Trump Mobilizes DHS and USPS in Latest Assault on Elections

He’d sooner set the Constitution ablaze than face the music in a free and fair election.

President Donald Trump signed a second executive order on elections last month. This is his latest, desperate attempt to abuse the power of the White House to seek more control over the 2026 midterms. It’s no coincidence that this executive order comes a year after his first executive order on elections (blocked by three separate courts) and a week after the Senate failed to pass his top legislative priority in the SAVE Act.

Photo by Tiffany Tertipes on Unsplash

Let’s cut right to the chase: this executive order is a dangerous — and likely unconstitutional — federal overreach into how states run elections. All to create chaos and sow seeds of doubt ahead of this year’s midterms while giving Trump’s allies in state legislatures a playbook to undermine American citizens’ freedom to vote.

Here’s what the order attempts to do:

1. It mobilizes the Department of Homeland Security to tell states who can and can’t vote. The order doubles down on a deeply flawed, incomplete, and unreliable DHS database to try to create a “State Citizenship List.” It ignores the fact that local election officials already maintain lists of eligible voters using far more reliable data.

2. It weaponizes the Department of Justice to investigate election officials who don’t follow orders from the White House — even if those election officials are following state law. The idea is as absurd as it is dangerous. Election officials nationwide already face death threats and intimidation spurred on by the president’s election lies.

3. It commandeers the U.S. Postal Service by barring the delivery of mail ballots to any voter not on a pre-approved federal list of mail voters. The order attempts to completely overrule state laws to hand the Postal Service unprecedented authority over mail voting, and flouts the checks and balances that protected 48 million Americans’ mail ballots in 2024.

You’ve likely heard it before, but it bears repeating: The U.S. Constitution affirms that states and Congress run our elections. The president has zero authority over voting in this country. He can’t override state election laws. He can’t boot people from voter rolls. He certainly can’t tell the Postal Service to toss your mail — whether it’s your ballot or your subscription to Us Weekly.

Above all else, the Trump administration is on a mission to convince Americans that our elections are broken. He’s desperately afraid voters will hold his party accountable at the ballot box this November, so he’s pulling out all the stops to convince voters in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan to doubt a process that could deliver results he doesn’t like. He’d sooner set the Constitution ablaze than face the music in a free and fair election.

States and voter protection groups were quick to challenge this order on constitutional grounds — and rightly so. But the legal fight isn’t the whole story.

A key and often overlooked part of the story is what could come next in states. The executive order hands Trump’s allies at the state level a blueprint. Even if it survives legal challenges (which is highly unlikely), it signals exactly what the administration wants—and state legislators are paying attention. That’s where this fight is going to play out, and that’s where we must turn our attention next.

This isn’t just speculation. While dozens of states — blue, red, and purple — resist a DOJ quest for private voter data, Trump allies from Texas to Ohio have gleefully complied. And we’ve already seen state legislatures fall in line — fueled by a five-year election disinformation pressure campaign following Trump’s 2020 loss.

Since Trump’s return to office, 22 states have introduced proof-of-citizenship mandates inspired by his first executive order on elections and the SAVE Act. In just the past month, South Dakota and Utah and, to a lesser extent, Florida and Mississippi approved flawed and misguided proof-of-citizenship laws for future voter registrants—laws that will block tens of thousands of U.S. citizens from voting.

Meanwhile, Ohio, Kansas, North Dakota, and Utah passed laws to toss mail ballots received after Election Day — another top Trump priority — according to our Election Policy Tracker. Voters in another 14 states could see their mail ballot grace periods eliminated when the Supreme Court rules in a case argued last month. That could see millions of mail ballots — potentially including those cast by servicemembers stationed overseas — thrown out under new rules.

And if that weren’t enough, the Supreme Court could open the door to yet another wave of racial gerrymandering in the states if they further gut the Voting Rights Act. Should the court give states the green light, states like Florida have already made plans to answer Trump’s call and redraw their maps — with primary season already underway.

The bottom line is this: Much of Trump’s latest executive order is unconstitutional and will be struck down by the courts. But that’s hardly the end of the line for the president’s extreme elections agenda. State lawmakers will continue to chip away at the freedom to vote, and as long as the president and his allies continue to spread lies around our elections, voters everywhere are being primed to question the integrity of our elections. And that’s exactly what Trump wants.

November’s midterms are just around the corner. This fight is just getting started.

Samantha Tarazi is CEO of Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to securing and strengthening elections in all 50 states.

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