Trump's new order could mangle dozens of ongoing DOJ lawsuits: expert

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he speaks during the signing ceremony for an executive order on mail ballots, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 31, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci

Elections lawyer Marc Elias tagged some unintended consequences of President Donald Trump's new executive order aimed at restricting mail-in ballots.

Writing on BlueSky on Friday, Elias said: "Trump’s executive order on mail voting is highly likely to be declared unconstitutional and blocked by courts. But it might also screw up the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) 30 ongoing lawsuits for state voter rolls."

Trump signed the order on Tuesday, which requires the U.S. Postal Service to decide who gets a mail-in ballot. Trump, who has voted by mail at least twice, has pressed the Senate to pass legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. It is already the law that someone must be a citizen to vote. Democrats have blocked the measure.

Democrats have already filed a lawsuit to stop the bill, PBS News reported. It marks the second round of legal battles over Trump's efforts to turn control of elections to the federal government. The state of California has also filed a suit, the attorney general announced in a release Friday.

“The U.S. Constitution clearly gives States the primary authority over elections and gives zero authority to the President. This latest executive order is just another unlawful attempt to restrict voting, fueled by his fear of losing the upcoming midterm elections and based on wholly unfounded allegations of voter fraud," said California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

However, in a Democracy Docket report on Friday, the writer echoed Elias' comments, calling the idea not only "foolish" but might "backfire."

“The only real legal effect of this executive order might be to kill the remaining DOJ lawsuits seeking to seize voter data,” said David Becker, who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Trump tried a previous executive order that attempted to impose his SAVE Act citizenship identification requirements through his unilateral presidential authority. A judge shot it down in January.

The problem is that Trump is facing a lawsuit by 29 states (and the District of Columbia) to block the Department of Justice's demand for all state voter rolls and information. There are 17 states that complied.

"In those lawsuits, the DOJ has claimed it needs millions of voters’ private sensitive data in order to ensure the states are complying with federal laws that require states to take steps to ensure accurate rolls," explained Democracy Docket. "But outside of court, DOJ officials like Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon have undermined that claim by boasting that the state voter records they’ve already obtained have been used to verify citizenship status using the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program."

Her public statements caused problems in a California case in which a judge ruled, “The Court is not required to accept pretextual, formalistic explanations untethered to the reality of what the government has said outside of the courtroom."

After that ruling, the DOJ attorneys argued in the other cases that the DOJ wasn't providing cover for DHS's immigration database.

“I need to say definitively for the record, I thought it was pretty unequivocal that there is not going to be a national voter registration database,” DOJ attorney James Tucker said during a subsequent case in Maine.

As Democracy Docket explained, this argument was just eliminated by Trump's new order, which does exactly that.

“There’s no federal justification for creating a national voter list, and as DOJ lawyers have gone into court and tried to assure the court that they were not creating a national voter list,” Becker told DD. “This seems to confirm what the court was concerned about all along.”

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