Courts likely to block Trump's effort to curtail mail-in voting [View all]

Source: Roll Call

Posted April 2, 2026 at 6:02pm


President Donald Trump’s effort to curtail mail voting through executive order will likely be ruled illegal in at least one of several lawsuits filed this week, experts said, the latest in the president’s long-running effort to assert federal control of elections. Democratic party groups and civil rights organizations have already filed three lawsuits over the executive order that Trump issued Tuesday entitled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

The order dovetails with Trump’s broader year-long effort to assert more federal control over elections ahead of the midterms. It would enact changes to voting nationwide to follow what the president called the “unavoidable duty” to enforce federal law. That would include sending each state lists of “individuals confirmed to be United States citizens” who are eligible to vote in elections and mandating the U.S. Postal Service only carry election mail for approved voters.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who focuses on election law, said the order’s “primary directive to tell the Postal Service not to deliver mail unless they’re on his ‘naughty and nice’ list is flatly illegal, and I expect it will take a court about 30 seconds to say so.”. “I don’t think that’s actually a hard call here. The thing that you should picture is the president deciding which Christmas cards the Postal Service should deliver. That seems plainly, obviously beyond his authority,” Levitt said.

Levitt said the executive order runs into a fundamental problem: the Constitution gives states the primary role in running elections, with the possibility for Congress to weigh in on the rules. Levitt said Congress has not given Trump the power he claimed in the executive order. “Congress has not given the president a role of any significance in the electoral process. There are plenty of people whose job it is to oversee the election process, and the president’s not on that list. And again, that’s not an oversight, that’s by design,” Levitt said.

Read more: https://rollcall.com/2026/04/02/courts-likely-to-block-trumps-effort-to-curtail-mail-in-voting/