President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order to limit mail-in voting, which political science experts and organizations called unconstitutional and quickly led to the filing of lawsuits against the order.
On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order to create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters and to restrict mail-in voting, a move that swiftly drew legal threats from state Democratic officials ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
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The order, which voting law experts say violates the Constitution by attempting to seize states’ power to run elections, is the latest salvo from Trump to interfere with the way Americans vote based on his false allegations of voter fraud. The president has repeatedly lied about the outcome of the 2020 presidential campaign and the integrity of state-run elections, asserting that he won “three times” — even though Joe Bident was certified as the 2020 election winner — and launching accusations of voter fraud that numerous audits, investigations and courts have debunked.
The order signed Tuesday calls on the Department of Homeland Security, working in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to make the list of eligible voters in each state. It also seeks to bar the U.S. Postal Service from sending absentee ballots to those not on each state’s approved list.
Trump is also calling for ballots to have secure envelopes with unique barcodes for tracking, according to the executive order. Federal funding could be withheld from states and localities that don’t comply.
U.S. elections are unique because they are not centralized. Rather than being run by the federal government, they’re conducted by election officials and volunteers in thousands of jurisdictions across the country, from tiny townships to sprawling urban counties with more voters than some states have people. The Constitution’s Elections Clause gives Congress the power to “make or alter” election regulations, at least for federal office, but it doesn’t mention presidential authority over election administration.
Elizabeth Bennion, Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science at Indiana University South Bend, said when she first heard about the order she immediately thought it would be legally challenged, which has happened.
“The Constitution gives states, not the federal government, the authority to run elections. Congress can step in, but the president is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution when we look at the Constitution’s elections clause,” Bennion said.
Within minutes of Trump signing the order, top election officials in Oregon and Arizona, two states that rely heavily on mail ballots, pledged to sue, arguing that the president was illegally encroaching on the right of states to run elections.
The Postal Service is run by a board of governors, and the president has no power to tell it what mail it can and cannot deliver, David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told the Associated Press.
A spokesman for USPS told the AP that the independent agency — which Trump is seeking to exert more control over by folding it under the Commerce Department — will review the order.
Bennion said the order would require the Postal Service to verify change of addresses and flag voters whose mailing address doesn’t match their voter registration address, and use that data to help remove voters from the rolls.
“But this is controversial because the data is really not a reliable indicator of voter eligibility or ineligibility,” Bennion said.
For example, Bennion said college students could have a college address and a permanent address and under most state laws they choose which address to use when voting. Military families move often, and some family members split time between two homes, she said.
The order does not direct states to notify voters if they have to update their registration to qualify to vote under the order, while also directing the USPS to stop delivering ballots to voters who are not on the federal verified list, Bennion said.
The national voter roll “is a real danger to voters who could be disenfranchised despite the fact that they have done nothing wrong,” Bennion said.
“This is a major shift in delaying or blocking people’s ballots with very little transparency or recourse for voters,” Bennion said. “Repurposing the post office in this way is highly controversial and raises important legal questions.”
Federal agencies, like the USPS, cannot sue the president or challenge presidential directives, Bennion said. But, the Brennan Center filed a lawsuit Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts challenging the executive order.
Andrew Garber, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, said the executive order is unconstitutional because it “purports to do a number of things that the president has no authority to order anyone to do.”
“Once I had the chance to read through it, I found that it was also deeply confusing, that it seems to not understand how elections work,” Garber said. “It seems to just not really take into account how difficult it would be to do the things it wants to do and for states and federal agencies to create systems that talk to each other that don’t currently exist. That’s not a simple change.”
The Brennan Center’s mission is to protect eligible voters as well as free and fair elections, Garber said, so it filed a lawsuit against the order because it “seeks to undermine all of those things.”
Measuring the success of the lawsuit, Garber said Trump signed a similar executive order a year ago that was largely struck down by the courts.
Trump’s March 2025 election executive order sought sweeping changes to how elections are run, including adding a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form and requiring mailed ballots to be received at election offices by Election Day. Much of it has been blocked through legal challenges brought by voting rights groups and Democratic state attorneys general who allege it’s an unconstitutional power grab that would disenfranchise large groups of voters.
Trump also told a conservative podcaster in February that he wants to “take over” elections from Democratic-run areas.
When looking at the Trump administration’s actions against voting, from the mail-in ballot executive order, to the SAVE America Act, to previous executive orders, Bennion said if any portions of those sweeping actions take place it will disenfranchise voters who “already face structural barriers to voting,” like senior citizens, people with disabilities, rural voters, military families, and more.
What’s more, Bennion said, is that data has shown that states that have mail-in ballots, particularly those with no excuse mail-in ballot rules, have higher voter turnout than states that limit or don’t have mail-in ballots.
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“So this would restrict voting and make it more challenging for people who have come to rely on that ability to sit down and research the ballot, the questions on the ballot, the candidates on the ballot, and then mail it in at their convenience,” Bennion said.
The larger goal around signing the executive order, amid other election actions taken by the Trump administration, is to cause chaos and confusion, Garber said. Further, signing an executive order amid the primary election cycle of this year’s midterm elections adds to the chaos, he said.
While the Trump administration pushes election fraud claims, there is no evidence of widespread fraud in U.S. elections and the executive order does nothing to increase the integrity of elections, Garber said. Its only goal is to “muddy the waters” and undermine elections, he said.
“Part of the point of this order is to create a time crunch, is to create chaos, because that can be exploited to claim there’s some sort of issue that there isn’t,” Garber said. “It’s particularly cynical because any issues that arise out of this executive order would, of course, be of the order’s own making.”
The Associated Press contributed.