Monday’s Supreme Court ruling siding with states that accept late-arriving mail ballots marked the latest limit on President Donald Trump’s push to tighten his grip on U.S. elections. The decision came after back-to-back rulings last week blocked his two sweeping executive orders, while other courts stopped his Department of Justice from getting detailed state voter data and his attempt to force the Senate to pass the SAVE Act stalled out.
Who Gets Squeezed
The pressure falls first on voters. The SAVE Act would eliminate nearly all absentee voting, require citizenship documents to register to vote and impose photo identification requirements nationwide right before the midterm elections. University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller said, “It’s been a mixed bag for Republicans,” and added that the president “has come up mostly empty-handed.” That’s the language of a machine running into the walls of its own legal limits.
Trump’s efforts have not been entirely fruitless, though. Republican-run states have satisfied his demands to redraw congressional district lines, helped along by the Supreme Court striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act. He has also been directing his Department of Justice to investigate voting and election operations, which Democrats see as a possible prelude to their involvement in November. Trump has been so frustrated by the inability of the Senate to pass the SAVE Act that he has refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill.
What They Call Order
On Monday, Trump said on his social media account that he is trying to “save America from crooked elections.” Voting rights groups and Democrats say he is abusing power and trying to suppress legal voters to gain an advantage in the midterms, when control of Congress is at stake. That fight sits right at the center of the hierarchy: the White House, the courts, the Senate, the states, and the people whose ballots get treated like evidence in a case file.
Trump’s view that U.S. elections are riddled with fraud in part because of noncitizen voting has driven a multiagency push to nationalize voter data and use federal resources to help states remove voters from the rolls. The Department of Justice has sought detailed voter files from multiple states, including dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers. Democratic and some Republican secretaries of state balked, and federal lawsuits followed. The administration has lost every case so far.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, with help from the DOGE effort led by Elon Musk, revamped a government tool called SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. The program has been a key pillar of his efforts to cull potentially ineligible voters from state rolls. Last week, a federal judge blocked its use as a mass citizenship check. According to the administration’s own news releases, local election administrators were allowed to search users by the thousands, using a wider range of metrics rather than DHS-issued identification numbers. At least 67 million registrations, primarily in Republican-controlled states, were analyzed. Tens of thousands were flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died, but some voters were wrongly identified as ineligible.
U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan said Trump’s changes aggregated Americans’ sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from the rolls. She wrote, “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”
The Courts Draw a Line
As presidents before him, Trump signed executive orders when Congress would not enact his policy preferences. His first order reflected his emphasis on noncitizens. Like the SAVE Act pending on Capitol Hill, it sought to require would-be voters to document their citizenship to be able to register to vote. U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper put a temporary block on the order last year and last week made her decision permanent. Casper wrote that the Constitution “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”
Trump issued a second order in March, as the SAVE Act’s rough path in Congress became obvious. He called for a national voter list using data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration. The order would have empowered the U.S. Postal Service to determine who gets an absentee ballot and threatened local elections officials with prosecution. Democratic secretaries of state sued, and U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani made the same legal assessment as Casper. The provisions, she wrote last week, “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.” The White House has indicated it will appeal.
Trump on Monday called the Senate logjam “crazy” and one of the holdouts, Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, “Trump-deranged.” It’s the latest legislative tussle that prompted Trump to demand Republicans scrap the filibuster, which requires most major legislation to get support from 60 of the 100 senators. But that likely wouldn’t matter in this case, with four of the Senate’s 53 Republicans declaring their opposition to the bill itself: Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. The president acknowledged Monday that the SAVE Act is “probably not going to happen.”
Both major parties have national operations to monitor elections, including legal teams ready to file challenges. Despite the Republican National Committee losing the mail ballot case, Chairman Joe Gruters said, “We are not going to be deterred by this decision, and the RNC will keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day.”
Meanwhile, Trump has been developing a possible roadmap for more aggressive actions. His U.S. attorney in Los Angeles said in June that he had opened multiple election fraud investigations, and he sent a prosecutor to the county’s vote-tabulation center after California’s June primary. Six months earlier, FBI agents executed a warrant and seized ballots and other records from the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.
University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller said local elections officials “already are having conversations about chain of custody disputes” for ballots as they are cast, collected, counted and stored. He and UCLA law professor Rick Hasen noted that judicial warrants are required for the kinds of actions that happened in Fulton County. Muller predicted “the bar would be even higher” for any warrant the administration requests during a live election. Hasen said, “Republicans believe him when he says the election is rigged. And then when Republicans try to change voting rules to tighten things up, that causes Democrats to also think that the election system is being rigged. So, if what he’s trying to achieve is undermine voters’ confidence in the election process, he seems to have succeeded spectacularly.”
Separately, Reuters reported that Trump disclosed more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures.