A federal decide on Wednesday completely blocked the Trump administration from implementing an executive order signed last year that required proof of citizenship to register to vote and demanded mail-in ballots be obtained by Election Day.
Decide Denise Casper dominated that the president lacks the authority to supervise elections and rejected the Trump administration’s unsupported claims of “widespread unlawful voting, discrimination, fraud, and different types of malfeasance and error.”
“Whereas the Structure vests the President with ‘government Energy’ and instructions him to ‘take Care that the Legal guidelines be faithfully executed,’ it doesn’t grant the President any particular powers over elections,” Decide Casper wrote.
The choice is greater than a yr within the making, with a bunch of state attorneys common final April submitting a lawsuit in Boston to dam Trump’s first government order on voting. That order sought to require proof of citizenship to register to vote in addition to impose an Election Day deadline for mail-in ballots, and Decide Casper final June issued a preliminary injunction blocking the coverage.
President Donald Trump delivers remarks on the Mack Vans Lehigh Valley Operations facility, June 23, 2026 in Macungie, Pennsylvania.
Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
In a 59-page ruling issued Wednesday, Decide Casper made that call everlasting on largely the identical authorized foundation as her resolution final yr. Along with discovering that Trump overstepped his authority with the order, the decide stated the Division of Justice didn’t exhibit the alleged fraud that purportedly justified the order, and the coverage would have disenfranchised 1000’s.
“There isn’t a proof on this file of widespread ‘unlawful voting, discrimination, fraud, and different types of malfeasance and error’ inside American elections, which the Govt Order purports to safeguard towards,” she wrote.
The ruling is the newest setback within the Trump administration’s try to reshape federal elections, with courts blocking a number of efforts to impose federal oversight on elections.
A number of lawsuits are difficult Trump’s second government order on voting that tried to create a national database of approved voters, and earlier this week, a decide blocked an try to make use of an immigration database to test voter rolls. Judges throughout the nation have additionally rejected the Department of Justice’s attempt to obtain state voter rolls.
