On Tuesday afternoon, President Trump signed a far-reaching executive order that Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program, described as “an astonishing and unprecedented voter suppression” effort. It would upend how Americans register to vote, how they cast their ballots, and how their votes are counted.
“We are at an astonishing moment where the President of the United States is issuing policy directives with the unmistakable intent of stopping Americans from participating in our democracy,” Sweren-Becker says.
“If this policy were implemented it would block tens of millions of Americans from voting.”
Legal experts across the political spectrum believe the order is unconstitutional, since the states, with some oversight from Congress, have the power to set the rules for federal elections according to the Constitution, not the president. “Under our American system, voting and voter registration are predominantly responsibilities of the states, with Congress constitutionally empowered to add some overlays through legislation of general applicability,” wrote Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Cato Institute. “A president cannot change those basics by putting out an executive order, nor may he commandeer the states, through funding blackmail or otherwise, into acting as instruments of his pleasure.”
The executive order includes a laundry list of suppressive policies that the voting rights group Fair Fight Action called a “MAGA fever dream.”
Here are four aspects of the order that most concern voting rights advocates.
1. It would prevent millions of Americans from registering to vote.
The centerpiece of the order is a requirement that voters show proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. It directs the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to mandate that information on a federal voter registration form.
There’s two big problems with that proposal. The first is that Trump can’t order the EAC to do that, since it is an independent agency created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The EAC has already been blocked by the courts from requiring documentary proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form; instead, voters already have to attest to their citizenship, under penalty of perjury.
The second is that millions of Americans don’t have or can’t easily get the documents that Trump wants to require. According to the Brennan Center, nine percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, like a birth certificate or passport. Trump’s proposal is even more restrictive than the SAVE Act, the voter suppression bill passed by the GOP-controlled House last year and set to be considered again soon. That’s because it does not specify that birth certificates or naturalization papers can be used to determine US citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote. Since driver’s licenses in most states don’t specify citizenship, voters would have to use a passport to register to vote, but 146 million Americans do not have one, with passport ownership interestingly far lower in red states than blue ones.
“If this policy were implemented it would block tens of millions of Americans from voting,” says Sweren-Becker.
2. It would severely limit voting by mail.
The order claims that mail-in ballots must be received by Election Day or else states will lose federal funding or face lawsuits by the Justice Department if they don’t comply. Currently 18 states allow mail-in ballots to be received some time after the election if they are postmarked by Election Day, including blue states like California and New York and red states like Kansas and Utah. Election law expert Rick Hasen calls the argument behind this provision “a bonkers theory.”
“It would certainly disrupt the way that voting is conducted across many states in the country,” adds Sweren-Becker. “And it is again a very clear attempt to just limit the number of Americans who can participate in our elections.”
3. It would allow Elon Musk to subpoena voting records
The order gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Musk-led DOGE the power to cross-check state voter registration lists with federal immigration databases and subpoena state voting records to search for alleged voter registration fraud. The DOJ can take action against states that don’t comply. This appears to lay the groundwork for massive, error-prone voter purges.
“It appears extraordinarily dangerous to give DOGE the ability to review all of that material and sift through voter registration records without the protections that are required and the very present risk of abuse of that information,” Sweren-Becker says.
There’s a lot of evidence in recent years of states attempting to remove alleged non-citizens from the rolls in ways that disenfranchised many legitimate American voters. For example, before the 2024 election, Alabama attempted to remove 3,251 suspected non-citizens from its voter rolls. But it turned out that at least 2,000 eligible voters on the list had been slated for removal before the courts put a stop to the purge.
Indeed, much of the executive order rests on the false claim that the United States does not “adequately…prohibit non-citizens from registering to vote.” In fact, it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote in US elections and such fraud is exceedingly rare. An audit in Georgia last year found only 20 suspected noncitizens on the rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters. A similar review in North Carolina found only nine possible non-citizens registered to vote in the state out of more than 7.7 million total voters.
The latest proposal brings to mind the disastrous effort by Trump’s 2017 “election integrity” commission to subpoena sensitive voting records from all 50 states, which led to a widespread bipartisan backlash as both red and blue states refused to comply. The commission abruptly shut down without finding any evidence of voter fraud.
4. It gives Trump King-like power to make it harder to vote
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the executive order, aside from all of the suppressive policies, is how it purports to give the president power over elections that he does not have.
“Don’t waste time on which parts of his elections order might be good, bad or a mixed bag [or] were they enacted by a legitimate authority such as a state legislature or Congress (as the case may be),” CATO’s Olson wrote on Bluesky. “Trump is trying to usurp power not rightfully his. That’s the key point and that’s where to focus.”
Trump is trying to push the unitary executive theory to the extreme. And even if he loses in court, the order could have dangerous ramifications. It could embolden states to enact similar policies. And Trump could use any loss in court as a pretext to make more bogus claims of voter fraud and attempt to overturn future elections.
“What I’m most concerned about is that the president and this administration are trying to rewrite election law unilaterally and completely alter the way that elections are run in order to stop American voters from participating in elections,” Sweren-Becker says.
