President Donald Trump’s executive order demanding sweeping changes to US elections has the potential to significantly reshape the voting process, despite likely legal challenges.
The order’s broad scope raises fundamental questions about presidential authority over elections, traditionally a domain of state control.
The order mandates proof of US citizenship for federal election registration, restricts ballot counting to those received by Election Day, introduces new voting equipment regulations, and bans certain donations from non-citizens.
These directives challenge the established balance of power between federal and state governments in managing elections, raising constitutional concerns.
Can the President unilaterally impose these changes, given the Constitution’s broad delegation of election procedures to individual states?
Here is a breakdown of the key changes and whether they are likely to succeed.
Voters would need to provide citizenship documents to register
The order mandates changes to the federal voter registration form, requiring prospective voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship, such as a US passport or birth certificate. It also directs states to share voter lists and maintenance records with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Government Efficiency for review. Federal agencies are instructed to assist states in identifying non-citizens on their voter rolls by sharing relevant data.
Furthermore, the order threatens to withhold federal grants from states that refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement in prosecuting election crimes.
While non-citizen voting is already a felony in federal elections punishable by imprisonment and deportation, the executive order reflects a renewed focus on this issue by the Trump administration. Despite the rarity of such occurrences, Trump has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about the potential impact of non-citizen voting on election outcomes. This issue has also become a prominent focus for conservatives in recent months.
The executive order effectively bypasses Congress, where Republicans have been pushing for a documentary proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration. Voting rights advocates have expressed strong opposition to this requirement, arguing that it could disenfranchise millions of Americans who lack readily available proof of citizenship.
Mail ballots would need to be received by Election Day
The order requires votes to be “cast and received” by Election Day and says federal funding should be conditional on state compliance with that deadline. Currently, 18 states and Puerto Rico accept mailed ballots received after Election Day as long they are postmarked on or before that date, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Perhaps no state is more notorious for drawn-out vote counts than California, the nation’s most populous. It allows ballots to be counted if they are received up to seven days following the election as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.
Most California voters cast ballots they receive in the mail, and in the pursuit of accuracy, thoroughness and counting every vote, the state has gained a reputation for tallies that can drag on for weeks or even a month or more. In one Northern California US House primary last year, a recount settled the outcome nearly two months after the election. At the time, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who oversees elections, said in a statement: “I understand that people want finality, but accuracy is of utmost importance.”
But the extended tallies have raised fears that they could undercut, rather than bolster, voter confidence. In 2018, then-Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan described California’s election system as “bizarre” in a year when Democrats picked off a string of GOP-held House seats.
In a statement, California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla said Trump’s order “does nothing to improve the safety of our federal elections — what it would do is disenfranchise millions of eligible American voters.”
Padilla, who formerly served as California’s chief elections officer, said Trump “lacks the authority to implement many of the changes laid out in this illegal executive order.”
Ballots could not rely on QR codes to be counted
The executive order instructs the Election Assistance Commission to amend its guidelines for voting systems to protect election integrity. That would include guidance that voting systems should not rely on ballots that use barcodes or QR codes in the vote-counting process.
Trump instructed the commission to “take appropriate action to review and, if appropriate, re-certify voting systems” under those new standards within six months of the order.
In Georgia, an important presidential battleground, virtually all in-person voters use voting machines with a large touchscreen to record their votes. The machines then print a paper ballot with a human-readable summary of the voter’s selections and a QR code, a type of barcode that is read by a scanner to count the votes.
It is not entirely clear how the executive order would affect Georgia and other jurisdictions throughout the country that use these machines.
Representatives for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger did not immediately respond Tuesday evening to messages seeking comment. The Georgia Legislature last year passed a law requiring that QR codes be removed from ballots by July 2026.
Foreign nationals would be barred from making donations
The order cracks down on foreign nationals contributing or donating in US elections. It’s an issue that’s been bubbling in recent years in the states, as Republicans seek to dampen the influence of Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss.
Wyss, who lives in Wyoming, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to 501(c) nonprofit organizations that support liberal causes. One of those groups, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, donated a combined $3.9 million to enshrine abortion protections in the Ohio Constitution. It also helped thwart a proposed constitutional amendment advanced by Ohio Republicans the previous summer that would have made passing future constitutional amendments harder.
During the run-up to last year’s presidential election, legislative Republicans linked then-President Joe Biden’s appearance on Ohio’s fall ballot to passing a ban on contributions from foreign individuals, companies, governments or political parties to campaigns for or against proposed amendments to the state constitution.
Other states have followed suit, most recently Kansas — which passed a nearly identical bill earlier this month after hearing testimony from Ohio’s secretary of state. Like the Ohio bill, it appears partly a response to a successful campaign to protect abortion rights in Kansas, which received money from the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly has not said publicly whether she’ll sign it.
Can Trump do all this through executive order?
The federal government plays a fairly limited role in American elections. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states the authority to determine the “times, places and manner” of how elections are run. The so-called “Elections Clause” doesn’t get into the specifics of voting or ballot-counting procedures -– those details are left to the states – but it does give Congress the power to “make or alter” election regulations, at least for federal office.
It does not mention any role for the president or the executive branch in regulating elections. Biden issued an executive order in 2021 directing federal agencies to take steps to promote voting access, but Republicans at the time argued that the order was unconstitutional and exceeded the president’s authority. Trump rescinded the Biden order earlier this year.
Voting rights advocates have begun to make similar arguments against Trump’s order.
“A president does not set election law and never will,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of Common Cause, a grassroots advocacy organization that supports expanded voter access.
Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, called core parts of the executive order “a blatant overreach that threatens to disenfranchise tens of millions of eligible voters.”
Given the nation’s long history of decentralized, state-run elections, any attempt to change state election laws by executive order is likely to face challenges in court. Marc Elias, a leading Democratic election and voting rights attorney, promised exactly that.
“Moments ago, Donald Trump signed a massive voter suppression executive order,” he said in a social media post. “This will not stand. We will sue.”
Ultimately, the courts will decide how far Trump can go in overhauling election procedures.
