describing it as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

It’s impossible to say how these presidential decisions and challenges will play out in the long term. But they will almost certainly cast Americans into renewed and crucial battles over who counts in our democracy. The outcome of these battles could reshape representation for everyone.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s interim editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.