Trump's plan to tighten voting rules faces more than a few problems

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President Donald Trump's new executive order aimed at tightening up election administration has triggered a wave of concern among voting-rights advocates who say it will likely make casting a ballot harder for millions of American citizens.

Liberal-leaning advocates are also concerned Trump's order gives the federal government unusually broad power to dictate how elections are managed, a process that's typically run by county-level officials and overseen by secretaries of state.

Conservative activists welcomed Trump's order as a necessary step to ensuring the sanctity of American elections, though studies have consistently shown that very few non-citizens cast illegal ballots.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who in 2021 tangled with Trump over the accuracy of the state's count, lauded the new executive order as a "great first step for election integrity reform nationwide."

The order likely faces significant legal challenges, and continues a longstanding battle between liberal and conservative groups over voting security, ballot access and who ultimately decides elections. One study found that as many as 10% of otherwise eligible voters in Georgia would be blocked from voting because they lack citizenship documentation even though they are citizens; 7% of Texans lack it.

"A president does not set election law and never will," Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of the Common Cause watchdog group said in a statement. "Trump's executive action is an attempt to take away our right to vote or make it so hard that we don't participate."

What does Trump's order do?

Trump's order:

• Directs workers to change the national mail voter registration form to require that applicants provide either a U.S. passport, a REAL ID driver's license or state-issued card compliant with REAL standards. It's illegal for non-citizens to vote, but voters today only have to swear they are citizens before casting a ballot.
• Requires Homeland Security and the IRS to coordinate with Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to help states "clean up" voter rolls by removing dead or otherwise ineligible voters. It also orders Homeland Security to study whether any foreign nationals have ever indicated on an immigration form whether they've voted in an American election. Some communities allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.
• Mandates a paper trail for each voter's ballot, rather than just an electronic record.
• Orders prosecutors to charge people caught trying to cast more than one ballot, vote illegally or who threaten or intimidate elections workers.
• Requires that no ballots be counted if they are received after Election Day, with the exception of those cast by deployed military members and other citizens living overseas. Mail-in ballots often arrive after Election Day, and officials in many states will accept ballots if they are postmarked by Election Day.
• Threatens to withhold the limited federal funding available for elections assistance to states or other jurisdictions that refuse to assist in certifying citizenship, cleaning up voter rolls or other steps Trump wants.

Many eligible citizens lack proof

While many of Trump's orders reflect existing best practices among elections officials, voting-rights advocates say requiring proof of citizenship will disenfranchise millions of otherwise eligible voters.

A recent study by the University of Maryland’s Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and the nonprofit VoteRiders found that 7% of Texans would have difficulty providing proof of citizenship, while it would be 10% in Georgia. The report said Hispanic voters who are American citizens were those most likely to lack documentation, along with young and low-income citizens.

"What we saw 20 years ago when Arizona implemented the Proposition 200 voter initiative requiring this documentation is that there are many eligible citizens who lack that proof ‒ and in Arizona it was only for new registrants, as all those on the voter rolls were grandfathered in," said Tammy Patrick, a former Arizona elections worker who is now with the nonpartisan National Association of Election Officials.

Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen and has called for investigations into alleged voter fraud. Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Two years earlier, then-president Trump disbanded a controversial commission he had created to look into claims that people had voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. State and local election officials, including some Republicans, said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said a court challenge to "this kind of presidential power grab"  would likely succeed.

He said the executive order "purports to require the states to create vast new bureaucracies and radically change their election processes and equipment at a likely cost in the tens of billions of dollars, and the president cannot do that with a simple swipe of his pen."

Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a Democrat from New Jersey and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Trump's order seemed targeted directly at suppressing the vote from non-white voters. She predicted federal judges will block portions of the order.

"That's a way of suppressing the vote of poor folks, Black folks, folks of other colors, anybody that's just not white in America," she said. "I don't think he's going to get away with that … The courts still recognize voter suppression when they see it."