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.
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.
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 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.”