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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.
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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 just last year 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.”
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.
