A federal judge on May 28 refused to block President Donald Trump’s executive order that tightens rules on mail-in voting, handing a setback to Democrats who said the move could disenfranchise millions.
The ruling arrives as Republicans allied with Trump fight to retain control of both chambers of Congress in the November midterm elections. Trump, who has long claimed without evidence that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election, has repeatedly criticized voting by mail.
Trump’s March 31 order directs the administration to create lists of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and to use federal records to help state officials verify voter eligibility. It also instructs the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on states’ approved mail-in lists and requires states to preserve election-related records for five years.
Democratic plaintiffs, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to issue a preliminary injunction, arguing the order improperly intrudes on states’ constitutional authority to run elections.
They warned that relying on Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration data to compile “state citizenship lists” could wrongly exclude lawfully registered voters because those databases can be outdated or contain errors. The Justice Department countered that the case is premature because agencies have not yet implemented the order. A separate group of Democratic-led states filed a similar challenge in federal court in Boston.