President Donald Trump escalated his assault on democracy Tuesday, signing a sweeping—and, according to experts, unconstitutional—executive order that would block millions of U.S. citizens from voting.
The order, titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” threatens to withhold federal grant money to force states to comply with voter suppression tactics that are already in effect in many red states.
The order comes one day after interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin was planning to investigate nonexistent voter fraud.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, condemned Trump’s executive order, which it compared to the GOP’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.
“This executive order would block tens of millions of American citizens from voting. Presidents have no authority to do this,” the Brennan Center wrote on Bluesky.
During the signing of the order, Trump boasted about winning the 2024 election “in a landslide.”
“Perhaps some people think I shouldn’t be complaining, because we won in a landslide, but we’ve got to straighten out our election,” Trump told reporters, despite having received less than half of the popular vote in the 2024 election.
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, characterized Trump’s executive order as “dangerous,” calling it a clear power grab by the executive branch.
Hasen highlighted how the order would disenfranchise millions of voters by enforcing extreme identification requirements and hampering mail-in voting by directing the DOJ to sue states that accept paper ballots received after Election Day—even if they were mailed before.
Further, it would cause a dramatic shift in the executive branch’s power over federal elections by allowing Trump to compel the independent, bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission to do his bidding.
“If a President can control the EAC, it could direct the agency to do all kinds of things that could benefit the President’s party,” Hasen wrote.
The order would also grant Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency—along with the Department of Homeland Security—access to voting records, allowing them to run roughshod through them.
And the order directs billionaire attack dog and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to target marginalized communities under the threat of unconstitutional deportation sweeps.
Like many of the GOP’s previous undemocratic election tactics, Trump’s executive order lacks any credible evidence to support its claims, such as the Republican lie that millions of undocumented immigrants are voting illegally in U.S. elections.
Danielle Lang, a voting rights lawyer at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center told The Guardian that there is nothing constitutional about Trump’s order.
“The short answer is that this executive order,” she said, “like all too many that we’ve seen before, is lawless and asserts all sorts of executive authority that he most assuredly does not have.”
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