Three Pillars of a Control Framework
The executive order signed on March 31, 2026, is based on three main pillars. First pillar: It directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to collaborate with the Social Security Administration to compile a national list of U.S. citizens eligible to vote, to be provided to election officials in each state. Second pillar: It directs the USPS—despite being an independent agency—to initiate a regulatory process to require states to submit lists of registered voters before mailing ballots. Any voter not on the federal list would be automatically excluded. Third pillar: It establishes potential criminal penalties for election officials, mail carriers, and anyone who sends a ballot to an individual deemed ineligible by the administration.
According to David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, “There is not a single element of this executive order that would withstand judicial scrutiny. It is a completely unconstitutional executive order.” The U.S. Constitution does not grant the president the power to regulate elections—that power explicitly belongs to the states and Congress. Yet Trump signed this order less than a week after Congress failed to pass election legislation he supported. When the legislative route closes, the presidential route takes over—constitutionality be damned.
The USPS Transformed into an Election Enforcer
One of the most striking aspects of the executive order is the role it assigns to the U.S. Postal Service. The USPS, which is not an election oversight body, finds itself thrust into the heart of the system: it will be required to maintain a “mail-in voter list,” refuse to send ballots to voters not on this federal list, and, according to court documents, potentially provide its lists to DHS for “investigations” into ballot flows. The postal workers’ union has protested vigorously. The ACLU has described this transformation of the USPS as “an arbiter of who can vote by mail”—which is both an accurate and alarming description.
Despite its status as an independent corporation, the USPS published a proposed regulation in the Federal Register in June 2026 that complies with the executive order—a submission that contrasts with its professed independence. Judge Talwani raised crucial questions during the Boston hearing: What happens if a federal list omits legitimate voters? What about women who have changed their names after marriage, or people who have moved from one state to another? “Isn’t there a reasonable fear that voters will be excluded?” she asked the representative of the Trump administration, without receiving a satisfactory answer.
Turning mail carriers into election officials is absurd both logistically and constitutionally. I find it hard not to see this as a deliberate provocation—a way to create so much chaos that voting becomes an obstacle course. And for whom? For seniors who vote by mail, for military personnel deployed overseas, for rural voters far from polling places. They are the ones who will pay the price for this political engineering.
The Specter of Fraud — Facts vs. Myths
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0.000043%: The True Fraud Rate
Donald Trump has been repeating since 2020 that mail-in voting is “rife with fraud.” But what do the actual data show? A Brookings Institution study published in November 2025, analyzing four general elections (2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022), calculated an average rate of mail-in voting fraud of 0.000043%—or about four cases per 10 million ballots. To put this figure in perspective: according to the American Postal Workers Union, “a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to cast a fraudulent mail-in ballot.”
An analysis by the Associated Press, conducted after the 2020 election in six key states where Trump had contested the results, identified fewer than 475 potential cases of fraud—a number that, according to the AP itself, was “too small to have any impact on the results.” The American Statistical Association also concluded, in a separate study, that there is “no evidence that mail-in voting increases the risk of election fraud.” These conclusions do not come from Democratic institutions. They come from researchers, auditors, and judges—including Republicans.
The Fraud of the Fraud Myth
Between 2000 and 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated 455 cases of election fraud, resulting in 171 convictions. Out of the billions of ballots cast during that period, this figure is statistically negligible. In 2022, 23 states reported 347 alleged cases of election fraud across all categories—18% of which involved mail-in ballots. Even more telling: the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has maintained a database on election fraud for decades, has documented a few thousand cases over forty years of elections—less than one case per two million presidential voters.
In states that conduct 100% of their elections by mail—Oregon, Washington, and Colorado—comparative studies find no increase in fraud following the transition to universal mail-in voting. Oregon has voted exclusively by mail since 1998. Colorado since 2014. No electoral disaster. No systemic fraud. Higher voter turnout. Elections that are certified, recounted, verified, and indisputable. The conclusion reached by researchers at George Mason University is succinct: “If mail-in voting creates more opportunities for fraud, those opportunities have not manifested in any data.”
I understand the argument for electoral integrity in theory. Every democracy must be concerned with it. But when the data—all the data, regardless of its source—unanimously contradicts the claim of widespread fraud, continuing to assert it is no longer democratic vigilance. It is propaganda. And I recognize propaganda, no matter who produces it.
The Contested Legal Basis — Anatomy of a Constitutional Usurpation
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Who really has the power over elections?
The U.S. Constitution is unusually clear on this point: federal elections are administered by the states. Article I, Section 4 provides that the states have the power to establish rules regarding “the time, place, and manner” of holding elections, with the sole caveat that Congress may “at any time alter” these rules by law—not the president by executive order. As Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University specializing in democracy, stated: “The president has no constitutional authority to dictate how national elections are organized.”
The precedent is clear. As early as 2025, Trump had signed a first executive order attempting to impose citizenship verification for voter registration and new restrictions on mail-in voting. That order was struck down by the courts. This time, the administration has adopted a slightly different tactic—acting through the USPS and DHS rather than directly imposing election rules—but the constitutional issue remains the same. The DOJ has filed 30 lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia to force them to hand over their voter rolls. The result so far: defeat in all eight rulings handed down.
The Courts as the Last Line of Defense
The judicial response has been massive. The 23 Democratic states, united in a coalition, argued before the federal court in Boston that the executive order constitutes “an extraordinary and abusive attempt to exercise executive power over the administration of federal elections”—these are the exact words of the ACLU’s complaint. Attorney Michael Cohen, representing the states, warned: “This will represent a radical change in the way certain states administer their elections. It will be difficult to overstate the disruption this will cause.”
On June 22, 2026—the day before this article was published—U.S. Judge Sooknanan issued a 75-page ruling declaring the SAVE system illegal; this was the voter data verification tool the administration had used to screen more than 60 million voter records. The judge concluded: “The federal government has knowingly violated the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that jeopardizes the fundamental right to vote. This court cannot stand idly by while this happens.” The system had identified 21,000 individuals as potentially non-citizens—including a significant proportion of foreign-born Americans who were wrongfully flagged.
When a federal judge says that the government has “knowingly violated the privacy rights” of tens of millions of citizens to influence an election, we are moving beyond ordinary political debate. We are entering territory that I would not have thought possible in a well-established Western democracy. This deserves to be clearly named: it is an attempt at institutional manipulation of the electoral process.
The Impact on Participation — The Numbers That Matter
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48 Million Voters in the Crosshairs
In 2024, according to the Election Assistance Commission, about 30% of American voters cast their ballots by mail—roughly 48 million people. This group is not monolithically Democratic—far from it. It includes a large number of people aged 65 and older, who are proportionally the heaviest users of mail-in voting. It includes military personnel deployed overseas, rural voters, people with limited mobility, and workers who cannot take time off on a Tuesday in November. Any significant restriction on this mechanism would affect a very diverse population.
However, the partisan reality is undeniable: in the 2024 election, Democrats voted by mail at significantly higher rates than Republicans. The Pew Research Center survey cited by the Brennan Center indicates that more than one in three voters cast their ballots by mail in 2024. In key states like Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots arrive after those cast on Election Day—creating what is known as the “red mirage”: Trump appears to be winning on election night, then the mail-in ballots close the gap. Trump has turned this statistical phenomenon into evidence of fraud. This is not the case. It is simply how the vote count works.
States yielding to federal pressure
The executive order is not falling on deaf ears—it has already had an impact on state legislatures. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, between 2020 and 2025, 27 states have passed laws restricting mail-in voting. Among the most recent measures: North Dakota eliminated its mail-in grace period in April 2026—just three weeks after the March executive order—by explicitly amending an election bill to “respond to the new executive order.” Ohio had already eliminated its grace period in December 2025. Mississippi passed a trigger law: if the Supreme Court invalidates its current grace period, ballots must be received by the day before Election Day—a logistical requirement that is nearly impossible for many rural voters to meet.
This domino effect—a presidential executive order encouraging state legislatures to act, which in turn fuels legal challenges all the way to the Supreme Court—creates a formidable systemic impact. A ruling in favor of the administration in Watson v. Republican National Committee, currently pending before the Supreme Court, could invalidate the laws of 30 states granting grace periods for mail-in ballots. This would be a silent revolution in election law, without a single vote in Congress.
I’m thinking of rural voters in North Dakota or Ohio—often Republican voters, for that matter—who drop their ballots into mailboxes sometimes dozens of kilometers from the nearest post office. These people are not fraudsters. They are citizens who trust the postal system that their taxes have funded for generations. To deprive them of this right in the name of imagined fraud is a betrayal.
What's at Stake in the November 2026 Midterms
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Trump and the Fear of Losing the House
To understand the urgency of these restrictions, one must look at the political calendar. The November 2026 midterm elections will put all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate up for grabs. Polls and historical precedents suggest that the incumbent president’s party loses an average of about 20 seats in midterms. If the Republicans lose control of the House, Trump loses his ability to block investigations and push through his legislative agenda. And as he himself stated at a Republican retreat in January 2026: “We have to win the midterms, because if we don’t win them […] they’ll find a reason to impeach me.”
It is in this context that the timing of the executive order takes on its full significance. Signed on March 31, 2026—exactly seven months before the November elections—the order creates massive uncertainty surrounding mail-in voting procedures, just in time to disrupt voter registration, election official training, and state-level logistics. The goal is not necessarily to ban mail-in voting—it is to introduce enough chaos and intimidation to make voters—especially those who tend to vote Democratic—give up on trying it.
Intimidation as a Strategy
One of the most troubling provisions of the executive order is the imposition of criminal penalties on election officials who send ballots to individuals deemed ineligible by the federal list—even if those individuals are legitimately registered voters in their state. Eileen O’Connor, a former member of the DOJ’s Election Division and now a senior counsel at the Brennan Center, was blunt: the order “could instill fear in election officials,” prompting them to be overly cautious and exclude eligible voters for fear of prosecution. Former officials quoted by The Guardian stated that Trump was seeking to “intimidate election officials and voters in swing states.”
The bigger picture is consistent: Kash Patel’s FBI seized election records from Fulton County, Georgia, based on long-disproved conspiracy theories. The federal judicial system is being mobilized to prosecute recalcitrant states. The USPS is being repurposed as a tool for voter screening. Election officials are being threatened with criminal prosecution. None of these elements, taken in isolation, shuts down a democracy. Together, they create an environment of systemic intimidation.
I have covered elections in semi-authoritarian regimes where mechanisms of intimidation do not need to be overt to be effective. Subtlety is often more formidable than brutality. An election official who hesitates to cast a ballot for fear of criminal prosecution—even if such prosecution were never to occur—has already served the purpose of a repressive system. Intimidation does not need to materialize to be effective.
The Response of the States—A United Front and Cracks in the Armor
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The Coalition of 23 States
Legal resistance organized quickly and on a large scale. As early as April 3, 2026—just a few days after the executive order was signed—Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown was co-leading a class-action lawsuit involving approximately 20 states. This front has since expanded its ranks to a coalition of 23 states. The central argument is constitutional: the president is encroaching on the prerogatives of the states and Congress. “The president has no constitutional authority to dictate the administration of national elections,” insisted Charlie Black, summarizing the position of many legal experts specializing in election law.
The geographic and political diversity of this coalition is worth noting. It includes liberal coastal states, as well as states in the Midwest and South that have well-established mail-in voting systems. Mail-in voting is not a progressive invention—it is a bipartisan electoral infrastructure. Even Republican-led states like Florida had, prior to pressure from the Trump camp, defended absentee voting as a convenient and secure mechanism for expanding voter participation. This pre-existing consensus has been fractured by electoral identity politics.
States That Are Giving In
In the face of this resistance, several Republican-led states have not only complied with the executive order but have used it as a pretext to impose even stricter restrictions. Missouri, whose Solicitor General Lou Capozzi defended the Trump administration in federal court in Boston, stated that it was not “exactly sure how we would use” the federal list—while insisting that the process not be “nipped in the bud.” This calculated ambiguity says it all: states are positioning themselves to use the federal list for as-yet-undefined political purposes, while resisting any preventive judicial oversight.
The rift within the Republican camp itself is worth analyzing. States like Florida, where absentee voting is a well-established tradition among retirees and “snowbirds,” find themselves in an uncomfortable position: officially supporting Trump while knowing that his restrictions could alienate a significant portion of their elderly voter base. This is the internal contradiction of a policy designed to harm the Democrats that risks, through sheer clumsiness, backfiring on its own instigators.
What worries me most about this resistance from the states is that it is fundamentally defensive. The states are winning in court today, but every legal victory can be circumvented by a new executive order, a new interpretation, or a new administrative procedure. And in the meantime, the uncertainty itself is doing the work of demobilizing voters. That is the real long-term danger.
Sources
Primary sources
Secondary sources
Axios — Washington sues Trump over vote-by-mail restrictions — April 3, 2026
Governing — States Brace for New Federal Limits on Mail Voting — June 9, 2026
This content was created with the help of AI.
