Trump is threatening states to change their election rules

By withholding federal funds and threatening investigations, President Donald Trump has tried to bend universities to his will.

Now, he’s doing something similar: trying to get states to change their election rules.

In an executive order Tuesday, Trump made what amounts to a series of demands on states to change their election laws and policies. For one, he wants states to be more strict at requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration.

Trump also wants states to stop counting mailed-in votes that were sent in on or before Election Day but arrive afterward — in fact, he suggests that counting such votes violates federal law. Most judges and mainstream legal experts think this interpretation of the law is ridiculous, but it has gained steam on the right.

Trump is trying to do all this even though the president has no legal authority to tell states how to run their elections. Indeed, several aspects of his order will likely be challenged in court.

But he’s trying to threaten states anyway, with the pulling of federal election assistance funding and with unspecified action from his Justice Department, in hopes they comply.

The biggest threat of all is implicit — that Trump is setting the stage for a really nasty attempt to use the federal government to dispute election results in states that don’t make the changes he wants. This gives states a tough choice to make: give in now, or have an ugly battle later?

Trump’s first demand is stricter citizenship proof for voters. He wants to force people registering to vote or renewing their registrations to prove their citizenship. He also wants to force state and local officials to do more to check the citizenship of people on their voter rolls. The order also instructs various federal agencies to make citizenship data more readily available to state and local officials.

This demand reflects baseless right-wing conspiracy theories that noncitizens regularly vote for Democrats in huge numbers. For decades, conservatives have believed that this is happening. But they can somehow never find evidence to prove it. Existing data and studies suggest that vanishingly few noncitizens try to vote. For instance, the state of Georgia audited its voter rolls in 2024 and found that, out of more than 8 million registered voters, a mere 20 were noncitizens.

Still, many on the right have long argued that, regardless of whether illegal voting is happening in significant numbers, it is common sense to require voters to prove their citizenship. Critics argue, though, that because there is no actual widespread problem of noncitizen voting, the most consequential impact would be to suppress legitimate voting from citizens who don’t have proof-of-citizenship documents easily available.

Trump’s second demand is that state and local officials not count mailed-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.

Every state that uses mail-in voting requires ballots to be postmarked — that is, in the mail — either on or before Election Day. But 18 states have later deadlines for when ballots can arrive (for instance, California accepts them until seven days after election day, and Alaska until 10 days after it.) This is to ensure legitimate votes are not excluded due to slow mail delivery and simply to give voters more flexibility.

However, Trump is adopting a fringe legal theory that an existing federal law setting a uniform date for federal elections makes it illegal to count ballots arriving after Election Day. This theory has been rejected by nearly all (though not all) judges who have heard cases about this. But Trump’s order asserts that this is the law and tells his attorney general to “take all necessary action” against states that “violate” it.

This demand reflects baseless theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by fraudulent late-arriving mail ballots. It is not true that late-arriving mail ballots swung the election — Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes, while the state as a whole only received 10,000 mail ballots after Election Day. Many mail ballots were counted quite slowly in a process that took days (and which Republicans in key states refused to help speed up). But such ballots were overwhelmingly received on or before election day itself.

Regardless, Trump is demanding these changes — and threatening states that refuse to go along.

To try to make his demands a reality, Trump is asserting authority over the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The EAC was established in 2002 by Congress as an independent federal commission to help state and local governments improve election administration by distributing grant money and maintaining a template for a mail voter registration form.

As Trump has done with other independent agencies, he’s asserting his authority over the EAC in the (perhaps justified) belief that the current Supreme Court will endorse such a power grab. His order instructs the EAC to add a proof of citizenship requirement to its mail voter registration form. It also says the EAC should withhold funds from states that don’t use that form and from states that count mail ballots arriving after Election Day.

States could get by without EAC money. But the order also makes the more ominous threat of siccing the Justice Department on states that don’t make the changes Trump wants.

Trump’s assertion that mail ballots showing up after Election Day are illegal — even if state law says otherwise — is particularly ominous. That lays the groundwork for him to dispute any close election Democrats win with such ballots. He would probably lose in court, given the Supreme Court’s past refusal to take up this issue. But that outcome is not a totally sure thing, and even the fight would be ugly.

So the 18 states with later deadlines for arriving mail ballots now will be forced to ask: How important is this late deadline, really? Like most state voting rules, the deadline likely has little partisan impact — people adapt to different rules, and most would simply send in ballots earlier.

Still, Trump is clearly hoping this change will be enough to tip some election outcomes in Republicans’ favor by disallowing late-arriving Democratic mail votes, and if a particular election is close enough, maybe he’d be right.

Then again, low-propensity voters have increasingly trended toward the GOP in recent years. These voters would probably be less likely to send in a ballot early. So Trump might not get the outcome he’s hoping for.