A Democracy Drive Thread
Executive orders rewriting voter rules, lawsuits to seize voters’ private data, and a campaign against mail ballots and voting machines — a federal drive to control elections the Constitution leaves to the states.
The Constitution leaves the running of elections to the states, with Congress empowered to regulate federal contests; the president’s role is to enforce the law, not write new voting rules. Beginning in 2025 the administration nonetheless moved to assert federal control over how Americans vote — through executive orders, Justice Department lawsuits demanding states’ private voter data, and a sustained campaign against mail ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterms. This thread tracks that effort in chronological order, with sources, including the courts that have repeatedly found it exceeds the president’s authority.
July 26, 2024
In his own words
At the Turning Point Action “Believers’ Summit” in West Palm Beach on July 26, 2024, candidate Trump urged Christian voters to turn out “just this time,” telling them that once he was elected they would no longer need to vote in future elections. The remark — that things would be “fixed so good” voting would be unnecessary — has been widely cited as a statement of intent about the durability of American elections under a second Trump term.
“Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore… In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
March 25, 2025
Trump signed an executive order, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” directing federal agencies to require documentary proof of citizenship on the national voter-registration form, to push states to reject mail ballots received after Election Day, and to condition election funding on compliance. Election administration, however, is set by the states and Congress — not the president.
April 3, 2025
Nineteen Democratic-led states sued, arguing the order usurped powers the Constitution assigns to the states and Congress. Federal courts agreed, blocking its key provisions; U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston later permanently barred most of the order, including the proof-of-citizenship requirement, holding that a president cannot add voting rules Congress has not enacted.
August 18, 2025
Trump declared he would move to ban mail-in voting and eliminate voting machines before the 2026 midterms, repeating unfounded fraud claims and asserting he would act by executive order. Election experts noted, again, that the president has no authority to dictate how states conduct their elections.
August 26, 2025
Heather Honey, a conservative election researcher known for promoting false claims about the 2020 election in Pennsylvania and Arizona, was appointed to a senior role in the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans. The position, which did not exist under the previous administration, focuses on election integrity.
September 25, 2025
The Justice Department began demanding full, unredacted voter rolls — including partial Social Security and driver’s-license numbers — from more than 40 states, then sued some 30 states and Washington, D.C. when many refused. Federal courts repeatedly rejected the demands, ruling they trampled the states’ role as primary administrators of elections; by mid-2026 the department had lost case after case, with an appeals court delivering its biggest setback yet.
October 9, 2025
Dominion Voting Systems — the voting-machine maker that became the central target of the 2020 “rigged election” conspiracy theories, and that had won a $787 million settlement from Fox News over them — was sold to Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican elections director in St. Louis and founder of the voter check-in vendor KNOWiNK. As sole owner he renamed the company Liberty Vote, saying he would push for hand-marked paper ballots and “improve election integrity.”
January 5, 2026
Former Civil Rights Division lawyers warned in court filings that the data campaign was a “stalking horse” for building a federal national voter roll, with collected data routed to DHS for screening. Weeks later, Attorney General Pam Bondi granted a single U.S. attorney, Thomas Albus, authority to pursue voter-fraud investigations in all 94 federal districts — the prosecutor who had also appeared on the warrant for the FBI’s seizure of Fulton County, Georgia election records.
March 14, 2026
David Harvilicz, the Department of Homeland Security's assistant secretary for cyber, infrastructure, risk and resilience policy, has called for the federal government to ban voting machines in all federal elections, claiming they are vulnerable to exploitation. Harvilicz is a co-founder of a company with James Penrose, who was involved in attempts to seize voting machines following the 2020 election.
March 23, 2026
On March 23, 2026, Steve Bannon stated on his 'War Room' podcast that President Donald Trump's deployment of ICE agents to major U.S. airports to assist the TSA should be viewed as a 'test run' or 'test case' for deploying ICE agents to polling places during the 2026 midterm elections to prevent noncitizens from voting.
March 24, 2026
A day before calling mail voting “mail-in cheating,” Trump cast a mail-in ballot in a Florida state House special election covering his Mar-a-Lago club, having skipped the in-person early-voting days available that weekend. Asked to square it with his rhetoric, he said he voted by mail “because I’m president of the United States.”
“Because I’m president of the United States … I did a mail-in ballot.”
March 31, 2026
With the 2025 order largely blocked, Trump signed a new executive order targeting mail and absentee voting: directing DHS to build and hand each state a list of “eligible” citizens, and threatening to withhold delivery of states’ ballots unless they submitted mail-voter lists to the Postal Service 60 days out. Voting-rights groups sued immediately and experts said he again lacked the authority; a federal judge in Washington declined to block the order in late May.
June 22, 2026
Trump revealed at a rally that he had personally phoned Bill Essayli, the U.S. attorney for central California, and asked him to “take a look” at the state’s elections — fearing his endorsed candidate, Steve Hilton, might not advance in California’s primary. Essayli had announced an election probe on June 5; it had not previously been known that Trump personally ordered it. Hilton in fact advanced once more ballots were counted, while Trump and allies used California’s slow count to push baseless fraud claims.
“I called up the very powerful and very good U.S. attorney in California, and I said, ‘Do me a favor. Take a look, they are trying to steal that election, too.’”
June 23, 2026
Liberty Vote moved to dismiss “with prejudice” — meaning it can never be refiled — the $1.3 billion defamation suit Dominion had brought against MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell over his false claims that its machines flipped votes in 2020, settling on confidential terms with each side bearing its own costs. Under the same new ownership, the company had already quietly settled its parallel cases against Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell — unwinding the main legal accountability that remained for the 2020 election-fraud lies.
June 24, 2026
Testifying to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Postmaster General David Steiner confirmed the Postal Service would refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that declines to hand the federal government a “manifest” of its voters — names, addresses, and ballot barcode numbers — under a proposed rule implementing Trump’s March 2026 elections executive order. All 47 Democratic senators wrote the agency calling it an unconstitutional attempt to turn USPS into a White House-controlled election authority.
“Under our proposed regulation, no. We would tell the state that we need the manifest.”
July 9, 2026
On July 9, 2026, Trump fired all of the remaining commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission — the bipartisan federal agency created after the disputed 2000 election to help states run their elections — dismissing Democrats Thomas Hicks and Ben Hovland and Republican Christy McCormick and leaving the four-seat body with no commissioners at all, just months before the 2026 midterms. Because the EAC cannot take significant action unless three confirmed commissioners agree, the purge effectively freezes the agency. It came days after the Supreme Court, in Trump v. Slaughter, swept aside decades of precedent that had shielded independent agencies from the White House and held that the president may remove their leaders at will — clearing the path for Trump to pull yet another election body under his direct control.
July 10, 2026
On July 10, 2026, U.S. District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit demanding New York’s unredacted voter registration records, ruling that the DOJ had failed to state the “basis” and “purpose” that federal law requires to obtain them. It was the administration’s 12th consecutive loss in the roughly 31 voter-roll suits it has filed against states and the District of Columbia — an 0-for-12 record, with judges across the ideological spectrum, including several Trump himself appointed in his first term, rejecting the department’s legal theory. Days earlier the Sixth Circuit had handed the DOJ its first appellate defeat as well, affirming the dismissal of an identical demand to Michigan.
On the ground
On July 10, 2026, U.S. District Judge Mae D’Agostino dismissed the Trump DOJ’s lawsuit demanding New York’s unredacted statewide voter-registration list, ruling that no federal law — not the Civil Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, nor the Help America Vote Act — authorized the demand. It was the department’s 12th consecutive loss in its nationwide campaign to force all 50 states to hand over their voter rolls to the federal government; days later a court tossed its West Virginia suit as well, making it 13 straight.
July 14, 2026
On the ground
On July 14, 2026, the Wisconsin Elections Commission found probable cause that Elon Musk violated the state’s election-bribery statute when he offered and handed out $1 million payments to voters during the April 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, in which he spent at least $20 million backing the conservative candidate, who lost. The bipartisan commission referred the matter to the Brown County district attorney, who can bring criminal charges.
July 16, 2026
In his own words
In a 25-minute primetime address from the East Room on July 16, 2026, Trump again disputed his 2020 loss, claiming he had declassified documents revealing “shocking vulnerabilities” in U.S. election infrastructure, Chinese efforts to influence American elections, and voting-machine and noncitizen-voter concerns — and said he had ordered the Justice Department to prosecute those involved. He produced no evidence that any vote count had been altered; repeated audits and reviews, many run by Republicans, have found no such fraud. The speech was a pitch for his stalled SAVE America Act.