One of the more annoying aspects of the first two months of the Trump Administration is the way the media is treating his Executive Orders like finished law.
It directs the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an agency created by Congress to operate without direct control from the White House, to require eligible voters to provide documentary proof of their citizenship when registering through a federal registration form.
The change would prevent Americans who lack easy access to documents, such as passports, from registering to vote through the national mail voter registration form, which was originally created to make registering to vote more accessible.
“The U.S. Election Assistance Commission is carefully reviewing the President’s Executive Order and determining the next steps in enhancing the integrity of voter registration and state and federal elections,” said EAC chair Donald Palmer in a statement. “We also anticipate consulting with state and local election officials.”
The order also directs that states which accept ballots that arrive after election day — a common practice used states like California, Illinois and Nevada — would lose federal funds to support their election operations.
And the order charges Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with using federal databases to review state voter registration lists. As part of this effort, DOGE and DHS can subpoena state records to prove supposed voter registration fraud.
The Social Security commissioner must share federal databases with state and local election officials verifying the eligibility of registered voters and those attempting to register, the order directs.
Attorney General Pam Bondi must also take action against states that do not comply with federal list maintenance requirements.
The net of this is that blue states will litigate and probably get around it. Red states won’t bother to litigate since it’s all consistent with the voter suppression efforts that they’ve already put in place. It’s a lucky thing for this moment in our history that states generally run elections.
That all said, I’m not trying to underplay the effects of the consistent, constant Republican effort to suppress votes. It’s going to hurt our efforts to claw back power from the Trumpists. But I still think we’re going to have elections, and it’s defeatism of the highest order to say that we won’t.
