As the midterm elections approach, there has been speculation about President Trump and his administration trying to have control over the elections so that the results could go in their favor.
This claim gained attention on Tuesday as Trump signed an executive order with the primary goal of creating a federal list of citizens and asking the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to those on the list.
According to this order, the Department of Homeland Security would be asked to create “state citizenship lists” from federal citizenship and naturalization records, Social Security records, and other federal databases.
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These lists would then be sent to states so that they could be verified against state voter rolls. Lastly, USPS would be asked to send ballots only to those on the list.
It should be noted here that this executive order is the second one related to elections since he took office. Given the nature of the order, it is bound to be challenged in court, even though Trump does not seem to think so. Talking about the executive order, he said, “That’s a big deal.”
The president then added, “I think this will help a lot with elections. We’d like to have voter ID. We’d like to have proof of citizenship, and that’ll be another subject for another time. We’re working on that. You would think it’d be easy.”
However, election experts have a completely different opinion than Trump, as David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, which works to support election administrators, said, “This will be blocked by the federal courts before the ink is dry.”
Becker further added, “The Constitution clearly gives the power to regulate these issues related to mail ballots to the states,” Becker continued. “The president has been excluded by the framers from dictating election policy to the states.”
Trump’s focus on changing the voting process has continued for a long time, as he consistently keeps falsely claiming that he had won the 2020 election and would have emerged victorious if the whole thing had not been rigged. Despite his claims being proven wrong time and again, the president does not appear to be deterred and continues to repeat the same rhetoric.
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Besides signing the executive order on Tuesday, Trump also announced that he plans to attend the Supreme Court oral arguments on Wednesday for a case that could end birthright citizenship in the U.S. The president told reporters on Tuesday, saying, “I’m going.”
He further added, “Because I have listened to this argument for so long.” On Wednesday, Supreme Court justices will hear arguments on the constitutionality of an executive order Trump signed in January 2025 seeking to limit birthright citizenship only to people who have at least one parent who is an American citizen or a legal permanent resident.
Trump’s decision to attend the oral arguments is historic, as no previous president has done so. Moreover, the fact that Trump had attacked the justices a few weeks earlier after his tariffs were rejected by the Supreme Court makes his decision to attend the arguments even more attention-grabbing.
