GOP Congressmen Won’t Pass the SAVE Act, so Trump Is Trying to Seize Control of Voting with Executive Orders Instead
The President of the United States just directed the Postal Service to not accept American votes.
Photo via Unsplash, Tiffany Tertipes Splinter mail voting
The Republican wing of Congress in the Senate has made it abundantly clear that despite President Donald Trump’s public tantrums on the subject, it simply doesn’t have the votes necessary to pass his cherished voter disenfranchisement bill, the SAVE Act–more recently amended in title, in classic Trump fashion, to the “SAVE America Act.” Doing so would require nuking the filibuster, something that the Senate GOP isn’t ready to commit itself to with midterms looming, so they’ve mostly settled for performative grandstanding instead, knowing that the bill will never actually pass. And Trump, despite continuing to push for the SAVE Act, knows this as well, which is why he’s now attempting to simply recreate the effect of the bill through his favored method: Legislation in the form of executive order. On Tuesday, he signed an order effectively attempting to federalize numerous aspects of state elections, commanding the Department of Homeland Security to create a national list of citizens eligible to vote, while threatening both states and the United States Postal Office simultaneously with punishment if they don’t fall into line with the executive order’s pronouncements on mail-in voting.
Two things can be true at once: This is simultaneously a nightmarishly totalitarian attempted power grab over U.S. elections by Trump and the executive branch, and it’s also mostly political theater so Trump can pretend to be doing something about his hatred of mail-in voting. Trump has already made multiple, similar attempts via executive orders to seize control over various aspects of the voting process, only to be smacked down by federal judges each and every time, citing the simply fact that the Constitution does not grant any authority over elections to the executive branch. The states are instead granted broad authority over the “time, place and manner” in which elections occur, and the Constitution likewise empowers Congress to pass laws regulating elections. Trump has previously attempted to impose an executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote (a central tenet of the SAVE Act), and signed another that would have withheld federal funding from states that didn’t revise their elections to suit his commands. In both cases, judges told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t have the power to do so, which is again the likely outcome here after multiple states immediately signaled they would sue the government in response. But despite that, Trump still claims confidence, saying “I believe it’s foolproof” in reference to this newest order. His plan has increasingly been to just throw as many patently illegal executive orders out there as possible, seemingly hoping that one will end up in front of a sympathetic judge.
This is bullshit. And it’s illegal. We’ll see President Trump in court.
www.reuters.com/world/us/tru…
— Governor Tony Evers (@govevers.wisconsin.gov) Mar 31, 2026 at 7:11 PM
Tuesday’s order tells DHS to create what is termed a “state citizenship list,” compiled from citizenship and naturalization records and Social Security records, to create what is essentially a national voter list. Said list would then be sent to state election officials, who would be prosecuted by the federal government if they refuse to use the list in determining the eligibility of any given voter. Simultaneously, it commands the U.S. Postal Service to similarly check against the list and refuse to deliver mail-in or absentee ballots to or from any individual who is not on the “state citizenship list.” This, despite the fact that the executive branch also has no power over the USPS, and cannot legally tell it what mail to deliver and not to deliver. As you would expect from an independent agency afraid that Trump will attempt to either directly control or privatize it, USPS spokespeople refused to give any substantive comment on the executive order commanding them to subvert American elections, saying only that they would “review the order.” Trump has previously floated the idea of bringing the USPS under direct control by folding it into the Commerce Department.
This is what we call an “easy case” for a lawsuit; the idea that the President can order the Post Office to adopt rules refusing to carry mail-in ballots that don’t conform to the President’s preferred design.
Laughably, obviously unconstitutional if USPS tries to go forward with it.
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) Mar 31, 2026 at 6:06 PM
Suffice to say, Tuesday’s executive order will be immediately challenged from all sides. State election officials in numerous states said they simply wouldn’t comply, with officials in Arizona and Oregon specifically saying they would bring lawsuits.
“The Constitution doesn’t allow the executive to take over elections administration, that’s a job for the state legislatures or Congress, and so I don’t think this is going to pass any sort of judicial muster,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to the New York Times. “So this is a big, giant waste of time, and it’s an attention grab from the Trump administration.”
It should probably go without saying that even if the federal government was able to implement this kind of national voter database, it would be immediately rife with problems–no doubt something the administration fully intends. Because each state’s voter rolls are updated on a daily basis via people moving in and out of the state, naturalizing, registering to vote, turning 18 or dying, the state-level lists are constantly in flux. A federal database created by simply taking a snapshot of that data would be out of date more or less instantaneously, while also allowing the federal government myriad opportunities to disenfranchise any individual voter or groups or voters they want by simply leaving them off the list without explanation. The Justice Department has been trying for months to access unredacted voter rolls from all 50 states, but only a handful of deep red states have acquiesced to date.
It’s also no surprise that Trump would choose the Department of Homeland Security as the vector for creating such a list, as the department under Secretary Kristi Noem and now Markwayne Mullin has been the personal extension of his autocratic will throughout the second Trump administration, used to repress and disenfranchise American citizens in a wide variety of blatantly illegal ways. If DHS were put in charge of enforcing aspects of this “state citizenship list,” which agency would it utilize as the manpower to carry out tasks related to it on election day? Can you say … ICE? As Maya Wiley, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights put it: “This is Donald Trump turning the Department of Homeland Security into the department of controlling the homeland.”
Elections expert says Trump’s new executive order on elections “will be blocked by the federals courts before the ink is dry.”
— Ryan J. Reilly “paints a vivid and urgent portrait of… disarray” (@ryanjreilly.com) Mar 31, 2026 at 6:14 PM
It always bears repeating that these moves on the part of the Trump administration are in response to a purely imaginary threat of widespread voter fraud, especially in the form of mail-in ballots, that has never, ever been demonstrated to actually exist. Numerous studies and reviews have all concluded that voter fraud is practically nonexistent, with a 2025 report from the Brooking Institution finding that fraud in mail voting occurred roughly 0.000043% of the time. That’s roughly 4 fraudulent votes per 10 million votes cast by mail. Trump has such confidence in the process, in fact, that he pretty much always votes by mail himself, while simultaneously telling his MAGA faithful that the entire mail voting system can’t be trusted, and that the SAVE Act is necessary to make sure that undesirables don’t sully our elections by participating in the democratic process.
The outcome of this time-wasting executive order will almost certainly that another federal judge tells Donald Trump to go shove it up his ass, indefinitely pausing any enforcement of it. Officials like Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows are already calling it “laughably unconstitutional” and simply saying that they’ll refuse to comply. But Trump, like a boxer, is working as a volume puncher, throwing out challenge after challenge after challenge, hoping that something significant will finally land. It’s dangerous to assume that nothing ever will, in an administration that is more nakedly corrupt than it’s ever been. We’re left, as we always are, simply hoping that American democracy, ill-equipped to fight off a concerted effort by an autocrat to undermine it, has the internal fortitude to continue shrugging off these kinds of assaults.
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