Robert Weiner: The Trump Administration is Set on Solving a Nonissue – and Millions Could Lose the Right to Vote
By Robert Weiner
Just recently, a federal judge blocked portions of Donald Trump’s executive order meant to overhaul our nation’s voting system. The court was right to do so. The president’s order was nothing more than a reckless sham solution in search of a problem.
Many aspects of voting in this country need reform—voter suppression laws, discrimination, and illegal purges of voting rolls, among others. Despite much fevered rhetoric, fraud and noncitizen voting are far down that list.
Our elections, it turns out, are safe. In fact, the greatest threats they face are the relentless and deceptive attempts by the Trump Administration to undermine, denigrate, and obstruct them.
The latest assault is an Executive Order issued March 25 and labeled—without apparent irony— “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”
The Constitution empowers the States, not the federal government, to conduct our elections, although Article I grants Congress power to change or override state procedures. The Constitution prescribes no role for the President in this process.
In 2002, Congress created the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to help the States conduct elections. The EAC provides grants to the States and has adopted a form that States must use to register voters for federal elections. The EAC’s structure locks in bipartisanship and independence. It has four members. By law, two must be Democrats, and two, Republicans, with three votes required to support any action.
The President’s Executive Order, however, ignored these constraints as well as conflicting voting rights laws and commandeered the EAC to address a made-up problem. Falsely depicting a fraud-wracked electoral system infested with foreign voters, the Order directs the EAC to change its registration form within 30 days to require documentary proof of citizenship in order to cast a vote.
Millions of American citizens, however, do not have such documents available. Only half have passports, one of the few forms of identification the Order deems acceptable. In its pretextual search for noncitizen voters, the Order would thus disenfranchise millions of citizens, disproportionately people of color, who have every right to vote.
The Order plants other land mines as well. Congress required the Secretary of Defense to create a postcard for overseas members of the military to use in registering to vote. The Executive Order directs that this form of registration, postcards, somehow include documentary proof of citizenship.
The Order further requires the EAC, by September 22, 2025, to rescind all existing technical standards for voting machines and recertify those machines under new standards established by the Order. Such abrupt, unreasoned change invites chaos.
This is just a sample of the disruption created by the Executive Order – and the Order itself is just a fragment of the Administration’s attack on the electoral system. For example, since 2017, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security has helped States harden their voting systems against cyberattacks. On February 7, DHS suspended that support, laid off relevant employees, and ended funding to the group that coordinated security issues for the election community.
Interwoven with these attacks is the claim that Trump won the 2020 election. That is not merely a lie. It is a flat-earth claim. The Attorney General, the head of cybersecurity, and the Director of the FBI, all Trump appointees, as well as Trump’s own White House aides and key Republican Secretaries of State, all determined that Trump lost. Recount after recount confirmed the result. Courts across the country issued more than 60 decisions rejecting Trump’s claims.
Nonetheless, relentless repetition of the lie has misled millions, and intimidation has silenced many others. The desecration of truth has sown distrust in the democratic process.
Perhaps we could write off this attack as merely reflecting the President’s inability to accept defeat. But the convergence with all the other assaults forecloses this option. The systematic effort is not merely to discredit an electoral process that is not broken but to actually to break it, and it begs the question of what the President is trying to achieve.
A possible answer—perhaps the most logical one—is alarming: that the effort seeks to lay the groundwork for preventing free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028. Skeptics and optimists may shrug off this concern as overwrought. But January 6 calls into question the President’s commitment to democracy. The subsequent pardons of the participants amplify the doubt by seeding a cadre of violent and fiercely loyal Trump enforcers.
Prudence thus dictates vigilance. It dictates that we leave none of these attacks unanswered, that we educate the public about the safety and resilience of our electoral system, and that we defend our institutions with all the legal means at our disposal.
Robert Weiner is the Director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
