Just two months into his second term, Donald Trump signed a radical executive order intended to impose sweeping changes on the nation’s system of elections. Congress hadn’t approved anything of the kind, but the Republican decided that he could just create the policy anyway through presidential fiat.

NBC News reported at the time that the changes “could risk disenfranchising tens of millions of Americans.” Trump, exercising a legal authority he decided to bestow on himself, did it anyway.

Predictably, the order faced a great many court challenges. Also predictably, the president’s policy was rejected throughout the judiciary as a power-grab at odds with how policymaking is supposed to happen in the United States.

As 2026 got underway, Trump’s determination to unilaterally seize control over election policy remained undeterred, and MS NOW reported in February that the president was eyeing another executive order, “even as his own lawyers … warned the moves would likely run into legal trouble.”

As March came to an end, the Republican again ignored his own country’s policymaking process, again decided to circumvent Congress and again signed an executive order giving himself sweeping authority over the country’s elections systems. MS NOW reported:

Trump’s order requires the Department of Homeland Security … to create a list of U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote. DHS would be expected to rely on information provided by the Social Security Administration, according to the Daily Caller, which first reported the Trump administration’s plans.

The U.S. Postal Service would then use that database to send absentee ballots to voters identified as eligible for mail-in voting, according to a White House fact sheet. The ballots would be mailed in envelopes with special codes only to voters enrolled in state-specific absentee ballot programs.

As part of the policy, the administration would withhold federal funds from states and localities that refuse to comply with the order.

In case this isn’t painfully obvious, the order intends to address a problem that doesn’t exist; there are no meaningful problems with mail-in voting (a system that Trump himself continues to use); and the White House made no effort whatsoever to bolster the executive order with even a shred of evidence to support the underlying conspiratorial claims.

“Maybe it’ll be tested, maybe it won’t,” the president said late Monday, referring to possible legal challenges.

There was, however, no need to be coy: Trump does not have the legal authority to singlehandedly dictate elections policy, which is a lesson he probably ought to have learned last year after his first such effort was swiftly rejected in the courts.

A related report in The New York Times added, “Election experts and Democratic state election officials rejected the president’s directive as legally invalid. Officials in Arizona and Oregon pledged to fight the executive order in court. Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer, also vowed to file a lawsuit against the order.

If Trump’s policy is ridiculous, and its failure in the courts appears inevitable, it might be tempting to brush off his latest gambit as pointless political theater.

But it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, the latest power-grab is part of a comprehensive effort to undermine public confidence in the nation’s electoral system and sow doubts about election results that Republicans don’t like. The president has played an instrumental role in fueling unnecessary public skepticism, and his executive order is likely to make a bad situation worse.

For another, Trump continues to position himself as the nation’s single most serious threat to the integrity of the electoral process.

On Tuesday morning, The New York Times published an op-ed by Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who made a convincing case that the most pressing danger to our elections isn’t coming from abroad; it’s coming from the White House.

“For months, President Trump has made his intentions clear,” the senator wrote. “He has called for the federal government to ‘take over’ elections, impose national rules and override state authority. Now we are beginning to see how he may plan to do this.”

Later that same day, the president helped prove Warner right.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The post Trump’s elections power-grab on mail-in voting is likely to fail, but it’s not irrelevant appeared first on MS NOW.

Author: Source Author

From MS Now.