Donald Trump has signed a widespread executive order that promises to fundamentally disrupt the American voter registration process, and has introduced extremely restrictive measures that can disenfranchise millions of citizens if enacted.
White House secretary Will Scharf was described on Tuesday as the “furtherest reach enforcement lawsuit” in the country’s history, and the order represents the latest list of long lists of attacks against immigrants, but also represents the current voting system.
The drastic order amends the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship to vote. It demands evidence of citizenship evidence, such as passports, requires that federal agencies cut funds to states that are eligible to vote in federal elections and are deemed non-compliant, and instructs the Department of Justice to indict what the White House portrays as an “election crime.”
The measure also seeks to block states from accepting state votes after election day, regardless of when they were mailed.
Many of the order provisions are likely to be challenged soon and are legally questionable. The US Constitution explicitly gives the nation and Congress the power to set election rules and does not allow the President to do so.
“The short answer is that this executive order, like too much we’ve seen before, is lawless and argued for all sorts of enforcement agencies he most certainly doesn’t have,” said Daniel Lang, a voting rights lawyer for the nonprofit Campaign Law Center.
Republicans have long sought to add citizenship to the federal form, and are being blocked by courts. For example, in a 7-2 decision in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court said Arizona cannot request evidence of citizenship to vote in federal elections. The authority to set requirements on federal forms is left to the bipartisan Election Assistance Committee. The court also blocked efforts to short-circuit efforts to add questions.
Orders with controversial legislation protect the US Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. This requires Americans to prove their citizenship directly.
All metrics refer to these actions and are not easy for Americans to vote. According to the 2023 State Department, less than half of all Americans had valid passports, and nearly 69 million women who changed their name would have a hard time creating matching documents, according to the Center for Progressive Analysis in America.
Kansas had laws requiring valid citizenship evidence between 2013 and 2016. It put 30,000 registrations at risk.
The Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement reported in 2024 that around 21 million vote-age Americans, about 9% of the population, did not have a current valid ID.
Despite Trump’s widespread election fraud claims, federal law already prohibits non-citizens from voting, with penalties that include up to five years of prison. The current election system already uses multiple federal databases to verify voters’ eligibility, including Department of Homeland Security citizenship data.
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The day after the 2024 election, Jen Easterly, director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said:
“The important thing is that there is no evidence of malicious activity that has had a significant impact on the security or integrity of the election infrastructure,” Easterly added.
Still, Trump framed order as an important step to “setting our elections straight,” claiming it was “sick” from what he called “fake elections.” He added that when it comes to the election process, “there are other steps in the coming weeks that will take the next step.”
This action continues Trump’s long-term efforts to restructure democratic participation. This is a throwback to a 2020 memo that excludes non-citizens from the census population numbers used to form council districts. Rhetoric and subsequent follow-through represent a potentially transformative and highly controversial approach to voter eligibility, which can redefine access to vote boxes.
“Perhaps some people think I shouldn’t complain because we won the landslide, but we had to straighten the election,” Trump said he signed Tuesday’s order.
