ATLANTA (AP) — President Donald Trump has pursued an ambitious campaign to tighten federal control over U.S. elections, using executive orders, proposed legislation, and agency actions to push his agenda. But Monday’s Supreme Court decision backing states that allow late-arriving mail ballots underscored just how far his reach actually extends.
The ruling came on the heels of two back-to-back court decisions last week that struck down his sweeping executive orders aimed at changing national election rules. Federal courts have also blocked his Department of Justice from obtaining detailed voter information from states. Meanwhile, his push to get the Senate to pass the SAVE Act has stalled. That legislation would eliminate most absentee voting, require voters to show citizenship documents when registering, and mandate photo ID nationwide — all ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
“It’s been a mixed bag for Republicans,” said University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller, who added that the president “has come up mostly empty-handed.”
Still, Trump’s efforts haven’t been entirely without results. Republican-controlled states have redrawn congressional district lines at his urging, a process aided by the Supreme Court’s earlier decision to strike down a key section of the Voting Rights Act. He has also directed the Department of Justice to investigate voting and election operations — a move Democrats worry could be a preview of federal involvement in November’s elections.
The relentless focus on election rules stems from Trump’s longstanding and false assertion that his 2020 presidential loss was the result of a rigged election. His frustration over the Senate’s failure to pass the SAVE Act has even led him to refuse to sign a bipartisan housing bill.
Following Monday’s Supreme Court mail ballot ruling, Trump took to social media to say he is working to “save America from crooked elections.” Voting rights advocates and Democrats, however, say he is misusing presidential power and attempting to suppress legally cast votes to gain a political edge in the midterms, when control of Congress will be decided.
Muller pointed out that Trump faces real constitutional boundaries. The authority over elections rests with the states and Congress — not the president.
“That’s how federalism works,” Muller said.
Here is a closer look at Trump’s attempts to change election rules and what avenues may remain open to him before November.
Trump has repeatedly claimed U.S. elections are plagued by fraud, particularly from noncitizens voting illegally. However, research consistently shows such cases are extremely rare, representing only a tiny fraction of documented fraud. Criminal convictions for this type of offense number in the hundreds across elections where tens of millions of ballots are cast.
Acting on those beliefs, Trump launched a multi-agency push to gather national voter data and use federal resources to help states remove voters from registration rolls. The Department of Justice sought detailed voter files — including birth dates and partial Social Security numbers — from multiple states. Democratic and some Republican secretaries of state refused to comply, and lawsuits followed. The administration has lost every court case so far.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, with assistance from the DOGE effort led by Elon Musk, overhauled a government program called SAVE — Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. The tool became central to efforts to identify and remove potentially ineligible voters from state rolls. Last week, a federal judge blocked its use as a broad citizenship verification tool.
According to the administration’s own announcements, the revamped system had allowed local election administrators to search voter records by the thousands using a wider range of data points rather than DHS-issued identification numbers. At least 67 million voter registrations — mostly in Republican-controlled states — were reviewed. Tens of thousands were flagged as possible noncitizens or deceased individuals, but some eligible voters were incorrectly marked as ineligible.
U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled that Trump’s modifications had compiled Americans’ sensitive personal information in a way that put voters at risk of being wrongly removed from the rolls.
“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote in her order.
When Congress declined to act on his policy preferences, Trump turned to executive orders — a tool used by presidents before him.
His first order mirrored the SAVE Act’s approach, requiring prospective voters to prove their citizenship in order to register. U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper initially placed a temporary hold on it and last week made that block permanent. The Constitution, Casper wrote, “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”
Trump issued a second executive order in March, as the SAVE Act’s prospects in Congress dimmed. That order called for creating a national voter list drawing on data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration. It also would have given the U.S. Postal Service the power to decide who receives an absentee ballot and threatened local elections officials with criminal prosecution.
Absentee voting is a widely used and accepted part of American elections, though Trump has repeatedly and incorrectly described it as a vehicle for fraud — even though he has voted by mail himself. A 2025 report by the Brookings Institution found that mail ballot fraud occurred in just 0.000043% of all mail ballots cast.
Democratic secretaries of state filed a lawsuit, and U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani reached the same conclusion as Casper. The executive order’s provisions, she wrote last week, “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.” The White House has signaled it will appeal.
On Monday, Trump called the Senate gridlock over the SAVE Act “crazy” and singled out Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, calling her “Trump-deranged.” He has demanded Republicans eliminate the filibuster, which requires 60 votes in the 100-member Senate to advance most major legislation. But that likely wouldn’t solve the problem here — four of the Senate’s 53 Republicans have declared outright opposition to the bill: Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
Trump acknowledged Monday that the SAVE Act is “probably not going to happen.”
Both major political parties have national operations in place to monitor elections, including legal teams prepared to file challenges. Despite the Republican National Committee’s loss in the mail ballot case, RNC Chairman Joe Gruters signaled the fight isn’t over.
“We are not going to be deterred by this decision, and the RNC will keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day,” Gruters said Monday.
Meanwhile, Trump appears to be laying the groundwork for more aggressive federal involvement in elections. His U.S. attorney in Los Angeles announced in June the opening of multiple election fraud investigations and dispatched a prosecutor to the county’s vote-tabulation center following California’s June primary. Six months earlier, FBI agents executed a search warrant and seized ballots and other records from the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, which encompasses Atlanta.
Muller said local elections officials “already are having conversations about chain of custody disputes” for ballots as they are cast, collected, counted, and stored. He and UCLA law professor Rick Hasen noted that judicial warrants are required for the type of action that took place in Fulton County. Muller predicted “the bar would be even higher” for any warrant the administration might seek during an active election.
Hasen said he is working to educate judges nationwide about the importance of maintaining proper ballot chain of custody.
“Republicans believe him when he says the election is rigged. And then when Republicans try to change voting rules to tighten things up, that causes Democrats to also think that the election system is being rigged,” Hasen said. “So, if what he’s trying to achieve is undermine voters’ confidence in the election process, he seems to have succeeded spectacularly.”
