A federal judge on Thursday blocked key parts of a sweeping anti-voting executive order issued by President Donald Trump in March. Voting rights advocates described the order as “an astonishing and unprecedented voter suppression” effort that would upend how Americans register to vote, how they cast their ballots, and how their votes are counted.
District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, found that Trump lacked the power to unilaterally change election rules. “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States—not the President—with the authority to regulate federal elections,” she wrote.
For that reason, she blocked the centerpiece of Trump’s executive order—a requirement that voters show documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Trump ordered the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent agency created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, to mandate that information on a federal voter registration form.
Democrats and voting rights groups who challenged the order, including the League of Women Voters and League of United Latin American Citizens, argued that Trump lacked the authority to force the EAC to require proof of citizenship. The order, if enforced in full, would prevent tens of millions of Americans from registering to vote.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, more than 9 percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents like a birth certificate or passport. Trump’s order could disenfranchise many more people than that because it does not specify that birth certificates or naturalization papers can be used to determine US citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote. And because driver’s licenses in most states don’t specify citizenship, those without access to their birth certificate would have to use a passport to register to vote, which 146 million Americans don’t have.
“If this policy were implemented, it would block tens of millions of Americans from voting,” Eliza Sweren-Becker of the Brennan Center told me in March. (The House passed a bill in April, the SAVE Act, that would also require proof of citizenship to register to vote, but it currently lacks the 60 votes necessary to pass in the Senate.)
Judge Kollar-Kotelly agreed that Trump did not possess the power to unilaterally change how Americans registered to vote. “Neither the Constitution nor any statute explicitly grants the President the power to dictate the contents of the Federal Form,” she wrote. “On the contrary, both the Constitution’s Elections Clause and the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act] vest control over federal election regulation in other actors, leaving no role for the President.”
In a partial victory for the administration, the judge declined to block other parts of Trump’s executive order, including one provision that gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Government Efficiency enhanced power to search for alleged non-citizen voters on state voter lists. (Non-citizens on such a list are exceedingly rare.) Another provision that was not blocked penalizes states that allow ballots to be counted after Election Day, so long as they are postmarked by the day of the election.
“On the present record, challenges to those provisions are premature or properly presented not by these plaintiffs but by the States themselves,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote. “In fact, many States are already bringing those challenges elsewhere.” Nineteen states, led by Massachusetts, have sued the administration over the executive order, which could lead to further provisions being blocked in subsequent litigation.
Voting rights groups celebrated Thursday’s order.
“President Trump’s attempt to impose a documentary proof of citizenship requirement on the federal voter registration form is an unconstitutional abuse of power,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. “If implemented, it would place serious and unnecessary burdens on everyday Americans and strain already overburdened election officials. This executive order is part of a broader attack on our democratic elections by promoting baseless nativist conspiracy theories. Today, the court blocked a key strategy of this attack. And we will keep fighting to ensure every eligible voter can make their voice heard without interference or intimidation.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.