President Donald Trump's sweeping attempts to reshape American voting rules have hit a wall of judicial resistance, with Monday's Supreme Court ruling on mail ballot deadlines marking the latest setback for an administration that's tried everything from executive orders to congressional pressure to tighten access to the ballot box. The decision, which sided with states that accept late-arriving mail ballots, followed back-to-back rulings last week that struck down two executive orders seeking to change national election rules — a pattern that voting rights advocates say protects democratic participation against executive overreach.
The Legislative Push Stalls
Trump's SAVE Act remains stuck in the Senate despite his public fury. The legislation would eliminate nearly all absentee voting, require citizenship documents to register, and impose photo ID requirements nationwide just months before the midterm elections. Four Republican senators have declared their opposition: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. That's enough to block the bill even if Republicans scrapped the filibuster, which Trump's demanded they do. The president acknowledged Monday that the SAVE Act is "probably not going to happen." He's been so frustrated by the Senate logjam that he's refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill — holding up relief for working families as leverage for voting restrictions.
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."
Courts Reject Federal Power Grab
Trump's executive orders have fared no better in court. His first order sought to require citizenship documents for voter registration — mirroring the stalled SAVE Act. U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper put a temporary block on it last year and made her decision permanent last week. Casper wrote that the Constitution "does not grant the President any specific powers over elections."
In March, Trump issued a second order calling for a national voter list using data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration. It would've 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'll appeal.
Voter Data Seizures Blocked
The Department of Justice has sought detailed voter files from multiple states — data that would include 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. Last week, a federal judge blocked its use as a mass citizenship check. The administration, according to its own news releases, had allowed local election administrators to search users by the thousands. 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 ruled that Trump's changes aggregated Americans' sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from the rolls. She said, "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."
Federal Investigations Raise Alarms
Meanwhile, Trump's developing what could be a more aggressive roadmap. His U.S. attorney in Los Angeles said in June that he'd 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.
Muller said local elections officials "already are having conversations about chain of custody disputes" for ballots as they're cast, collected, counted, and stored. UCLA law professor Rick 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."
Trump hasn't been entirely blocked. Republican-run states have satisfied his demands to redraw congressional district lines, efforts buoyed by the Supreme Court striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act. He weighed in again Monday after the Supreme Court's decision in the mail ballot deadline case, saying on his social media account that he's trying to "save America from crooked elections." Voting rights groups and Democrats see him abusing power and attempting to suppress legal voters to gain an advantage in the midterms, when control of Congress is at stake.
Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters said Monday, "We are not going to be deterred by this decision, and the RNC will keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day."
Separately, Reuters reported that Trump disclosed more than $1.4 billion in income from his family's cryptocurrency ventures.
Why This Matters:
The wave of court rulings blocking Trump's election restrictions represents a crucial test of constitutional checks on executive power — and whether the judiciary will protect voting access when a president seeks to restrict it. The administration's losses so far suggest that federal judges, including those appointed by Republicans, won't allow the White House to bypass Congress and rewrite election rules through executive action. But Trump's ongoing efforts — from pressuring the Senate to pass restrictive legislation to deploying federal investigators to election offices — create uncertainty for voters and administrators heading into midterms where control of Congress hangs in the balance. The wrongful flagging of eligible voters through the SAVE database shows the human cost of rushed enforcement: Americans who've done nothing wrong facing the threat of losing their fundamental right to vote. And the broader pattern, as legal experts note, is eroding public confidence in elections themselves — exactly the outcome that makes democratic participation harder to sustain.