President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a second executive order on elections, this one giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented oversight over who is voting by mail, a move experts and state election officials said will quickly draw legal challenges. The order, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” says that states can send the U.S. Postal Service only mail ballots for voters on federally approved lists, fundamentally altering how elections are administered nationwide.
A coalition of voting rights organizations filed a lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts challenging President Trump’s March 31 executive order concerning mail-in voting.
The Constitution explicitly states that only Congress and the states can set the rules for elections. Nevertheless, the order attempts to displace states’ mail-in voting laws by transforming the U.S. Postal Service from a neutral mail carrier to an arbiter of who may cast a ballot by mail. The ACLU and League of Women Voters lead the legal challenge.
Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which represented plaintiffs suing over Trump’s first executive order on elections , declared “The president has no power to direct the creation of any of these lists or to restrict the delivery of mail ballots to any given list.”
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA, wrote on his blog that the order is likely unconstitutional. And regardless, he added, “the timing here makes this virtually impossible to implement in time for November’s elections. … It seems highly unlikely any of this could be implemented for 2026, even if it were not blocked by courts.”
If implemented, the Order would threaten the ability of millions of eligible citizens to cast their ballots, particularly military members, overseas citizens, the elderly, recently naturalized citizens, and voters with disabilities who rely on mail voting.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, a Democrat, said her office is “reviewing this order and will take appropriate legal action to ensure that every eligible voter in Massachusetts can vote and have their vote counted.” “The Trump Administration cannot interfere with the right to vote and may not override state election authority,” Campbell said. Multiple state attorneys general have signaled similar challenges are forthcoming.