President Trump on Tuesday stepped up efforts to promote his false claims of widespread voting fraud, signing an executive order of questionable constitutionality seeking to create a national list of citizens that would determine voting eligibility and restrict mail ballots.
Mr. Trump acknowledged that the order, which comes as a bill he has been pushing to restrict mail voting has languished in Congress, could face legal hurdles.
“I believe it’s foolproof,” Mr. Trump said about the executive order before signing it in the Oval Office. “And maybe it’ll be tested. Maybe it won’t.”
The president has no explicit Constitutional authority over elections, and many aspects of the order appear difficult to enforce.
It directs the Department of Homeland Security to create a “state citizenship list” based on data from citizenship and naturalization records, Social Security records and other federal databases.
The order directs federal officials to send the list to state election officials, and orders the attorney general to prioritize prosecution of election officials who provide federal ballots to ineligible voters. It also directs the U.S. Postal Service not to transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual not included on the “state citizenship list.”
Election experts and Democratic state election officials rejected the president’s directive as legally invalid. Officials in Arizona and Oregon pledged to fight the executive order in court. Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer, also vowed to file a lawsuit against the order.
“The Constitution doesn’t allow the executive to take over elections administration, that’s a job for the state legislatures or Congress, and so I don’t think this is going to pass any sort of judicial mustard,” Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, said in an interview. “So this is a big, giant waste of time, and it’s an attention grab from the Trump administration.”
He added: “The greatest threat to American elections is Donald Trump lying about them. Our elections are in good shape.”
Mr. Trump has long fixated on mail-in voting to bolster his baseless claims of widespread fraud in elections. On Tuesday, he reiterated his false claims that “cheating among mail-in voting is legendary.” Voter fraud in the United States is extremely rare, and Trump’s continued claims about large-scale “cheating” in elections have never been proven or substantiated.
The Constitution grants no explicit authority to the executive branch regarding elections. It grants the states broad authority to conduct elections, including the “time, place and manner,” and it dictates that Congress may pass laws overseeing elections.
Courts have largely blocked Mr. Trump’s previous executive order, signed last year, seeking to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote, among other changes. And in January, a federal judge blocked the administration from withholding federal election funds to states that do not alter their voting procedures in line with the president’s demands.
Mr. Trump’s latest order attempts to harness the U.S. Postal Service to control who gets access to mail ballots.
“The states run these elections,” said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who joined Mr. Trump in the Oval Office Tuesday. “If they want to use the U.S. Postal Service, they are going to get a code, a bar code from the U.S. Postal Service, and they are going to put that on the envelope, and we will have one envelope per vote.”
A U.S. Postal Service spokesman said that agency was reviewing the order.
Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, said the executive order is “flatly illegal.” He added: “The president doesn’t have any authority to write the rules that govern our elections. The Constitution gives that power to Congress and to the states, not to the president.”
Mr. Trump’s announcement that the government is creating a “state citizenship list” comes as the administration has been largely stymied in its efforts to build a national voter database. The Justice Department has attempted to get the private, unredacted voter rolls from nearly every state in the country, but only about 12 states have agreed to provide the data, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
Attempts to force at least 29 states to hand over their voter rolls through litigation have so far been unsuccessful. Some Republican-controlled states, including Utah, Oklahoma and West Virginia, have been among those that have resisted the Justice Department’s requests.
Election officials have said that any national voter list would likely be rife with errors because each state’s voter file is updated every day, changing as voters move away, naturalize, turn 18 or die. As soon as a national list were created, it would be out of date.
Mr. Trump has for weeks been pushing Congress to pass a bill that would impose restrictions on voting and mail-in ballots and would require states to turn over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security for the agency to remove people flagged as noncitizens.
But that legislation has no clear path to passage, with Democrats unanimously opposing it and some Republican senators objecting to adding restrictions on voting by mail, which is a main method of voting in multiple states.
Lawmakers left Washington last Friday for a planned two-week recess with no significant progress toward passing the measure.
Some Republicans have committed to attaching Mr. Trump’s desired restrictions to a new bill they can push through on a party-line vote using a special process known as budget reconciliation. But that procedure has strict limits that may make it difficult to do so.
Though Mr. Trump has long been skeptical of voting by mail, criticizing the practice while a candidate during the 2016 election, it was not until it became a partisan liability that he took a far more aggressive posture.
During the 2020 election, Democrats began to vastly outpace Republicans in voting by mail, reaching a nearly 2-to-1 advantage in mail ballots, according to data from the M.I.T. Election Data and Science Lab. After his loss in 2020, Mr. Trump made mail voting a target of his attempts to subvert the election, making numerous false and unsubstantiated claims about voting by mail and filing multiple lawsuits challenging mail ballots.
As he has continued to criticize the process, Democrats have maintained an advantage in mail voting nationwide, though the gap has narrowed. During the 2024 election, 37 percent of Democrats reported voting by mail, compared to 24 percent of Republicans, according to the M.I.T. Election Data and Science Lab.
Overall, voting by mail was used by about one in three American voters in the 2024 election. And earlier this month, Mr. Trump cast a mail ballot for a special election in Florida.
Adam Sella contributed reporting.
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
The post Trump Signs Order Seeking Federal Control of Mail Voting as He Promotes False Claims appeared first on New York Times.
