Another day, another executive order-signing spectacle from President Donald Trump, where he does a bunch of bigoted rambling, signs a little piece of paper, and pretends that it’s now the law of the land.
Trump’s latest bit of make-believe, Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections, purports to create—on the fly—an entire new nationwide scheme for verifying voter eligibility and handling mail-in ballots. It’s unconstitutional, unworkable, and unhinged.
Broadly, there are two parts to this nonsense. The first part orders Citizenship and Immigration Services to coordinate with the Social Security Administration to create a master list of citizens for each state by trawling through “citizenship and naturalization records, SSA records, SAVE data, and other relevant Federal databases.”
So essentially the federal government will now singlehandedly determine voter eligibility. Got it.
Sure, multiple audits have shown that SSA’s citizenship data is often wrong or incomplete—particularly for naturalized citizens—and sure, this violates the Privacy Act of 1974, but Trump’s just getting started.
While the Department of Homeland Security and SSA are busy spelunking through whatever databases they feel like, the U.S. Postal Service is now supposed to create a detailed national mail-in ballot tracking service.
USPS gets 120 days to complete rulemaking that would first create “official election mail,” in which mail-in ballots will have envelopes with trackable barcodes.
Related | When you're president, voting by mail is fine, Trump says
Next, before each federal election, states must tell USPS whether they’ll be allowing mail-in voting. If so, the state must send its special generated list of citizens to USPS. The post office can only send ballots to those on the list, and only people on the list can cast mail-in ballots.
None of this is legal. None of it is even workable. Anyone who isn’t as conspiracy-addled as Trump knows that states already go to great lengths to track applications for mail-in ballots and to track the ballots themselves. This just grafts on an extra, illegal step.
There’s no world where the post office can suddenly become a nationwide citizenship cop, juggling 50 states’ worth of lists, while simultaneously becoming a centralized hub for tracking millions of ballots across the country.
In case you’re wondering if Trump provided any guidance as to how this would work, of course he didn’t.
Throughout the signing, Trump played his favorite hits—bragging about excluding trans women from the Olympics, explaining that Democrats hate Immigration and Customs Enforcement because they love rapists and murderers, and claiming to have made Washington safer.
However, Trump did make sure to preemptively attack anyone who might rule against him, complaining of “rogue judges, lots of bad, bad people” and saying that he’ll appeal any loss.
It’s impossible to overstate the fact that the executive branch, by constitutional design, has no role in elections. Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 is super clear on this:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
Courts are very clear on this as well, and they keep ruling against Trump’s attempts to control elections. But he doesn’t care.
Perhaps Trump would like to read Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council, in which Alito was furious that the majority decided that a federal law about voter registration forms preempted Arizona’s attempt to require proof of citizenship.
“The Elections Clause's default rule helps to protect the States' authority to regulate state and local elections. As a practical matter, it would be very burdensome for a State to maintain separate federal and state registration processes with separate federal and state voter rolls,” he wrote. “For that reason, any federal regulation in this area is likely to displace not only state control of federal elections but also state control of state and local elections.”
We would be remiss not to mention that some mail-in voting is still perfectly fine.
For example If your name is Trump, mail-in voting is guaranteed to be easy peasy.
“Because of the fact that I’m president of the United States, I did a mail-in ballot for elections that took place in Florida,” he said.
Neither Melania nor Barron Trump is president, but they also cast mail-in ballots for … reasons. No doubt they were both very busy.
Trump will continue to try to control elections in this shambolic, ham-fisted way, and states are going to have to continue to sue to stop him. It’s all a pointless waste of time and money—a coddling of a president wholly divorced from reality.
Lisa Needham April 1, 2026 at 12:51AM From Daily Kos
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