Trump’s Election Rule Push: Mixed Record, November still to come
President Trump has spent a great deal of his second term attempting to change the way America votes, with executive orders that have pressured Congress, and federal investigations. So far, his efforts have met with mixed success, as courts have intervened to thwart his most ambitious moves.
The latest blow occurred on Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of states that would accept mail ballots that arrived after the election’s deadline, provided they were postmarked on time. It is the latest instance of the opposition Trump’s election program has encountered, even in a friendly conservative majority on the bench.
The decision came on the heels of a bumpy ride for the administration. Two federal courts recently invalidated two of Trump’s key executive orders dealing with election rules just last week. The Department of Justice was prevented from obtaining sensitive voter information from individual states by separate court decisions. Meanwhile, in Congress, the SAVE Act (his favorite bill to reform voting rules) has been languishing on the Senate floor without any prospects of passage.
Derek Muller, a Notre Dame Law professor, said it has been a mixed bag for Republicans. Overall, the president has “returned mostly empty handed,” he added.
Where Trump has actually been effective.
It hasn’t been a total loss for the administration. By encouraging several Republican-controlled states to redraw their congressional lines, Trump has helped pave the way for several of them to do so.Trump has helped pave the way for several of these Republican-controlled states to redraw their congressional lines by encouraging them to do so after the Supreme Court gutted a key part of the Voting Rights Act. Individually, Trump has instructed the Justice Department to conduct investigations into election functions in election states, a step that worries Democrats because it could be a way for the administration to prepare for the midterm elections in November.
It’s all because of Trump’s long-standing and false assertion that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud. Recently, he withheld his signature from a bipartisan housing bill reportedly because of his frustration that the Senate wasn’t advancing the SAVE Act.
Following Monday’s decision, Trump shared on social media that he was “working to save America from crooked elections. But voting rights activists and Democratic operatives see something entirely different suppression of their right to vote before a midterm election that will decide control of Congress.
As long as Trump persists in doing what he wants to do, he finds himself backed up against the wall every time: The Constitution vests power in the states and congressional bodies to conduct elections, not the presidency.
That, that is how federalism works,” he said.
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The Noncitizen Voting Claims Continue to Face Legal Stumbling Blocks.
Trump has cited the illegal voting by noncitizens as a major issue in U.S. elections repeatedly. This isn’t the data to suggest that. Numerous studies demonstrate the rarity of noncitizen voting consistently convictions are in the hundreds of votes cast out of tens of millions of ballots over multi-year periods.
The assertion has not been proven, even though it has spurred a huge federal initiative to consolidate voter records and eliminate fraudulent voters. The Justice Department asked certain states to provide voters’ details, such as birth dates and partial Social Security numbers. Some state secretaries of state, both Democrats and some Republicans, resisted, and sued. So far, the administration hasn’t won a single one of those cases.
One of those programs was the Department of Homeland Security’s reworking of a program known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, which is now assisted by the DOGE initiative of Elon Musk. The tool was designed to assist states in determining and purging voters who might not be eligible.
Last week a federal judge banned its use for mass citizenship checks. The government says it had given election officials wider powers to search tens of thousands of voters than they had sought, as per the government’s records. The registration of 67 million plus was examined, with a significant majority in Republican states. Some of the flagged were rightfully flagged as dead or ineligible, while others were flagged incorrectly.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan was not holding back in her opinion, explaining that the federal government “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a way that threatens the sacred right to vote.
Executive Orders that are utilized to skirt a hesitant Congress.
Trump is following in the footsteps of many of his predecessors who resorted to executive orders when lawmakers deadlocked.
His original order was to require proof of citizenship for voter registration on a national basis, which is essentially what the SAVE Act would do. Last year, Judge Denise Casper put the order on hold and permanently blocked it last week, noting in a scathing ruling that the Constitution “does not give the President any specific powers over elections.
In March, it became apparent that the SAVE Act was languishing in the Senate, so a second executive order was issued. This one had required a national voter list that would be created from information in immigration and Social Security records. It also would have granted the U.S. Postal Service control over the delivery of absentee ballots and would have jeopardized local election officials’ criminal prosecution.
Trump has been critical of absentee and mail voting for its susceptibility to fraud, even though he has relied on them to vote himself. According to a Brookings Institution 2025 study, it appears that documented mail voting fraud was extremely rare, at about 0.000043% of ballots cast.
Democratic secretaries of state brought suit over the order and Judge Indira Talwani gave the same verdict as Casper, finding the provisions “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers. According to the White House, it will appeal.
Even Trump admits that the SAVE Act is probably dead
Trump lashed out at Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, whom he described as “Trump-deranged,” on Monday for voting against the measure.
Trump has called for the end of the filibuster, or 60-vote requirement, for the most important legislation for the first time. Even if the filibuster were abolished, though, the SAVE Act would not be the same this time around. So far, four Republican Senators have voiced their objections against the bill, including Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell.
Trump acknowledged Monday that the bill “probably not going to happen.
What Trump Can Still Do before Nov. 7
Despite these legislative and legal disappointments, Trump still has some tools at his disposal to help define how the midterm elections will turn out.
Both political parties have national monitoring teams in place who have legal teams to challenge results or procedures if they are perceived as unfair. Although the RNC lost the mail ballot case in the Supreme Court, RNC Chairman Joe Gruters indicated the party isn’t giving up. The RNC will continue to fight this decision and will not be deterred, he said Monday, “Let’s see the RNC get elections to come to an end on Election Day.”
Perhaps more importantly, the administration seems to be laying the groundwork for greater direct involvement. In June, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles said it had initiated several investigations into election fraud and dispatched a prosecutor to monitor the vote counting in California’s primary elections. FBI agents had already served a warrant and confiscated 2020 election ballots and records from Fulton County, Georgia, where Atlanta is located, months ago.
Local election officials are already in discussions about what to do if they have any possible chain-of-custody issues to contend with when collecting and counting the ballots this fall, Muller said.
But both Muller and UCLA law professor Rick Hasen say that such seizures must be done with a judicial warrant, and Muller believes that such warrants would be even harder to obtain in the midst of an election.
For his part, Hasen is working to educate judges across the country about the importance of ballot chain-of-custody protections at this time.
His all-encompassing message about the entire incident is scathing: “Republicans believe him when he claims that the election is rigged and then when Republicans attempt to change voting systems, hoping to make it tighter, that makes Republicans think that the election is being rigged, too. So if that is what he is trying to do, he has been successful on an astounding level.”
