A federal judge on Thursday blocked major portions of President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail, finding he had exceeded his constitutional authority.

The decision halts, at least until a nearly certain appeal is heard, efforts by the U.S. Postal Service to require states to submit the names of likely mail voters before it delivers ballots. It also stops the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from compiling lists of voting-age citizens in each state.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an appointee of President Barack Obama in Massachusetts, is the first judge to block the March 31 executive order. State and local election officials have raised concerns that its requirements would inject chaos into preparations for the November midterm elections.

Talwani ruled that Trump had asserted too much control over elections in several parts of the order as he directed federal officials to quickly take actions that he argues are needed to prevent noncitizen voting, which rarely occurs.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Talwani wrote.

Order overpowered states

The executive order directed Postmaster General David Steiner to put forward a rule requiring states, at least 90 days before a federal election, notify the Postal Service whether they intended to allow ballots to be sent through the mail. States would then have to submit to USPS a list of voters planning to vote by mail at least 60 days before the election.

Talwani wrote that the Postal Service lacks any authorization by Congress to put forward binding regulations on mail-in voting. The Constitution, she wrote, “reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone.” 

The executive order also required the Department of Homeland Security, with help from the Social Security Administration, to compile a list of voting-age U.S. citizens living in each state and then provide that information to state officials at least 60 days before each federal election. The order does not tell states how to use the data.

The list of citizens would be drawn from naturalization and Social Security records, according to the order. It would also include data from SAVE, a powerful computer program maintained by Homeland Security that verifies citizenship by checking names against information in federal databases. 

The executive order pointed to no relevant constitutional or legal authority supporting the compilation of the citizenship lists, Talwani wrote. Trump “lacks any authority to compile voter lists for each State,” she wrote.

A day before the decision, Steiner told a U.S. Senate committee that a proposed Postal Service rule to implement the executive order would lead to non-delivery of ballots in states that don’t provide lists of anticipated mail voters — a position condemned by Democrats.

“Today’s decision is a very significant victory for free and fair elections and a defeat for Donald Trump’s vile efforts to make it harder for people to vote,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in a statement.

“Once again, the courts have reaffirmed that Trump’s efforts to subvert the election are patently unconstitutional.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that the Trump administration remains confident the executive order will be implemented by the November election.

“The entire Trump Administration will continue lawfully enacting the agenda President Trump was elected to enact – which includes the safety and security of American elections,” Jackson said.

Latest setback

Trump has suffered a series of setbacks in recent days in his efforts to influence the administration of state-run elections. 

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that the Department of Justice wasn’t entitled to state voter rolls. Senators also continues to rebuff the president’s attempts to pressure them into passing the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show documents proving their citizenship.

Talwani’s decision came in a lawsuit brought by Democratic state attorneys general. It is the second major district court ruling over the executive order, after a judge in Washington, D.C., declined to stop the order because the Trump administration hadn’t taken enough action to implement it.

Under Thursday’s decision, federal officials must notify their employees within a week that sweeping portions of the executive order are void.

And on Monday, a judge blocked the use of SAVE to search for noncitizen voters.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled the Department of Justice isn’t entitled to access the sensitive personal data of Michigan voters, a setback in President Donald Trump’s push to assert power over state-run elections.

The decision moves the country closer to a potential fight at the U.S. Supreme Court over state voter rolls ahead of the November midterm elections, with Michigan at the center. 

The Trump administration has sued 30 states for copies of their voter information. Federal officials want to run the data through a Department of Homeland Security computer program to identify possible noncitizen voters.

In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson isn’t required to turn over sensitive voter data, including dates of birth, driver’s license and Social Security numbers of voters. The 6th Circuit is the first appellate court to weigh in on the voter roll lawsuits after a series of district court rulings against the DOJ.

The Justice Department had demanded Michigan’s voter roll under the 1960 Civil Rights Act, which grants the U.S. attorney general broad access to documents and records that “come into the possession” of election officials. Congress passed the law to empower investigations into voting discrimination against Black citizens. 

Lower court affirmed

Wednesday’s opinion affirmed a February decision by U.S District Court Judge Hala Jarbou, a Trump appointee in the Western District of Michigan, who ruled that the Justice Department isn’t entitled to voters’ data. Michigan’s voter registration database is a record created by state officials, not a document that comes into their possession, she reasoned.

The appellate judges agreed, writing that making the state’s full voter roll subject to the Civil Rights Act would place Michigan officials on a “collision course” with the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, two federal laws that require states to maintain and update voter registration lists.

The Civil Rights Act “tells election officials to retain and preserve certain records and papers that come into their possession, and the NVRA and HAVA tell election officials to remove ineligible voters from statewide voter registration lists,” Judge Andre B. Mathis, a President Joe Biden appointee, wrote in the majority opinion. 

“We should not adopt a reading that would place election officials in violation of one federal law for trying to comply with others,” Mathis added.

One member of the appellate panel, Judge John B. Nalbandian, a Trump appointee, wrote in a dissent that Michigan’s voter roll is a record that the Justice Department can demand under the Civil Rights Act. He argued that requiring Michigan to turn over the data wouldn’t conflict with the NVRA and HAVA.

DOJ sees ‘carveout’

During oral arguments in May, the Justice Department suggested that upholding the district court decision would weaken its ability to investigate racial discrimination in voting. DOJ attorney David Goldman told the panel that the district court judge had created a “carveout” in the Civil Rights Act not rooted in the law. 

But Michigan Assistant Attorney General Heather Meingast, representing Benson, told the judges that the Justice Department’s demand is unprecedented and unsupported by federal law. 

“It doesn’t seem to meet the test of what the (Civil Rights Act) was talking about in the ‘60s,” Meingast said. “And the purpose was voters turning in their documents, their applications, their poll taxes.”

The Justice Department has been pursuing state voter rolls for more than a year. While some Republican-led states voluntarily provided the data, most states have resisted, leading to a wave of lawsuits. So far, no court has ruled in the DOJ’s favor.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have said the voter information would be shared with Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system — a computer program that originally checked the eligibility of individual immigrants for government benefits that the Trump administration overhauled into a tool to verify citizenship.

On Monday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the changes to SAVE had been made illegally and that the Trump administration had violated the privacy of millions of Americans. The judge also noted that problems had been found with SAVE, including falsely flagging citizens.

The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. DOJ lawyers can ask the full 6th Circuit or Supreme Court to hear the case.

“The law cannot be any clearer– states run elections, the federal government is not entitled to Michigan voters’ personal data, and the president cannot change election law with the stroke of a pen,” Benson said in a statement.

The U.S. Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots in states that refuse to turn over lists of voters under a proposed rule, the agency’s chief executive said Wednesday, angering Democrats who warn the decision will disenfranchise voters.

Postmaster General David Steiner defended the rule at a Senate hearing and dismissed accusations that the Postal Service was acting politically after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March restricting voting by mail. 

“If a state refuses to turn their absentee voter list over to the federal government, will the Postal Service still mail their ballots under this proposed rule?” Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, asked Steiner.

“Under our proposed regulation, no,” Steiner replied.

Steiner’s testimony, before the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, marked the clearest acknowledgment yet by a federal official that the rule threatens to upend voting by mail across the country. 

If the rule takes effect and Democratic-led states refuse to comply, the requirements would effectively limit mail voting to Republican-led states during November midterm elections to decide control of Congress.

The Postal Service put forward the rule after Trump ordered Steiner to require states to submit lists of anticipated mail voters to the agency as a condition of having ballots delivered. 

Trump cancels signing ceremony

The executive order is one of several steps the Trump administration has taken this year to influence how elections are administered, along with the Department of Justice suing states to obtain sensitive voter data.

Underscoring the depth of Trump’s interest, as Steiner was speaking Wednesday morning the president abruptly called off a U.S. Capitol ceremony to sign a bipartisan housing bill because of the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE America Act. The legislation would require voters to show documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, proving their citizenship.

“Now we have this new rule you’ve put out saying that states have to turn over their voting rolls and you, the U.S. Postal Service, will decide who’s approved to send their ballot through the mail,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, said. “It’s just another backdoor way of trying to influence this election.“

Slotkin said Trump’s decision to cancel the housing bill signing demonstrated the “level of obsession this president has” over elections.

Turning over names 

Every state would have to provide the names of residents expected to vote by mail. Additionally, eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct elections by mailing all voters a ballot, meaning election officials would have to provide information on every voter. Those states include California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington.

Trump and his aides argue the restrictions are needed to combat noncitizen voting, which occurs very rarely. Democrats and voting rights groups have sued over the order, arguing it’s an unconstitutional assertion of presidential authority over state-run elections. No judge has yet halted it.

Steiner sought to place himself outside the controversy and said, in response to a question, that the Postal Service would adhere to a court order blocking the rule if one were issued. Asked about the legal authority underlying the rule, he said he would “have to defer that to the courts to understand the authority.”

Steiner, who became the postmaster general in July 2025, cast the rule as primarily focused on best practices for election mail, a description that understates the scope of the proposal, which postal experts call unprecedented.

“I’m not a political person and the Postal Service is not a political organization,” Steiner said.

Dems urge Steiner to withdraw rule

Democrats expressed sharp disagreement with Steiner and accused him of folding to Trump’s efforts to exercise more control over elections. Steiner answers to the USPS Board of Governors, not the president, and his critics say he is endangering the agency’s independence by complying with the executive order.

Every Senate Democrat, as well as two independents who caucus with the party, on Tuesday signed a letter to Steiner urging him to withdraw the rule. The letter warns that aside from the rule’s legal and constitutional problems, it’s not feasible for state and local election officials to meet its requirements.

“The proposed regulation demands that the Postal Service set up an entirely new system and database to process and transmit millions of absentee ballots that is secure and accessible to every American election official, just months prior to a general election,” the letter says.

At Wednesday’s hearing, GOP senators mostly steered clear of the mail ballot rule, instead focusing on the official topic, the Postal Service’s finances. But Sen. Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican, accused Democrats of hypocrisy over their past support of the “For the People Act.” 

The sweeping bill, offered when Democrats last controlled Congress, would have required states to offer same-day voter registration and expand mail voting. Opponents said it amounted to nationalized elections.

“Three years later all of them are testifying, ‘It’s outrageous, President Trump is trying to nationalize elections.’ No, he’s not, he’s trying to get rid of voter fraud,” Moreno said, adding that Democrats had now “dug up from their bottom desk drawer” the Constitution.

“Should we get back to post office stuff now?” Moreno said.

“Absolutely,” Steiner replied.

The Trump administration illegally overhauled a U.S. Department of Homeland Security computer program in its hunt for noncitizen voters, a judge ruled Monday in a stinging decision that laid into federal officials for violating the privacy of millions of Americans.

The ruling struck at the core of President Donald Trump’s project to assert authority over state-run elections ahead of the November midterms. Under Trump’s control, the executive branch has spent the past year attempting to obtain state voter rolls to feed into the computer program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a President Joe Biden appointee for a district court based in Washington, D.C., condemned the Trump administration’s behavior over 75 pages and vacated a series of notices Homeland Security had published to implement the computer program.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

Sooknanan’s decision, if upheld, could hamper the administration’s ability to implement an executive order aimed at restricting voting by mail. The order requires Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state using information from SAVE, along with other federal databases.

Homeland Security has long operated SAVE, but prior to the second Trump administration it was primarily a tool to check whether individual immigrants were eligible for various government benefits. Last year, the agency reconfigured SAVE to allow for simultaneous searches of millions of names and allowed states to upload their voter rolls for the purpose of identifying possible noncitizens.

While some Republican-led states took Homeland Security up on the offer, most states have resisted demands to turn over their voter rolls to the Trump administration. In turn, the U.S. Department of Justice has sued 30 states for unredacted copies of their voter rolls, including sensitive personal data such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers.

The Justice Department has been unsuccessful in forcing states to provide the information. DOJ attorneys have indicated that any data would be shared with Homeland Security for analysis by SAVE.

“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist. Judge Sparkle Soknanan’s latest ruling preventing DHS from addressing alien voting is just the latest example!” Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival wrote on social media.

If Homeland Security appeals the decision, federal officials face a shrinking window to restore their ability to use SAVE before the midterms. Federal law prohibits sweeping purges of voters less than 90 days before federal elections — in this case early August ahead of November.

Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a group that advocates for the “responsible use of technology in elections,” acknowledged election officials are in a moment of uncertainty.

“The closer we get to the midterms, it raises your blood pressure,” Smith said in an interview. “But I think most people are (saying), ‘well, we just have to wait and see.’”

Concerns from Dems, voting groups

Democrats and voting rights groups have warned about the dangers of SAVE, saying it makes errors and has wrongly flagged citizens. They hailed Monday’s decision as a victory for voters.

“Efforts to create a federal voter database to facilitate voter purges threaten the fundamental right at the heart of our democracy,” Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice for the League of Women Voters, said in a statement.

Sooknanan came to a similar conclusion in her decision, writing that federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

The judge pointed to sworn declarations by four naturalized citizens that Texas had threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of inaccurate Social Security data contained in the SAVE system. At least three citizens had their registrations revoked for at least some time.

The Trump administration didn’t dispute the sworn testimony, Sooknanan noted. The administration also didn’t contest, she wrote, the findings of an independent investigation that found that 25% of possible noncitizens identified by SAVE in Travis County, Texas, which includes Austin, were people who had already proven their U.S. citizenship.

The judge’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed against Homeland Security and other federal agencies last September by the League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center that challenged the repurposed SAVE system. 

“As the Trump-Vance administration continues its attack on the right to vote, this is an important victory for the American people and our democracy,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.

Democracy Forward Foundation, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Fair Elections Center, represented the groups challenging the directive.

Three violations

The SAVE system violated federal law in three primary ways, Sooknanan wrote. 

First, it breached a ban on the Social Security Administration against disclosing Social Security numbers and related records. Second, it violated the federal Privacy Act, which restricts how the federal government shares information. And third, it violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies set policy.

The record in the lawsuit “shows that the federal agencies that created this database knew that the database violates those statutory protections,” the judge wrote.

Decision preempted expansion 

Before Monday’s decision, the agency was planning to expand the use of SAVE. 

CNN reported hours earlier that the agency later this summer planned to require states to run their voter rolls through SAVE as a condition of receiving full homeland security grant funding.

Under the planned changes, states could also lose at least some funding if they don’t offer plans to move voting toward hand-marked paper ballots. Those changes could affect all voters in Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, Nevada and South Carolina, nearly all voters in Arkansas and Indiana, and roughly two-thirds of voters in Tennessee, according to data from Verified Voting.

Homeland Security didn’t dispute the report when asked about it by States Newsroom. In a statement, the department emphasized Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s focus on election security.

“Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, DHS and FEMA are committed to ensuring homeland security grant funding advances core national security priorities, to include the security and integrity of our nation’s election infrastructure,” the statement says, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, an agency within Homeland Security. 

“Any recipient of federal funding should expect accountability for how taxpayer dollars are spent.”

American teens are driving less than in previous decades, prompting civic advocates to warn that fewer young people may register to vote.

Yet at least one state — New Hampshire — offers insight into how civic groups can work around a lack of registration opportunities to ensure young people can register, as well as the challenges that remain.

Since Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act in 1993, nearly all states must allow residents to register to vote at motor vehicle offices. But fewer teens are obtaining driver’s licenses today, translating into fewer trips to the local Department of Motor Vehicles and more missed chances to register.

More than 7.5 million people ages 16 to 18 don’t have a driver’s license, according to data compiled by The Civics Center, a nonpartisan group focused on boosting youth voter registration. Three million of those youth will be old enough to vote this year and all will be eligible by 2028, the organization said in a June research report on how declines in teen driving, spurred in part by the rising cost of obtaining a license, could affect voting.

Young people represent a large pool of potential voters for candidates ahead of the midterm elections this November and the presidential election in 2028. Still, voting advocates worry barriers to registration will keep many of them from the polls.

“Our goal is to help people debunk these myths that it’s somehow young people’s fault that these systems aren’t working well for them,” said Laura Brill, founder and CEO of The Civics Center.

Low registration rates

In recent years about 60% of 18-year-olds have held driver’s licenses, according to the Federal Highway Administration. By contrast, in 1994, the year after the National Voter Registration Act was passed, about 74% had licenses.

Even without declining visits to the DMV, registration rates among the youngest voters are low. During midterm election years, the percentage of 18-year-olds registered to vote typically remains under 30%, according to The Civics Center, compared to about 75% of Americans 45 and older. 

Some civic groups are pushing for more in-person voter registration drives, including in high schools, which may help offset the effects of fewer trips to the DMV. Without significant action, they fear registration rates will dip even lower. 

The League of Women Voters announced a partnership with The Civics Center in April to promote high school voter registration. The groups are offering state-specific training and toolkits to help members of the League, which has hundreds of chapters across the country, help students, teachers and school administrators hold registration drives.

They also want states to provide teens more time to register before they can vote. About half of teens currently live in states that allow voter pre-registration at 16 or earlier, according to The Civics Center. 

These states include California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia and Washington.

“Young people have a very short window of opportunity,” said Jeanette Senecal, chief of civic learning and impact at the League of Women Voters. “So when we increase that window of opportunity to allow for preregistration at 16 and 17, there’s a much longer kind of runway in order for us to get them registered to vote for that first election.”

The focus on voter registration drives reflects, in part, an acknowledgement that online voter registration isn’t a panacea for fewer in-person DMV visits. Thirty-six states either offer no online voter registration option or allow voter registration only with a driver’s license or state-issued identification, according to information compiled by The Civics Center.

“Paper forms, typically you only need a Social Security number and not a driver’s license. That’s one of the reasons that in-person efforts can be so effective,” Brill said.

SAVE America Act

Voter registration drives are under threat, however. President Donald Trump’s signature election legislation, the SAVE America Act, would effectively prohibit drives held by third-party organizations like the League of Women Voters because it would require individuals to present documents proving their citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to government officials in person to register to vote. 

The bill has stalled in the U.S. Senate amid opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republican senators. Trump is still urging lawmakers to pass the measure and posted on social media recently that he opposes unrelated foreign surveillance legislation unless it also includes the SAVE America Act.

As of late 2024, 24 states and the District of Columbia placed no restrictions on third-party voter registration drives, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a Colorado-based think tank. An additional 24 states impose some limits, while Wyoming and New Hampshire prohibit them.

What worked in New Hampshire

Because of its voter laws in the early 1990s, New Hampshire is one of six states exempt from the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, along with Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The exemption means New Hampshire isn’t required to offer voter registration at motor vehicle offices.

In New Hampshire, everyone — teens and older adults alike — registers in person with election officials and can also register at the polls on Election Day.

Open Democracy, a New Hampshire voting rights group, has spent several years working to improve the registration rate among 18-year-olds. 

The organization hired an employee focused on high school voter registration and held 41 high school voter registration drives in 2024, said Olivia Zink, the group’s executive director. To hold the drives, it had to assure election officials were present to accept paperwork.

In December 2023, an election off year, just 9% of New Hampshire 18-year-olds were registered. After the November 2024 election, nearly 64% of 18-year-olds were registered, according to data compiled by The Civics Center. Zink acknowledged that the presidential election was a major motivator, but she emphasized the importance of registering students every year. 

State laws can play a major role. Registrations plummeted last year, Zink said, after state lawmakers removed the ability of residents to sign an affidavit as proof of citizenship. She attributed the drop to students not regularly carrying their birth certificates or other documents proving citizenship with them.

“Even with education and posters that are hung up at school and announcements and letters home to parents — we still saw so many fewer students register to vote in 2025 due to that law,” Zink said.

In May, a federal judge blocked the New Hampshire law after a coalition of voting rights groups, including Open Democracy, challenged the measure. 

As part of her decision, Judge Samantha Elliott, a Biden appointee, found that Open Democracy registered fewer students in 2025 compared to 2023, even though the organization at that time didn’t have a full-time staff member dedicated to high school registration.

 Zink said that even in the first few weeks since the judge’s decision, she had heard of high school students once again registering by signing affidavits. 

Despite persistent barriers, Senecal cast the work of registering young people as critical. Each time someone votes, they’re more likely to vote again, she said.

“So the earlier we can engage those people, we really help create these lifetime habits of voting,” Senecal said.

Democrats are growing hopeful they can recapture the U.S. Senate in this fall’s midterm elections amid President Donald Trump’s plummeting approval ratings. 

But they still need nearly everything to break their way against a map that put them at a starting disadvantage, analysts and campaign officials say.

At the outset of this election cycle, Republicans appeared highly likely to hold their majority. Democrats would need to flip four seats, and competitive races this year are in states that are more Republican than average. 

But as election watchers increasingly expect a blue tint to the November midterms, the question is now whether it will be blue enough to put Democrats back in the Senate majority, where they are now at a 53-47 disadvantage.

Democrats are mounting competitive campaigns in Republican-run states typically seen as stretches, including Texas and Iowa. But analysts say scandals surrounding the party’s nominee in Maine, Graham Platner, have exposed how dependent Democrats are on a rising tide of voter anger with Trump and Republicans to lift their candidates to victory. 

“Is 2026 gonna be a mildly blue lean year, like 2018, or a kind of tsunami blue year, like 2006 or 2008?” J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a University of Virginia-based election forecaster, said. “I think the answer to that question is still kind of, we’ll see.”

Strong candidates, high prices

Thirty-five Senate seats will be on the ballot during the November midterm elections. 

Of the nine deemed most competitive — Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — that will likely decide control of the chamber, Trump won all but Maine and New Hampshire in 2024. Democrats would have to retain their current seats and flip others in some combination of seven of those Senate races to take over control of the chamber. 

But Democrats have also offset their geographic disadvantage by fielding strong candidates in a few of the most important races, making pink-to-red states such as Alaska, Ohio and North Carolina ultra-competitive.

Democrats’ optimism comes as Trump has made a series of moves they believe could prove toxic for Republicans. Potentially most damaging, the war with Iran sent gas prices soaring and inflation rising, calling into question his handling of the economy as voters continue to rate affordability as a top issue.Trump has signed a ceasefire agreement and gas prices are dropping, but the question is whether there’s enough time left to erase the damage. 

The president’s approval rating was near 50% when he won the 2024 election, Coleman said, but has since sunk as the cost of living keeps rising. 

Trump continues to turn off voters, with elections now less than five months away. A New York Times daily average of polling placed the president’s approval rating at 39% as of June 17.

A switch in Senate control would have major implications for the remainder of Trump’s term. 

Democratic senators, assuming they vote together, would have the power to block any U.S. Supreme Court nominees put forward by Trump in the final two years of his term, as well as executive branch nominees and federal judges, and to shut down major party-line legislation enacted by Republicans twice already in the past year through the budget reconciliation process.

The combination of an unpopular president and a strong crop of candidates gives Democrats a fighting chance to win the majority, even if they still face long odds, Coleman said.

“If you asked me a year ago if Democrats had a path to the Senate, I would have said the chances aren’t zero, but they’re very hard,” Coleman said. “Now, I think there are several paths that the Democrats have to take the Senate, but I think the Republicans just have an easier path holding it.”

Moderates put red states in play

Alvin Tillery, a Democratic pollster and consultant who is also a professor in Northwestern University’s political science department, said strong candidates in North Carolina, Ohio and Alaska give his party the edge in those states

Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and former Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola are “moderates who have won statewide,” Tillery said.

Though the Democratic candidates in those states are establishment-friendly, Tillery said Democrats generally should look to motivate younger voters and voters of color by leaning in to issues that the No Kings protests have elevated, as well as keeping affordability in focus.

But, despite the apparent quality of Democratic candidates, those states are still purple at best. Trump has won each state in each of his three White House runs.

The president’s drooping approval may not be as big a factor as Democrats need, a national Republican campaign operative said.

“Yes, approval ratings, obviously, have gone down,” the operative, who declined to be identified by name, said. “However, when it comes to the Republican base, they are still showing up for Trump, and he will make sure to turn them out … At the end of the day, we have an advantage when it comes to the state-specific electorates that we’re looking at.”

Control of the Senate may come down to the Democratic candidates’ strength against the overall partisan lean of the states in play.

“They’ve by and large done a good job of recruiting the candidates they need to to put those states in play,” Coleman said of Democrats. “It’s just a question of: Are those states too red?”

Democrats are also defending open seats in Michigan and New Hampshire, while Sen. Jon Ossoff is seeking reelection in Georgia. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates the Michigan race as a toss-up and the contests in New Hampshire and Georgia, where Ossoff will face Trump-endorsed Rep. Mike Collins after his win in the June 16 GOP primary, as leaning toward Democrats.

A Maine street fight

On paper, Maine could be seen as the bluest state on the map this year because of its state’s record in presidential elections.

But its Senate race also may be the most immune from the national environment, with a battle-tested Republican incumbent running in a lightly populated state where retail politics can still swing an election.

The matchup, which may be the single most competitive in the country, pits a controversial newcomer in Platner against Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate and powerful Republican with proven electoral appeal who has occasionally criticized the president during the Trump era but also voted for conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Democrats are betting that Maine voters want more full-throated opposition to Trump. Primary voters formally made Platner the nominee in June after Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, seen as a more establishment candidate, suspended her campaign. 

Platner, a gruff-looking oyster farmer and Marine veteran, has connected with voters with a populist, outsider message. But he has faced an array of flaps, including over a tattoo with Nazi associations and that Platner had sexted several women while married. The New York Times also reported on women who said they were disturbed by Platner’s behavior while dating him.

He faces a difficult matchup with Collins, who has won other races in the face of significant national headwinds. In 2020, even as Trump lost the presidential election nationwide and in Maine, Collins won reelection while outperforming Trump by 18 points.

Senate math

The president’s party typically does poorly in midterm elections. Republicans are seen as likely to lose the House, though gerrymandering may make the fight for control of that chamber tighter than before. Republicans losing the Senate, too, would be seen as a stinging rebuke of Trump and GOP lawmakers.

In Ohio, Republican Sen. Jon Husted is seeking election after he was appointed to the Senate last year to replace JD Vance, who resigned to become vice president. Brown is running against Husted after losing reelection in 2024 to Sen. Bernie Moreno. 

Brown, who promotes a populist message, hearkens back to an earlier era of Ohio politics, when Democrats were more popular. President Barack Obama won the state in 2008 and 2012 but Republicans have since become ascendant, with Trump winning the state all three times he’s run for president.

While Husted hasn’t won a Senate race, he’s won statewide races for lieutenant governor and secretary of state. 

In North Carolina, Cooper is now favored in a contest with Republican Michael Whatley, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. Sabato’s Crystal Ball and the Cook Political Report have said the race leans Democratic, though another forecaster, Inside Elections, rates it as a tossup.

They are battling to flip the seat and succeed Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican who chose not to run for reelection after repeatedly clashing with Trump. He has publicly said Trump is harming Republican chances in November.

“We need Republicans to do well in November, but the stupid stuff is killing our chances!” Tillis wrote on social media in late May.

Alaska’s Senate race pits two well-known politicians in the state against each other. Incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan is facing Peltola, who was the state’s lone U.S. House member for more than two years.

Peltola represents a hope by Democrats that a familiar face will resonate with voters in a state where the party has struggled. She was the first Democrat to win statewide in Alaska since 2008. Peltola, who was first elected to Congress in a 2022 special election, lost her race for reelection in 2024.

Sullivan’s campaign got a boost after Alaska election officials disqualified a different Dan Sullivan from appearing on the ballot. Alaska Elections Division Director Carol Beecher wrote that the other Sullivan had filed “with a purpose to confuse or mislead” voters.

In Iowa, Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson and Democrat Josh Turek, a state representative, are running for an open seat created after Sen. Joni Ernst, a Republican, declined to run for reelection.

Iowa was once a major swing state and home of long-serving Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, and helped power President Barack Obama’s rise in 2008. It has since become solidly Republican, but anger over Trump’s tariffs and concerns that the war in Iran will send fertilizer prices rising have potentially created an opening for Democrats.

Lone Star longing

After Maine, no race has perhaps attracted as much attention as Texas.

Republicans are emerging from a bruising primary battle between Sen. John Cornyn and Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued and previously indicted state attorney general. Paxton won and will face Democrat James Talarico, a state lawmaker and seminary student who speaks openly about his faith, a progressive form of Christianity.

A Democratic victory would represent a political earthquake. Democrats haven’t won a Senate seat in Texas since the 1980s and haven’t won a statewide election since the 1990s.

Trump won 56% of the vote in Texas in 2024. A Talarico victory — a statewide Democratic victory — would open up the possibility that the party might one day again compete at the presidential level in Texas, the state that sent President Lyndon B. Johnson to Washington. Texas has 40 Electoral College votes, the second-biggest prize after California’s 54.

U.S. Senate Democrats introduced legislation on Thursday to require Congress to sign off on any deployment of federal troops to the polls, as President Donald Trump and his administration refuse to rule out the idea.

Fears of troops or other federal agents at voting sites have long loomed over the approaching midterm elections in November. Democrats and voting rights advocates have grown alarmed in recent months as Trump has publicly entertained the possibility. Other administration officials have mocked or sidestepped questions about possible deployments.

The legislation, the Protect Our Polls Act, would require Congress to pass a resolution approving any deployment beforehand. Federal law prohibits troops and other armed federal personnel from polling places, but contains an exception to “repel armed enemies of the United States” — fueling speculation that Trump could invoke this exception to bypass the ban.

“He is trying to nationalize the elections and he is telling us in his own words what he is trying to do,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, said at a news conference at the Capitol. “On top of that, Trump’s nominees for his Cabinet positions have come up here and refused to rule out uniformed military or federal law enforcement being sent to the polls on Election Day.”

White House justification

The bill would require the White House, 48 hours before any deployment, to provide Congress with intelligence, legal justifications, deployment plans and evidence that state and local officials are unable to address the threat themselves. 

It also prohibits military personnel from using federal funds to access election records, a provision designed to block troops from seizing ballots.

Slotkin is offering the bill alongside Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Alex Padilla of California, Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

“One of the things I’m very proud of is that I served to protect the Constitution of the United States and our democracy,” said Gallego, a Marine veteran. “I swore that oath, and the last thing any Marine, sailor, Army, Coastie, Air Force, spacemen — whatever they call them nowadays — wants to do is to undermine that. We’re here to protect democracy, we’re not here to undermine democracy.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that if Democrats “really cared about securing our elections,” the party would pass the SAVE America Act. 

The legislation would require voters to provide documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, proving their citizenship. The measure has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republicans.

In May, Trump told reporters that he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” in response to questions about sending National Guard personnel or federal immigration agents to voting locations in November.

Amendments blocked

At a Senate hearing in April, Slotkin pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on sending troops to the polls. He called the questions “another gotcha hypothetical.”

The Democratic legislation comes a week after Slotkin said Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee blocked two amendments to ban troops at the polls during work on the National Defense Authorization Act. The committee typically works on the defense spending bill behind closed doors.

The Protect Our Polls Act has virtually no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress. Still, its introduction underscores the level of concern among Democrats as Trump’s efforts to influence the midterm elections come into focus.

The Department of Justice has spent a year demanding states turn over unredacted copies of their voter rolls, including sensitive personal data on voters. DOJ officials have said in court that the department wants to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security, which operates a powerful computer program that can identify possible noncitizen voters. 

The DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the data, but no judge has so far ruled in the administration’s favor.

Investigations

The Department of Justice is also engaged in several election-related investigations over past elections. 

The FBI raided a Georgia elections warehouse in January and seized ballots from the 2020 election. Election officials have been subpoenaed in Minneapolis and the FBI last week searched the office of an Ohio voting rights group.

And Trump signed an executive order that restricts voting by mail. It would require states to provide lists of voters to the U.S. Postal Service before using the mail to send ballots and directs Homeland Security to share lists of voting-age citizens with every state. The order remains in effect for now, despite a series of lawsuits challenging it.

“There’s a common theme here,” Padilla said at a Democratic forum on election security on Tuesday. “All of these things are illegal and many unconstitutional.”

As election officials across the country steel themselves for the midterm elections in less than five months, President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail threatens to upend their preparations.

The executive order instructs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t provide lists of voters or meet other requirements. It has created a sense of deep uncertainty and concern among election officials as they consider how to comply, according to a review of court documents and interviews with election officials and experts on election administration.

The March 31 executive order, and a proposed Postal Service rule published June 2 that would put the order’s requirements into effect, raise serious logistical and procedural challenges for those running elections, they say. Rural areas with limited resources are especially at risk, but jurisdictions of all sizes could be forced to scramble.

The executive order is the latest step taken by Trump to assert control over state-run elections, along with the stalled SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documents proving their citizenship. The Justice Department, under Trump’s control, is also trying to obtain state voter rolls.

“This is just another death by a thousand cuts that clerks have been experiencing since the 2020 elections,” said Barb Byrum, the Democratic clerk of Ingham County, Michigan, which includes Lansing.

First-ever national voter list

The order and the rule require states to provide lists of mail-in voters if they want the Postal Service to deliver ballots, marking the first time the federal government has created a national voter list. 

Mail ballot envelopes must meet certain design standards. And federal agencies have to compile lists of voting-age citizens to share with each state in an effort to root out noncitizen voters.

But Democratic states and voting rights groups argue the executive order — and the accompanying proposed rule — represent an illegal overreach by Trump because states administer elections under the U.S. Constitution. Trump and his Republican allies say the restrictions are necessary for election security and to combat noncitizen voting, which occurs extremely rarely.

The Postal Service didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom. The agency has said the rule “will facilitate the faithful execution of federal law.”

Multiple lawsuits have been brought against the order, but a federal judge in Washington, D.C., in May declined to halt it, partly because the Trump administration hadn’t taken enough action to implement its requirements. Another federal judge in Massachusetts is weighing a separate request to block the order.

With the executive order still in effect, at least for now, election officials and experts who work with them are taking the ramifications of it and the proposed Postal Service rule seriously.

“We don’t have a national voter registration list. We don’t have, currently, a list of sanctioned, authorized voters to vote by mail at the federal level,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at Election Center, operated by the National Association of Election Officials.  “That’s a big, big change in the way elections have always been conducted.”

Sweeping changes very quickly

In court papers filed in May, local election officials and local governments representing 26 jurisdictions across the country warned the executive order would “severely disrupt” local election administration and force the implementation of sweeping changes within months. Implementation of the order’s requirements will largely fall on local election officials, they argued.

Byrum was among the officials to sign onto the brief, along with others in Boston, and counties in Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Under the executive order, states that want to send ballots through the mail must provide the Postal Service with lists of voters they intend to provide a mail ballot. Local election officials will play a large role in helping states develop these lists, according to the court papers, and will have primary responsibility to help voters address any errors.

And Trump wants it all in place before November. The executive order’s proposed timelines “present a logistical nightmare for local election officials,” the officials warn.

“The general rule is don’t make changes before a big election because there’s always something you didn’t think about,” said Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, a nonpartisan organization for election officials in jurisdictions of at least 250,000 people.

The proposed Postal Service rule says the agency would launch a portal where states would submit voter lists and make updates. But a number of questions remain, said Lopez, who previously spent a decade administering elections in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

The portal poses the potential for bottlenecks in the election system and it’s unclear what would happen if it was ever offline. The United States has a decentralized election system, with states each running their own elections. By contrast, the Postal Service portal would create a single point of failure, raising concerns about the security of information on tens of millions of voters.

Additionally, while every state maintains a voter registration list, there is no nationwide standard for the formatting of that data. It’s unclear whether the portal will accept data in a variety of formats — the proposed rule only says the Postal Service wouldn’t alter the data provided by states.

“It looks a little different across the country and therefore normalizing the data will be a process,” Lopez said.

Struggle for small, rural counties

The Department of Justice initially said in a court document that the Department of Homeland Security planned to obtain voter data from the Postal Service before backpedaling a few days later. Still, Homeland Security continues to have “preliminary conversations” about data sharing, the Justice Department said in a subsequent court filing.

DHS operates the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system that can scan voter data to identify possible noncitizens. The Justice Department has sued 30 states in an effort to force them to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal data such as dates of birth, driver’s license and full or partial Social Security numbers, for the purpose of running the information through SAVE.

The proposed Postal Service rule also imposes standards on ballot envelopes that states must meet if they want to send ballots through the mail.

Envelopes must include an election mail logo, be automation compatible and have a bar code that allows for tracking. These are already considered best practices — and many jurisdictions across the country already follow them — but the rule would make them mandatory.

Election offices in small, rural counties may struggle to comply. In many places, a single person is in charge of elections and may not even be on the job full time, Patrick said. 

“There’s rural offices all across the country, some of them don’t have their own computer in their office — they are sharing it with the tax assessor or whatever — they don’t have the ability to generate those serialized tracking codes, intelligent mail bar codes,” Patrick said. “Because they’re physically hand-writing these envelopes out or they’re using a rubber stamp with their address on it.”

Neither the executive order or the proposed Postal Service rule include any federal funding for implementation, something that would likely have to be appropriated by Congress.

Some Republican states have championed the executive order. A dozen GOP state attorneys general filed court documents defending the order and arguing that it “will enhance the security of absentee voting.”

“It is vital to the strength of our republic that we ensure only American citizens vote in our elections and that mail-in and absentee ballots are secure and reliable,” South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said in a statement earlier this spring.

But Matt Crane, a Republican who is the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the executive order and the proposed rule mark an overreach by the federal government into duties best left to states and local governments. 

The biggest reaction among Colorado clerks, he said, has been, “why?”

“No offense to our friends at the post office,” Crane said, “but I trust our processes more than I trust theirs.”

California often takes days or even weeks to tally votes after its elections, a product of measures to protect voters and a deluge of mail ballots dropped off on Election Day. Incomplete vote totals reported in the hours after polls close don’t always reflect final results.

None of this is evidence of fraud. But President Donald Trump has spent more than a week baselessly alleging malfeasance in California’s June 2 primary election, in which votes were still being counted as of June 11, offering a window into how he may approach the November midterm elections.

Trump has claimed repeatedly, without evidence, that Democrats are stealing the election, even though the state is a party stronghold. California’s long count is a well-known feature of its elections, with election officials given about a month to process and tally all ballots.

Democrats and experts on elections aren’t surprised by Trump’s statements, saying he is turning to familiar tactics in an effort to discredit unfavorable results.

“Whenever they don’t like the outcome of an election, they spread lies about the election,” said David Becker, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice Voting Rights Section. 

‘The Dumocrats’

After the 2020 election, Trump allies mounted a legal campaign to overturn the president’s losses in key battleground states, citing nonexistent fraud. When that failed, GOP lawmakers raised objections certifying President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Finally, Trump rallied a crowd of supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, that went on to storm the Capitol.

Trump continually cast the election as stolen during that period — a theme he’s returned to in hammering on California.

“The Dumocrats are at it again!” Trump wrote in a social media post on June 3. “They are trying to STEAL THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA PRIMARY, AND THE MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES, PRIMARY, AWAY FROM TWO GREAT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES. Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.”

The U.S. Department of Justice is following the president’s lead. The top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles has linked suspicions about California’s elections to the state’s refusal to turn over its unredacted voter roll, which includes sensitive personal data on residents.

The Justice Department has sued California and 29 other states to gain access to the data, which it plans to feed into a Department of Homeland Security computer program that can identify possible noncitizen voters. So far, no federal judge has agreed the DOJ is entitled to the information.

Eye on the midterms

The voter roll lawsuits are part of a proactive campaign by the Trump administration to exert influence and control over the midterms before voting begins. 

The president has signed an executive order restricting mail ballots that currently faces multiple lawsuits. And Trump wants Congress to require voters to show documents proving their citizenship, but the legislation has stalled in the Senate.

The stakes of the midterm elections are high for Trump and Republicans. Democrats retaking the House or the Senate or even both would mean the end of his legislative agenda and more aggressive oversight of the administration.

At the same time, Americans’ confidence in elections is declining. Two-thirds of U.S. adults say they are confident or very confident that their state or local government will conduct a fair and accurate election, down from 76% in October 2024, according to a March poll conducted by Marist University.

The 2026 House landscape — and Trump’s past comments — suggest he may direct his ire at additional states in November. 

For instance, of the 18 House races that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter categorizes as a “toss up”, three are in Pennsylvania, a swing state that Trump alleged was the site of election fraud in 2020 (he won the state in 2024).

California has its own “toss up” House race and an additional three only lean Democratic, meaning they remain competitive. After California, Texas and other states gerrymandered their congressional maps in recent months, control of the House could again run through California.

“It’s been pretty clear to all of us that Republicans are laying the groundwork to do anything, and they will say anything, to hold power,” Rep. Pete Aguilar, a California Democrat, said at a news conference on June 9.

Evidence of fraud?

States Newsroom asked the White House to provide evidence substantiating Trump’s fraud claims in California. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded with a statement that didn’t directly answer the question.

“Countless Americans share the same concerns as President Trump watching the way California conducts its elections, including taking weeks to deliver results,” the statement says in part.

California’s slow vote count dates back years and is driven by multiple factors. California, along with seven other states, sends mail ballots to all voters. In a statewide special election last year, nearly 89% of voters cast their ballot that way.

This creates a flood of ballots arriving at election offices in the days leading up to and on Election Day, along with large numbers of voters who drop off their ballots in person. Voter signatures must be checked on ballot envelopes, adding more behind-the-scenes work that slows down election workers.

Voters with an issue related to their ballot, such as a missing signature or signature mismatch, also have an opportunity to correct the problem. The process, called ballot curing, adds more time.

Additionally, California has a week-long grace period for ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive late, creating a trickle of votes that come into election offices days after polls have closed. 

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to deliver an opinion soon that could strike down these grace periods nationwide, though such a decision could compound the ballot pileup on Election Day as voters move to get their ballots in sooner.

Need for faster count acknowledged

Evoking an image of a snake digesting a large meal, Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, likened the arrival of ballots on Election Day to “the thing in the python.” Her nonprofit group has long advocated for improvements to the state’s election process, including a faster count. 

“While I am dismayed by the unfair criticism being placed on California, I’m more concerned about voter confidence being undermined, not just by those fraudulent claims but also by the long count itself,” Alexander said.

The demand to know the winners of races on election night has been fueled by modern media, as news services and TV networks declare race winners. But these calls are almost always based on incomplete vote totals, and often rely on mathematical analyses of whether enough votes remain uncounted for other candidates to have a realistic chance of winning.

Candidates are officially declared winners by canvassing boards and other election officials in the days and weeks following the election, depending on each state’s procedures. Often election night vote totals match the actual outcome of a race, but not always — a gap Trump is now exploiting to claim fraud.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in May sent a letter to election officials that almost appeared to anticipate the reaction to the June primary and called for quick and accurate vote tabulation.

“Time is of the essence in preventing election lies from taking hold,” Newsom wrote.

House GOP leaders join criticism

While California’s slow process is normal for the state, Trump allies have latched onto it — conflating the pace of the count with evidence of wrongdoing, even if they aren’t always as explicit as the president in accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said during an exchange with a CNN reporter on Monday that while he wasn’t saying the election was rigged, it “stinks to high heaven.”

“Whether you can prove fraud or not, it does undermine voter integrity in the vote,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican, said of the slow count at a news conference.

But Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, analogized the vote counting to a football game. The vote totals available on election night represent the score at half time — but the final score at the end of the game will be different.

“It doesn’t mean there’s fraud, it just means the game was completed,” Lieu told reporters. “That’s what we’re seeing right now, we’re completing the vote count. And then we’re going to see who wins and who loses.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is walking back, for now, a plan to sweep up data on millions of Americans who vote by mail under President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail ballots.

In a federal court filing Monday night, the Justice Department significantly hedged the data-sharing plan, pulling back from a position the Trump administration advanced last week. DOJ lawyers now cast the idea as in the early stages and dependent on approval of a new U.S. Postal Service rule for mail ballots, citing a memo that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin signed earlier Monday.

“The Secretary authorized DHS to continue preliminary conversations with USPS concerning potential data-sharing arrangements, and should USPS finalize its rulemaking process, consider working to advance potential coordination to the extent feasible and consistent with applicable law and privacy protections,” the notice says.

Mullin’s memo, the Monday court filing says, “more accurately reflects the current policy of the Administration with respect to the implementation” of the executive order, reversing a Friday notice that said Homeland Security “contemplates” working to “integrate” the Postal Service’s voter data in an effort to monitor the flow of mail ballots and identify possible fraud. Friday’s filing said Homeland Security would use the information to generate investigative leads.

Trump’s March 31 executive order requires states to submit lists of potential mail voters to the Postal Service if they want ballots delivered and directs Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state. The order faces several lawsuits ahead of the November midterm elections but so far hasn’t been paused by a federal judge.

Trump signed the executive order amid an ongoing campaign to influence how states administer federal elections. Under the U.S. Constitution, states run elections. While Congress can pass regulations, the president has no unilateral authority over voting. 

Trump has long attacked mail voting and has also promoted the idea that noncitizen voting is rampant. In reality, it’s extremely rare.

Democrats and voting rights groups say the order represents an unconstitutional attempt by Trump to assert authority over elections. They also argue the order endangers the independence of the Postal Service, which is overseen by a Board of Governors, not the president.

Running out the clock

Michael McNulty, the policy director at Issue One, a group focused on protecting American democracy, said the Justice Department’s second notice almost appears to anticipate that a court will block the Postal Service’s new rule, which would require states sending ballots through the mail to provide lists of voters.

“It looks like they definitely walked back the USPS data-sharing language,” McNulty said in an interview.

Downplaying the current effect of the rule could be part of a legal strategy to shield the administration from court challenges.

Despite a series of legal challenges, the Trump administration has urged judges not to block the March order because federal officials haven’t taken major action to implement it — making the lawsuits premature. That argument will become more difficult to maintain as the Postal Service moves forward on the new rule for mail ballots and Homeland Security begins to take action.

David Becker, a former Justice Department Voting Rights Section attorney who leads the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said that since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the Justice Department has sought to “run the clock out” in legal challenges until it’s too late for courts to act or judicial action would cause chaos.

While Trump and his aides speak publicly about the alleged threat of noncitizen voting, in court the Justice Department seeks to minimize the extent of the actions the federal government has taken to carry out the executive order, Becker indicated.

“So I think this is a case of the government trying to have it both ways,” Becker said. “The government is trying to satisfy an audience of one, the president, while at the same time trying to play this rope-a-dope game with the court so that the court might not rule against them, they might say that a case isn’t ripe yet.”

In response to questions from States Newsroom, Homeland Security said in an unattributed statement that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency within DHS, is “lawfully implementing” the executive order.

“President Trump has been clear: Nothing is more fundamental than the integrity and security of our elections,” the statement said.

Quest for voter rolls

The Trump administration has spent the past year attempting to obtain unredacted state voter rolls to feed into a powerful Homeland Security computer program that can identify potential noncitizen voters. The Justice Department has filed more than 30 lawsuits seeking to force states and the District of Columbia to turn over the information, but so far none have been successful.

Eight states — including heavily Democratic California, Oregon and Washington — have all-mail elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. For those states, complying with the executive order would effectively mean turning over the names of all or nearly all their voters to the Postal Service.

It’s unclear if those lists would include voters’ sensitive personal data, like driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, that the Justice Department has sued to obtain.

In its Monday notice, the Justice Department appeared to suggest Homeland Security had been planning to go beyond the scope of the executive order. 

The executive order does not explicitly direct the Postal Service to share voter and mail ballot data with Homeland Security. Instead, it tells the Postal Service to coordinate with the Justice Department on investigations into suspected election crimes.

Data-sharing arrangements between DHS and the Postal Service “are not directed” by the order, the Monday notice says. Any future sharing would be contingent upon both the Postal Service’s mail ballot rule and “any policy and legal determinations as to the desirability and feasibility of any such data-sharing” — in other words, a decision the Trump administration will make later.

Computer system participation

The Justice Department had also reported Friday that Homeland Security planned to launch a “State Voter Roll Verification” powered by the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system — the computer program that can flag possible noncitizen voters.

The Friday notice said states would be able to upload their voter rolls to SAVE, but Homeland Security already allows states to voluntarily run this information through the program. Some Republican-led states have previously used SAVE to scan their voter rolls and it’s unclear how the new verification process would have been different.

On Monday, the Justice Department reversed itself on that issue as well. DOJ lawyers wrote in the second notice that the executive order “does not direct that approach, and the new memorandum no longer includes that discussion.”

The Justice Department’s Monday notice makes clear that Homeland Security still plans to create lists of citizens in each state, as mandated under the executive order. The agency plans to have a way for states to obtain citizenship information from federal agencies by June 30, the notice says.

The executive order also requires Homeland Security to allow individuals to access their citizenship-related records and update or correct them ahead of elections. The Justice Department said Monday that Mullin approved a phased plan for a portal accessible to the public.

Monday’s notice, citing Mullin’s memo, says only that those capabilities will be developed and launched later this year after the completion of legal, privacy and technical groundwork. That leaves open the possibility that states will have access to federal citizenship information weeks or months before individual voters will be able to view the same data and call attention to any errors.

Questions linger

What prompted Mullin to sign the memo on Monday is unclear. Homeland Security didn’t respond to a request for a copy of the memo.

Early on Monday evening, lawyers for the League of Women Voters filed a court document in a separate lawsuit challenging Homeland Security’s use of the SAVE system that alerted the judge to the Justice Department’s Friday notice. 

“It remains unclear—from the Implementation Notice or otherwise—what specific legal authority either the USPS or DHS have to share, consolidate, and use data in this way,” the lawyers wrote, referring to the initial data sharing plan between Homeland Security and Postal Service.

The Justice Department responded on Tuesday, saying in a court filing that information was “no longer accurate, as of yesterday evening.”

Also unclear is what role, if any, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has played in Mullin’s decision to change course. Trump’s executive order charges Lutnick with coordinating implementation efforts.

The Commerce Department didn’t respond to States Newsroom’s questions.

Sixteen Democratic senators last week demanded Lutnick halt implementation of the executive order. The letter, led by Sens. Maria Cantwell of Washington, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Alex Padilla of California, urged Lutnick to preserve records related to the development of the order ahead of congressional oversight.

“Vote-by-mail is safe, secure, and convenient, and it has been used successfully across the political spectrum over many election cycles,” the senators wrote.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will allow states to access federal citizenship data by June 30 and plans to monitor the flow of mail ballots for signs of voter fraud, according to a court document.

Amid a series of lawsuits, President Donald Trump’s administration is now moving to carry out a March 31 executive order restricting voting by mail ahead of the November midterm elections.

Democrats and voting rights advocates oppose the directive as unconstitutional election meddling by Trump and have sued to stop him. The president, who has long attacked mail ballots but votes by mail himself, says the additional rules will fight noncitizen voting, a rare phenomenon.

“No president has the authority to unilaterally rewrite election rules or dictate how states administer their elections,” Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice at the League of Women Voters, said in a statement last week. The League of Women Voters filed one of at least five lawsuits challenging the order.

Potential disruptions

The order could carry major consequences for the midterm elections. Any new restrictions on mail ballots would risk disrupting how tens of millions of voters cast their ballots. About 30% of voters cast mail ballots in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

But despite several legal challenges, the order remains in effect. 

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., in late May ruled against a request by Democratic groups to pause the order, finding that it was too soon to weigh in because federal officials hadn’t taken enough action yet. A second judge in Massachusetts held a hearing last week, but didn’t immediately issue a decision.

“The Trump Administration will continue fighting for the safety and security of American elections,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement shortly after the D.C. judge’s decision.

One portion of the order demands the postmaster general enact new restrictions on mailed ballots and not transmit ballots from states that refuse to provide the names of absentee voters. The U.S. Postal Service, despite its status as an independent corporation, has put forward a proposal in line with the order to require states to submit lists of voters before mailing ballots.

Now, Homeland Security is responding to another part of the order that requires the creation of lists of voting-age citizens in every state, which the Trump administration calls “state citizenship lists.” State election officials would receive the lists, which they could compare to their voter rolls in a search for noncitizen voters.

Homeland Security’s plans for the citizenship lists came into focus on June 5, when the U.S. Department of Justice filed a notice in federal court that briefly outlines the administration’s plans. The notice describes a two-part effort by Homeland Security and its subsidiary agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, to comply with the order.

First, Homeland Security will implement a “State Voter Roll Verification” that allows state election officials to submit their voter rolls to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system. 

SAVE is a powerful computer program that checks names against citizenship information held in a variety of government databases. It can flag registered voters as possible noncitizens, but faces criticism for incorrect identifications.

For the past year, states have already had the option to upload their voter rolls into SAVE. Some Republican-led states, such as Indiana, Texas and Wyoming, have used the system, while Democratic states have declined. It’s unclear how the State Voter Roll Verification would be different, if at all, from states’ current SAVE access. 

Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom.

Second, the Justice Department notice says Homeland Security will set up a registry for state election officials to securely access “citizenship-related data” from USCIS, the Social Security Administration and the State Department.

According to the notice, the “underlying data would remain in each agency’s respective system.” No other details were provided.

The notice also outlines Homeland Security’s intention to use the lists of voters that states provide to the Postal Service for investigations. It says DHS wants to “integrate” data on those voters “to monitor mail-in and absentee ballot flows, identify anomalies that may suggest voter fraud or misuse, and generate authorized investigative leads.”

California elections

The notice comes as Trump renews his attacks on mail-in voting. Last week he alleged, without evidence, voter fraud in California, which held primary elections last week. California relies heavily on mail ballots and often counts votes at a slow pace — meaning final results sometimes don’t match election night vote totals.

“Do you know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election,” Trump said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

While the executive order already faces a slew of lawsuits, the NAACP on June 3 filed a motion in federal court seeking to specifically block the Postal Service’s proposed regulations of mail ballots. The NAACP alleges the regulations violate a 2021 settlement agreement that requires timely delivery of election mail to all voters. 

The Postal Service has until Thursday to respond.

The American Postal Workers Union in a statement on June 5 denounced the executive order, saying the Postal Service serves all Americans. It is “not a tool for politicians” to pick which Americans receive which benefits, the union said.

“The Executive Order is an unconstitutional attack on the millions of Americans who vote by mail,” the union said, “and another front in an ongoing assault on voting rights in the United States of America.”

The U.S. Senate rejected the SAVE America Act on Thursday, dealing a blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to impose voting restrictions ahead of the November midterm elections.

Senators voted 48-50 against advancing an amendment that would have incorporated Trump’s top legislative priority into an immigration-focused spending bill. The vote offered the clearest sign yet that despite pressure from the president, a handful of Republican senators continue to resist advancing the bill, which critics say would unleash immense chaos ahead of elections this fall.

The SAVE America Act would require voters to offer documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, proving their citizenship when registering to vote. It would also mandate voters show photo ID when casting a ballot and restrict where voters can register, effectively eliminating voter registration drives.

Democrats and voting rights groups have assailed the bill, saying it would disenfranchise voters and upend the midterms because the new rules would take effect immediately. Trump and the bill’s GOP supporters say it’s needed to combat noncitizen voting, an extremely rare phenomenon.

Since taking office last year, Trump has made a series of attempts to shape how elections are run. An executive order that would limit voting by mail remains in effect for now as opponents challenge it in federal court, and the Department of Justice continues to seek to force states to hand over sensitive voter data, so far unsuccessfully.

The Senate amendment, offered by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, also included restrictions on sports participation by transgender athletes. On social media after the vote, Graham called the SAVE America Act “one of the most consequential” pieces of legislation developed by Trump and his team.

“All Democrats voted no, and they will eventually pay a price,” Graham wrote.

Republicans also vote no

But the proposal fell short among a small group of Republicans, too. Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina joined Democrats in voting no.

Collins is seeking reelection in what is one of the most competitive Senate races in the country. McConnell and Tillis have both opted against seeking reelection, while Murkowski has said the bill would set up barriers for voters in her large, rural state.

Sixty votes would have been needed to advance the amendment — the same threshold to overcome a filibuster. 

The vote came after the Senate spent weeks debating the SAVE America Act earlier this year before moving on to other business without a vote. Trump has urged Republicans to abandon the filibuster to pass the bill, without success.

“We will squash this blatant attempt at voter suppression,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, wrote on social media after the vote.

The Senate also rejected, 50-49, a separate amendment offered by Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, that included a different version of the SAVE America Act. According to Lee, the amendment was the version of the bill passed by the House, which didn’t include provisions on transgender athletes. 

Collins voted in favor of the amendment after earlier opposing Graham’s amendment.

California

Both amendments failed hours after Trump asserted, without evidence, that Democrats were stealing “the vote” in California. The state held primary elections earlier this week, but vote counting is often slow in the state, meaning vote totals reported on election night don’t always reflect the final outcome of a race.

Trump linked California’s elections to his push for the SAVE America Act, writing on social media that “I hope Republicans are watching” so they could pass the legislation.

“They found a lot of mail-in ballots last night, shockingly,” Trump said at an unrelated Oval Office event on Thursday. “So we don’t want that.”

With the Senate unwilling to advance the SAVE America Act, some GOP lawmakers have begun offering alternative election-related bills.

Republican Reps. Julie Fedorchak of North Dakota and Laurel Lee of Florida on Thursday introduced the SAVE America Through REAL ID Act, which would create a grant program to help states provide REAL ID-compliant driver’s license and identification cards to residents for free to low-income Americans.

On Tuesday, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, and Graham introduced the Election Security Partnership Act, designed to encourage states to submit their voter rolls to a computer program operated by the Department of Homeland Security that can identify possible noncitizens. 

States can already upload voter data to the program, called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements or SAVE, but the legislation would provide $20 million in grants for states to offset any costs related to using SAVE.

Ahead of the November midterm elections, President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have demanded Congress pass sweeping voting restrictions, including showing proof of citizenship to register — all in the name of election security.

At the same time, the only federal agency dedicated solely to helping states and localities run smooth and secure elections operates on a meager budget. It provides grants for election security far smaller than in the past. And U.S. House Republicans have signaled they want sizable further cuts.

The agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, sits at the center of a fight playing out in Congress over how to best ensure secure elections. The debate has thrown into sharp relief a yawning gap between GOP rhetoric over election tampering and actual congressional support for election security efforts.

“If my colleagues truly cared about protecting our elections from foreign interference, they’d put the resources behind it,” Rep. Sanford Bishop, a Georgia Democrat, said at a House Appropriations Committee meeting this spring. “Instead, we get empty rhetoric, zero urgency, while putting the right of citizens to vote at risk.”

Congressional support of the EAC’s election security grant program has fluctuated over time, but has generally trended downward.

Lawmakers approved $380 million in 2018 and $425 million in 2020, along with an additional $400 million in election-related pandemic aid that year. 

Since then, grant funding has slowed to a trickle. Congress appropriated $75 million in 2022 and again in 2023. That was followed by $55 million in 2024 and $15 million in 2025.

This year’s amount, $45 million, is an increase from the previous year — consistent with enhanced needs in an election year — but substantially lower than other recent years and a far cry from the program’s early years.

Trump and many GOP lawmakers support the SAVE America Act, which would impose new restrictions on voting. It would require voters to show a photo ID at the polls, as well as require them to bring documents proving their citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, with them when they register to vote.

The requirements are needed, the bill’s supporters say, to combat noncitizen voting, an extremely rare occurrence. 

“The cheating is rampant in our elections,” Trump asserted without evidence in his 2026 State of the Union address. He has called the SAVE America Act “commonsense, country-saving legislation.”

The House passed the bill in February but it has floundered in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republicans. Trump continues to seek new avenues to advance the measure, including urging lawmakers to attach it to housing legislation.

Cuts to election security agency

The Trump-led push for voting restrictions has largely ignored concrete election security needs in favor of chasing the phantom specter of noncitizen voting, Democrats and experts on election administration say. The result, they say, has been the possibility of sharp cuts at the EAC.

The House Appropriations Committee in April approved a bill that would cut the EAC’s salaries and expenses from $23.86 million to $17 million. It would mark the first time in four years the agency’s budget has dropped below $20 million.

The bill would also sharply cut the EAC’s election security grant program from $45 million to $15 million, the same as the last non-election year.

Since 2018, the agency has distributed the grants to election officials for technology upgrades, including cybersecurity, physical security improvements at election sites and efforts to combat voter misinformation. Lawmakers created the election security grants in response to foreign interference in the 2016 election.

“Republicans claim falsely that our elections are plagued by fraud and that more needs to be done to secure the vote,” Rep. Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, said in a statement to States Newsroom.

“Yet, they have consistently undermined the security of our elections, including by proposing to cut election-security grants by two-thirds and the Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) overall budget by almost 30% in Fiscal Year 2027,” Hoyer said. “This will leave states without critical resources to secure their voting systems and adopt the latest in voting technology and best practices.”

Hoyer, who helped spearhead the 2002 legislation creating the EAC and is the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the agency’s budget, said it has been a tremendous benefit to state and local election officials and to the integrity of the vote.

“I will continue to oppose Republican efforts to cut its funding,” he said.

Congressional GOP embraces Trump

The bill represents only one, early step in the appropriations process. The House hasn’t voted on it and the Senate could eliminate or alter the cuts, with any differences eventually worked out in a conference committee. 

The House Appropriations Committee, which is not burdened with the Senate’s need for bipartisan approval of most legislation, in past years has also put forward cuts to election security grant funding that have been abandoned later.

Still, the measure this year demonstrates how House Republicans have embraced Trump’s focus on noncitizen voting. 

While cutting the EAC and election security funding, the bill includes a provision prohibiting the use of funds to register noncitizens to vote. Noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections and only a very small number of municipalities allow noncitizens to vote in local contests.

“The people demanded a new mandate, we’re carrying it forward. That includes reinforcing President Trump’s work to … ensure that only citizens vote in our elections,” Rep. Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican and the Appropriations Committee chairman, said at an April meeting.

A spokesperson for Rep. Dave Joyce, an Ohio Republican who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that developed the bill, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Funding ebb

Congress created the EAC in the 2002 Help America Vote Act, passed in the wake of the 2000 presidential election and the Florida recount. 

A bipartisan commission leads the agency, which has about 70 employees, according to its 2025 annual report. It focuses on aiding state and local election officials with training and other resources, certifying voting equipment and overseeing grant programs.

Gideon Cohn-Postar, director of federal affairs at the Institute for Responsive Government, said election officials generally want Congress to provide about $400 million a year, a figure that reflects lawmakers’ initial commitment to the grant program in 2018 and would allow states to make significant strides in bolstering their election infrastructure.

Each year’s grants are split between states and territories based on a formula. In practice, most receive the minimum amount. The $45 million grant for 2026 translated into $819,000 for most states, with a mandatory 20% match.

“It’s absolutely insufficient,” Cohn-Postar said.

State spending

A December 2024 report from the Bipartisan Policy Center measuring the impact of the grant program found that cybersecurity constituted the single largest category of grant spending, at over $200 million, followed by nearly $150 million on voting equipment.

Some states save up their grant money over several years to help pay for larger purchases, like voter registration systems, with the money earning interest in the meantime. As of March 2025, states had collectively spent 69% of their grant dollars, according to the latest data available from the EAC. 

Two states — Nevada and Ohio — have spent 100% of their funds. Only Louisiana has spent none, ahead of a future elections system overhaul.

In Connecticut, election officials have spent 95% of the $13.8 million it has received in election security grants over the years, according to the EAC data. The funds have helped towns conduct security audits, Connecticut Democratic Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas said in an interview. 

As an example, Thomas said when she took office in 2023 not all of the town’s systems were on a government online domain but most have now adopted one.

“Someting like that, it never gets the headlines but hugely important from a security perspective,” Thomas said.

Commission warns against cuts

EAC commissioners have been warning Congress that unstable funding and budget cuts would harm their agency’s work. All three current commissioners and a recent former commissioner testified at a House Administration Committee hearing on election security in May, where they cautioned lawmakers against reduced and unpredictable resources.

Commissioner Benjamin Hovland, a Democratic appointee of Trump, noted that while Congress has provided “significant” funding since the 2002 law, federal dollars have covered less than 5% of the total cost of running elections during that time. 

Election officials today face challenges that would have been unimaginable when the law was passed, he said, adding that commissioners heard enthusiasm for the EAC’s work in recent meetings with officials.

“But the agency is nearing a point where funding cuts will impact what we can accomplish, and the support we can provide election officials, especially related to election security,” Hovland said.

States frequently tell the EAC they want federal funding that is “predictable, consistent, and sufficient” to support long-term planning, said Christy McCormick, a Republican commissioner appointed by President Barack Obama. 

The EAC’s adoption of newer, more rigorous standards for election equipment illustrates the importance of funding for state and local election officials. 

In 2021, the EAC adopted the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0, or VVSG 2.0, replacing the earlier 1.0 guidelines. The technical standards are designed to enhance security, such as requiring air gapped systems, and greater accessibility for voters with disabilities.

While states are not required to use VVSG-certified machines, many states have followed the EAC’s lead and mandated the use of machines that meet these standards. Upgrading is expensive, however.

In the meantime, election technology continues to age. By 2028, the average age of modern voting equipment will rise to 9.3 years old, up from just 4.9 years old in 2020, according to a report from the Bipartisan Policy Center released in late May. The report identified “episodic and unpredictable” federal funding as one obstacle to states purchasing VVSG 2.0 equipment.

“Federal support is absolutely key to making sure that election infrastructure is functioning well at the state and local levels,” Will Adler, a co-author of the report, said in an interview.

‘Don’t give me any more money’

To be sure, some state election officials are skeptical of accepting grant funding. Kansas Republican Secretary of State Scott Schwab told a congressional hearing in April that elections are best run and funded locally. 

He said he previously accepted grant dollars but that state lawmakers then didn’t approve the required matching funds, leaving his office in a bind.

“I would rather, because of the strings attached, just don’t give me any more money,” Schwab said. “If we need more money, we can handle it locally.”

But since the House Appropriations Committee advanced cuts to the EAC and the election security grants in April, numerous election officials and voting rights groups have urged lawmakers to reconsider.

On May 12, the Project for Election Infrastructure sent a letter signed by several dozen local election officials asking senators for $400 million in election security grants, with at least two-thirds directed to localities. The true cost of modernizing and fully securing American election systems will run billions of dollars, the letter warned.

The National Association of Counties on June 2 asked House and Senate appropriations leaders to not cut funding. The years between presidential elections are when “critical groundwork is laid,” the association’s CEO and executive director, Matt Chase, wrote in a letter.

Chase ticked through typical security expenses that can quickly add up. Bollards to protect remote drop boxes can cost $500 to $4,000 per bollard. Key card access at election facilities can cost $1,500 to $5,000 per door. Video surveillance cameras can run hundreds to thousands of dollars.

“Federal investment scaled only to presidential cycles leaves counties without the resources needed to be ready when turnout surges,” Chase wrote.

Thomas, the Connecticut secretary of state, echoed the sentiment.

“I feel that many people use the term election security almost like a slogan,” Thomas said. “But election security is actually year-round work.”

President Donald Trump’s extraordinary $1.776 billion fund to pay off allies and others who say they have been wronged by past administrations has drawn widespread condemnation by opponents, including some Republicans, who characterize it as an act of brazen corruption.

But the Trump administration’s push to reward its supporters also harkens back to an earlier era of American cronyism, experts say, while expanding the frontiers of political favoritism.

From the early years of the United States until well into the 19th century, a spoils system dominated the federal government. Presidents handed out jobs to supporters, filling the bureaucracy with workers who had demonstrated loyalty to the administration in power. 

Trump’s political idol, President Andrew Jackson, replaced large numbers of federal officials after his 1829 inauguration, for instance. One appointee to a role at the Port of New York made out with more than $1 million, valued at tens of millions today.

The comparison isn’t exact. The spoils system was associated with the distribution of government jobs to political allies, a practice called patronage. Trump’s new fund would instead deliver taxpayer dollars directly to favored individuals.

Yet, academics who have studied the spoils system and the presidency see parallels between the past and present — with a desire to reward allies and build allegiance at the center of it all.

“It seems to me that may be the common element here,” said Sidney Shapiro, a professor of law at Wake Forest University who wrote before the 2024 election that Trump wanted to reinstate the spoils system. “It appears President Trump is thinking about using the fund to reward people unfairly punished, but I think in his mind it’s unfairly punished because they were trying to support him.”

Five-member board to be named by Trump

The Department of Justice announced the “anti-weaponization fund,” which critics call a “slush fund,” on May 18 as it moved to settle a lawsuit Trump had filed in his personal capacity against the IRS over the leaking of his tax returns by a former agency contractor. 

The suit placed Trump in the extremely unusual position of effectively negotiating with himself because he has erased the DOJ’s post-Watergate tradition of independence from the White House.

Even before the settlement, the Justice Department under Trump had taken actions that would have been unheard of in other recent administrations. For instance, federal prosecutors have brought a case against former FBI Director James Comey and tried to pursue criminal charges against New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James. 

The DOJ has also obtained an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a frequent critic of GOP politicians.

Trump’s settlement agreement provides for the creation of the fund overseen by a board of five members chosen by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney. Trump can fire the members for any reason.

The fund’s board will have the power to make decisions about payments, as well as issue formal apologies. Claims submitted to the fund must be processed by Dec. 1, 2028, prior to the end of Trump’s term.

Jan. 6 rioters line up

A bevy of Trump supporters and hangers-on have said they plan to apply for compensation. They include individuals who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, disrupting Congress’ certification of President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. Trump previously pardoned rioters when he took office in January 2025.

Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 22 years in prison before Trump pardoned him, predicted on a recent podcast that a “lot of J6ers are going to spend their money on firearms.”

Trump has cast the fund as an act of magnanimity on his part because the settlement agreement doesn’t include a monetary payout to him. 

However, Blanche also signed a document barring any additional scrutiny of the president’s past tax history, a move that shields him from audits. The New York Times and ProPublica reported in 2024 that Trump could have owed $100 million if he lost an audit battle over improper tax breaks.

“I gave up a lot of money in allowing the just announced Anti-Weaponization Fund to go forward. I could have settled my case, including the illegal release of my Tax Returns and the equally illegal BREAK IN of Mar-a-Lago, for an absolute fortune,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, referring to the FBI search of his Florida residence in 2022.

“Instead, I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!”

Trump has adopted a “patrimonial” approach to governing, James Pfiffner, a professor emeritus at George Mason University who has studied the presidency, wrote in an email to States Newsroom. 

Benefits, like federal contracts, go to those who are loyal, Pfiffner wrote, and the government is treated as if it were a family business and the state’s resources were his personal property.

The “anti-weaponization fund” represents an extension of that approach, Pfiffner wrote, but also goes further than past presidents. He wrote that he could think of no past precedents in the modern presidency for such a blatant use of taxpayer money to potentially reward loyalists.

“At least in the spoils system, the people hired by the government were working and presumably doing their jobs,” Pfiffner wrote. “The beneficiaries of this fund have done nothing to earn their benefits, and presumably some will be rewarded for having committed crimes to overturn the 2020 election.”

Congress began curbing the spoils system after the 1881 assassination of President James Garfield by a spurned job seeker. 

Over the next two decades, many federal positions were moved into a civil service system. While the federal government still includes some 4,000 political appointees today, the vast majority of the bureaucracy is staffed by civil servants.

Critics and defenders in Congress

But it’s unclear whether Congress will block Trump’s fund, despite an intense backlash.

Anger among Republican senators has stalled action on budget legislation funding immigration enforcement, which Democrats would have used to force votes on amendments to block the fund. Democrats have introduced multiple bills aimed at halting it.

“Congress cannot stand by while Trump turns the federal government into a political operation for his friends and cronies,” Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, said in a statement.

Obstacles exist to congressional action. Even if Republicans who control both chambers voted with Democrats, Trump could veto bills passed placing restrictions on the fund, which would require two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate to override. 

And some GOP lawmakers have defended the fund.

On May 21, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, objected to a unanimous consent request by Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, to pass a bill that would prohibit payments to Jan. 6 rioters.

“Thankfully, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Trump Department of Justice established a standard and lawful process to hear from American citizens who suffered lawfare or weaponization under the Biden administration,” Tuberville said on the Senate floor.

Lawsuits have been filed challenging the fund and how it’s structured. Two police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 have sued, warning that rioters could use the money to organize. 

Fund blocked temporarily

On Friday, a federal judge in Virginia ordered the Trump administration to halt work on the fund for at least two weeks while she considers ordering a lengthier pause.

The decision came in a lawsuit brought by a former federal prosecutor fired by the DOJ and a California professor who was charged but acquitted of assaulting a federal officer after protesting an immigration raid.

Legal advocacy groups also argue Congress didn’t intend for federal money to be used for these kinds of payoffs.

“Another commonality is we the taxpayers are funding both,” Shapiro, the Wake Forest professor, said of the spoils system and the Trump fund. “We certainly fund the jobs that people have and now we’re funding this fund.”

The U.S. Postal Service on Friday took its first major step to carry out President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail, proposing a rule that would require states to submit lists of voters before mailing ballots.

But the proposed rule appears to smooth over some of the rougher edges of the executive order, which has been condemned by Democratic state officials as an intrusion on their constitutional authority to administer elections.

“The proposed rule would apply uniform standards for the mailing of absentee ballots to and from voters, which the Postal Service understands will facilitate the faithful execution of federal law,” the Postal Service said in a document posted on the Federal Register website.

The executive order faces at least five lawsuits. Experts on the Postal Service have also warned that Trump’s attempt to assert authority over the agency threatens its decades-long record of independence.

The order remains in effect for now ahead of the November midterm elections. A federal judge on Thursday declined to block it after finding the federal government had taken few steps to implement it. However, with Friday’s proposed rule, that’s beginning to change.

Some exemptions

Trump’s March 31 order directed the postmaster general, who leads the Postal Service, to propose a rule that would block states from sending ballots through the mail except to voters on lists provided by the state to the Postal Service. In effect, states would be blocked from allowing residents to vote by mail unless they provide their names to the federal government.

The proposed rule fulfills that directive, but it exempts overseas and military voters — a concession that wasn’t included in the executive order. Voting by citizens who are abroad and in the military is regulated by the federal Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. The law sets strict deadlines for states to send ballots.

The rule also doesn’t require states to submit voter lists for primary elections.

“Primary elections largely involve political parties selecting nominees through their chosen procedures, rather than direct election of federal officials, and thus implicate different considerations that bear on the necessity for these provisions,” the Postal Service said in a document outlining the proposed rule.

The Postal Service document emphasizes that states retain full control of who gets to vote by mail or alter the information. 

The proposed rule creates data reporting standards that “can provide information regarding the sending of ballots through the mails that would be available for use by law enforcement,” the document says.

The Postal Service plans to formally publish the rule on June 2.

Noncitizen voting

Trump and administration officials have framed the executive order as a way to combat noncitizen voting, which occurs very rarely. Trump has long attacked mail voting, though he has voted by mail multiple times.

“I think this will help a lot with elections,” Trump said when he signed the order.

But opponents of the executive order say it violates the U.S. Constitution, which gives states the responsibility of running elections and allows Congress to pass regulations. The order represents an attempt by Trump to unilaterally control elections, they say.

After a federal judge in Washington, D.C., declined to block the order, another federal judge in Massachusetts will hold a hearing on June 2 in a separate lawsuit challenging the directive brought by Democratic attorneys general.

“Widespread chaos and confusion is the goal of this executive order,” Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said in a statement.

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from moving forward with a fund that opponents fear will be used to pay off the president’s political allies.

Judge Leonie Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia issued a brief order halting the Department of Justice, the Treasury Department and other high-ranking administration officials from taking any additional actions to create the fund or make payments from it.

The order came in a lawsuit filed by a former federal prosecutor and a California professor. The plaintiffs are represented by the legal advocacy groups Democracy Forward and Common Cause. The lawsuit is part of a flurry of legal challenges against the fund.

The Justice Department on May 18 announced a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that will make payments to individuals who believe they have been wronged by past administrations. The fund came as part of a settlement agreement in a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump over the leaking of his tax return information by a former IRS contractor.

Trump’s settlement agreement provides for the creation of the fund overseen by a board of five members chosen by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney. Trump can fire the members for any reason.

Brinkema, a President Bill Clinton appointee, took no position on the legality of the fund in her order. She wrote that her order is to ensure no money is “irreversibly disbursed” while the plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order is pending.

She also set a hearing for June 12 — likely ensuring the fund will remain blocked for at least the next two weeks.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Andrew Floyd, a former federal Jan. 6 case prosecutor who was fired by the DOJ in June 2025, and Joseph Caravello, a California university professor who was charged with felony assault on a federal officer after protesting an immigration raid last summer. A jury acquitted Caravello in April.

The nine-count lawsuit alleges in part the fund violates the plaintiffs’ First and Fifth Amendment rights, and violates the authority of Congress.

“Since its inception, this fund has been on a collision course with the United States Constitution,” their complaint says.

Trump has written on social media that the fund will help those “who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration” receive justice.

Ashley Murray contributed to this report.

A federal judge on Thursday declined to block President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail, finding that it was too early to challenge the directive.

The decision by D.C. District Court Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, represents a setback for Democratic groups, lawmakers and other groups including the NAACP that have sued to stop the order ahead of the midterm elections in November. The March 31 order faces at least five lawsuits. 

The executive order directs the postmaster general, who leads the Postal Service, to propose a rule that would block states from sending ballots through the mail except to voters on lists provided by the state to the Postal Service. Under the order, the proposed rule is due this week.

The order also instructs the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of voting-age U.S. citizens in each state, with the help of the Social Security Administration. Democrats allege the Trump administration is building an unauthorized national voter list, despite the U.S. Constitution giving states the responsibility of running federal elections.

The Department of Justice had told the judge that the federal government hadn’t yet implemented the directive. The judge’s opinion, released just after midnight in Washington, D.C., makes clear that he could arrive at a different decision if the Trump administration moves forward with enforcing the order. 

“The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws,” Nichols wrote in a 26-page opinion. 

“Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur,” he wrote. “Until then, however, Plaintiffs cannot show that preliminary injunctive relief is warranted.”

Implications for midterms

Nichols’ decision is the first ruling in what is likely to be a protracted legal battle that could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Thursday’s opinion dealt only with whether the executive order should be blocked immediately — the underlying lawsuit to decide if the directive is unconstitutional and illegal will continue.

Whether Trump can successfully implement the order holds major consequences for the midterm elections. If the White House is able to block the Postal Service from sending or receiving mail ballots from voters not on state-provided lists, it could upend elections in states where voting by mail is the norm and disrupt procedures in others. 

About 30% of voters cast mail ballots in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Trump has framed the order as a needed measure to combat noncitizen voting, though it’s exceedingly rare. The directive marks the White House’s latest effort to assert authority over elections as the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show documents proving their citizenship, stalls in the U.S. Senate.

Democrats and voting rights advocates argue the executive order is unconstitutional. Under the U.S. Constitution, states administer elections and Congress has the power to pass regulations on them, but the president has no power to act unilaterally.  

Postal Service targeted

The battle over the executive order also carries ramifications for the future of the Postal Service. While the president used to appoint the postmaster general, since 1970 the Postal Service has operated as an independent corporation — a change intended to shield mail delivery from politics.

Postal law experts say that if Trump is able to enforce an order against the postmaster general, who now is appointed by a Postal Service Board of Governors, it will shatter the agency’s independence. 

“Today’s ruling is a decisive victory for the rule of law and deals a blow against the Democrat strategy of suing first and finding legal arguments later. The Trump Administration will continue fighting for the safety and security of American elections,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.

The Democratic groups suing over the order, including the Democratic National Committee, in a joint statement expressed confidence they would eventually prevail. They said the decision doesn’t change the principle that the executive branch cannot infringe on Americans’ voting rights.

The Democratic groups suing over the order, including the Democratic National Committee, in a joint statement expressed confidence they would eventually prevail. They said the decision doesn’t change the principle that the executive branch cannot infringe on Americans’ voting rights.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and one of the plaintiffs, in a statement called mail voting safe and secure. He emphasized that presidents don’t get to rewrite election law “by decree.”

“Trump’s strategy is simple: if he can’t win voters, he’ll silence them — and now a MAGA judge is enabling him,” Schumer said.

A group of Republican state attorneys general has also intervened in the case to defend the order. They argue that Trump has authority to gather and organize information within the executive branch. They say Trump can direct the Postal Service to propose rules.

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, who is leading the Republican legal effort, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Nichols’ decision.

Opponents look to Massachusetts

With Nichols’ decision, a federal judge in Massachusetts offers opponents their next opportunity to quickly halt the directive. 

Massachusetts District Court Judge Indira Talwani, appointed by President Barack Obama, will hold a hearing on Tuesday in a legal challenge brought by Democratic state attorneys general, led by California, along with the League of Women Voters and other civic groups.

Some legal analysts anticipate states may have an easier time challenging the order because its requirements, such as requiring states to submit lists of voters to send ballots through the mail, directly affect them. David Becker, director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, wrote on social media that the states have “much stronger standing claims” heading into the hearing.

After federal agencies begin acting on the order, the challenge in Massachusetts “will be the case to watch,” he wrote.

‘Maximum amount of confusion’

At a mid-May hearing before Nichols, lawyers for the Democratic National Committee, Democratic leaders Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and other interest groups had argued that, with the midterm elections less than six months away, there was no time to see how the Trump administration executes the order.

The proposal would result in a “maximum amount of confusion” and be a “nightmare for election officials,” Danielle Lang, who argued on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told Nichols. “Waiting will only erode public confidence in elections.”

At the time, Nichols warned Justice Department lawyers to notify him of “anything even approaching a material change” on implementing the order.

Justice Department senior trial counsel Stephen Pezzi told Nichols the plaintiffs have a right to “prepare for the darkest fears,” but, he argued, they can’t win a preliminary injunction based on speculation about error-prone citizenship lists and a postal rule not yet created.

Ultimately, Nichols agreed.

“In any event, given that the Executive Order does not command Plaintiffs to do anything, and that no agency has yet acted pursuant to the Order in a way that could harm Plaintiffs,” Nichols wrote, “they have not suffered any harm at present, much less harm that is ‘certain,’ ‘great,’ and imminent.”

The Trump administration wants the U.S. Supreme Court to empower states to review their voter rolls for noncitizens just days before elections, a change that voting rights advocates say would risk disenfranchising Americans.

The U.S. Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to wade into a legal fight between the Republican National Committee and a host of Democratic and voting rights groups over a series of voting restrictions in Arizona.

If the court takes the case, it could lead to a significant decision granting states greater leeway to purge alleged noncitizen voters close to elections and mandate that voters prove their citizenship — a key aim of the SAVE America Act, President Donald Trump’s signature elections legislation that’s stalled in Congress.

The high court’s decision could arrive prior to the 2028 presidential election.

Voting in Arizona

Arizona requires individuals to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, to vote in state elections. Residents who don’t offer documentation can still use a federal form to register, but can only vote in federal elections. 

Election officials must run the names of federal-only voters through a U.S. Department of Homeland Security computer program that can identify possible noncitizens.

The Justice Department argues that the Supreme Court should affirm the Arizona law and find that it doesn’t violate the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 federal law that sets rules for how voters are registered and when states can remove them from their rolls. The NVRA imposes strict limits on canceling registrations in the 90 days before a federal election.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals previously ruled that Arizona’s law violates the NVRA.

“But that decision eliminates the flexibility the Act promises to States when enforcing their voter qualifications,” the Justice Department says in its brief.

While the Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to take the case, the underlying petition was filed by the Republican National Committee. Its chairman, Joe Gruters, in a statement said it was “unacceptable” that the RNC was still having to defend the Arizona law.

“Federal law is clear: only U.S. citizens have the right to vote in American elections,” Gruters said.

Appeals court ruling 

Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting rights group that’s opposing the RNC in court, said in a statement the Justice Department’s brief shows “MAGA Republicans and their friends in the Trump Administration are once again trying to disenfranchise Latino voters in Arizona.”

Opponents of Arizona’s law argue the 9th Circuit decision was correct. The state law, they say, goes well beyond what’s allowed under the NVRA. Election officials may remove individual voters in certain circumstances in the run-up to an election but the law prohibits sweeping purges.

“States cannot circumvent the limits on systematic removals that Congress — exercising its express constitutional authority to regulate federal elections — put in place to ensure that eligible voters have adequate time to correct erroneous removal procedures, thereby protecting Americans’ fundamental right to vote,” the Democratic National Committee and the Arizona Democratic Party argued in a brief filed Tuesday.

Democrats and voting rights groups warn about expanding use of Homeland Security’s SAVE system, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, that’s mandated under Arizona law. 

Initially a program used by states to check whether individual noncitizens were eligible for government benefits, the Trump administration has overhauled it into a tool that can verify citizenship by checking information in federal databases. 

SAVE can now check millions of names simultaneously. Many Republican states have begun uploading their voter rolls into SAVE to search for potential noncitizens. 

Critics of the program say SAVE has falsely flagged U.S. citizens, a problem that could be exacerbated if the Supreme Court allows its widespread use in the weeks before an election. Last-minute misidentifications could leave little time for voters to prove their citizenship.

Justin Levitt, who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said in an interview that the 90-day period serves as a “pencils down” time to minimize the possibility of errors just before elections.

“Anytime you’re matching one giant list to another giant list, you’re going to have mistakes,” Levitt said. “If you execute this systemic list maintenance two days before the election, those mistakes are going to keep eligible voters from voting.”

Voter purges

At a U.S. House hearing on the NVRA in December, Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, pointed to several voter purges, including a 2024 effort in Virginia, to highlight the dangers of last-minute removals. 

That August, Virginia’s Republican governor at the time, Glenn Youngkin, ordered election officials to scrub the state’s voter list for noncitizens. More than 1,600 voter registrations were canceled, with citizens swept up in the purge. The Supreme Court in October 2024 declined to overturn the purge.

“There is no dispute that states and localities must keep their voter rolls accurate and up to date,” Lakin wrote in her opening statement. “But the integrity of our elections is not threatened by the phantom menace of widespread noncitizen voting — it is threatened by aggressive purge practices that wrongfully strike legitimate voters from the rolls and by unnecessary barriers to registration that prevent eligible Americans from getting on those rolls in the first place.

Noncitizen voting

The specter of noncitizen voting has been a central focus of Trump’s second term, despite studies showing it’s an extremely rare occurrence. One study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

Utah recently announced that a review of its 2 million registered voters identified just 27 confirmed noncitizens and an additional 25 “probable” noncitizens — a miniscule percentage of voters.

The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia in a so-far unsuccessful effort to force them to hand over private voter data so the information can be run through the SAVE system to search for noncitizens. In late March, Trump signed an executive order to restrict the transmission of ballots through the mail, though several lawsuits have been filed against it.

Trump also continues to demand that senators pass the SAVE America Act, even though it has stalled in the U.S. Senate. While the legislation would set a national proof of citizenship rule, some states have enacted or are weighing their own requirements. 

Republican attorneys general

Five states — Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, New Hampshire and South Dakota — ask for proof of citizenship when voters register for the first time, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. One state, Wyoming, also requires proof when voters update their registration.

But Arizona was the only state before 2025 to maintain two separate voter rolls to enforce its proof of citizenship rules, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The distinction helps explain why the Arizona case is now poised for consideration by the Supreme Court.

A host of Republican state attorneys general, led by Kansas’ Kris Kobach, have filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to take the Arizona case. They say the 9th Circuit gutted Arizona’s “common-sense measures” to protect its elections.

“This case presents yet another assault on State efforts to promote election security,” the states’ brief says.

In addition to Kansas, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia signed on to the brief.

The Supreme Court has sent conflicting signals about proof of citizenship laws in the past. In August 2024, the court issued an unsigned order on its “shadow docket” allowing Arizona to enforce its proof of citizenship requirements for the 2024 election. 

But four years earlier, the justices declined to take a case over a Kansas proof of citizenship law. That left in place an appeals court decision blocking the law, which remains unenforceable.

The Arizona case would offer the Supreme Court a way to provide a more definitive opinion. If the justices decide soon to take it, they would likely hold oral arguments in the fall and potentially issue a decision next spring, more than a year before the 2028 presidential election.

The Justice Department’s brief says the case “offers an opportunity to resolve these important election-law issues outside the setting of a contested election.”

The Congressional Black Caucus on Tuesday urged American corporations to condemn efforts to dilute Black voting strength, as Southern states eliminate congressional districts where most residents are Black.

The CBC’s attempt to mobilize the business community comes as Black representation in Congress potentially faces its most severe threat since the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War. But some business leaders have taken a friendlier tone with President Donald Trump, who backs the gerrymandering.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision in April, in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, sharply weakened the federal Voting Rights Act, which had blocked states from breaking apart majority-minority districts. It limited the use of race in redistricting, prompting several Southern states to advance new maps targeting these districts, which are mostly held by Black Democrats.

“These actions are not routine political exercises,” the letter reads. “They are coordinated efforts to silence Black voices at the ballot box and strip communities of representation in American democracy.”

The message is addressed to more than 200 corporations and business groups that signed on to a 2021 letter in support of voting rights, as well as an unnamed number of other corporate leaders. Among the signatories were Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Nike, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Target, Tesla and Unilever USA. 

That letter called on Congress to update the Voting Rights Act, including changes that would restore the federal government’s ability to review changes to election and voting laws in states and local governments with a history of discrimination, a practice called preclearance that the Supreme Court effectively halted in 2013.

On Tuesday, the CBC said those companies should issue individual or joint public statements opposing efforts to dilute Black voting strength and dismantle protections in the Voting Rights Act.

The lawmakers also want companies to report on corporate political spending and relationships connected to attacks on voting rights and “discriminatory redistricting schemes.” Companies should accept an invitation to participate in a national gathering alongside civil rights leaders and advocates to discuss voting rights and Black political power, the lawmakers wrote.

The letter asks businesses to respond by June 9.

“Five years ago, corporations across America publicly affirmed that democracy, racial equity, and voting rights matter. Today, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, those commitments are being tested in real time,” Rep. Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat who chairs the CBC, said in a statement. 

“Corporations that have profited from Black consumers, relied on Black workers, and benefited from Black communities cannot remain silent while Black political representation is dismantled in plain sight,” Clarke said. “Silence in this moment is not neutrality — it is complicity.”

Corporate leaders warm to Trump

But political attitudes in parts of corporate America, especially among tech firms, have shifted since 2021.

When businesses signed the July 2021 letter, they were acting after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, and the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters. Six years later, some titans of American business have taken a more conciliatory approach to Trump and the Make America Great Again movement.

Elon Musk, who leads Tesla, spearheaded the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE, initiative in 2025 that resulted in the firings and layoffs of thousands of federal workers. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has spoken positively about the president. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, called Trump “more mature” in his second term.

Trump has also led a push against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. In March, the president signed an executive order targeting DEI practices by federal contractors. The directive followed another anti-DEI order in January 2025 that encouraged the private sector to “end illegal DEI discrimination and preferences.”

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais, some Republicans have portrayed eliminating majority-minority districts as a constitutional imperative. The current districts should be tossed because they were drawn with their racial makeup in mind, they say.

“I don’t think race should be used to help a person because of his race, and I don’t think race should be used to harm a person because of his or her race,” Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiania Republican, said at a Senate hearing on racial gerrymandering last week.

Rapid remaps

Since the release of the Callais decision on April 29, Florida and Tennessee have changed their maps and Louisiana is expected to follow soon. South Carolina lawmakers tried but failed to advance a new map and Alabama has taken steps to implement a 2023 gerrymander after the Supreme Court lifted a lower court order that had blocked it.

A panel of three federal judges on Tuesday issued a new order halting the Alabama map, which would likely force out one of the state’s two Black Democratic members of Congress if enacted. The judges found that the map was racially discriminatory, even in light of Callais. 

Alabama has appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

“I applaud the three-judge panel for upholding the rule of law and reaffirming that racial discrimination has no place in our redistricting process,” Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat who also signed Tuesday’s CBC letter, said in a statement.

“While we know that this legal battle is far from over, today’s ruling sends a clear message: Black voters in Alabama cannot and will not be silenced.”

KANSAS CITY, Missouri — When Vice President JD Vance pitched voters on electing Republicans to Congress this November during a trip to a Kansas City manufacturing plant on Monday, he delivered the message while standing in a newly gerrymandered U.S. House district.

“If you want congressional leadership that fights to lower your taxes, that fights to put more money in your pockets and fights to protect your jobs, the only game in town is Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans,” Vance said.

But the Trump brand is hurting — placing Republicans’ miniscule U.S. House majority at high risk, despite a GOP rush to redistricting in Southern states this spring following a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision and earlier gerrymandering.

Public polling shows most voters are dissatisfied with President Donald Trump’s job performance and historically, the party not in the White House wins seats in the midterms.

The GOP gerrymandering could offset some losses, analysts say. But whether voter displeasure with the president translates into enough Democratic gains to retake the House and usurp the GOP trifecta in Washington also remains to be seen, five months out.

Vance’s visit to Democratic-leaning Kansas City underscored the extraordinary effort Republicans have undertaken to give the party a chance at retaining control of the House in the midterm elections. The GOP now holds 217 seats to 212 for Democrats, with one independent and five vacancies.

GOP states, including Missouri, have engaged in a blitz of gerrymandering over the past nine months, dividing areas like Kansas City in hopes of securing additional seats as the party faces political headwinds ahead of November. 

Without the redistricting war that Trump triggered last year, Republicans could lose no more than three House seats and keep their majority. Redrawn lines push that number up slightly, in the eight-to-10 range, Erin Covey, an editor who specializes in U.S. House races for the elections forecaster Cook Political Report, said in an interview.

“That is still not going to be enough to protect (Republicans) from a difficult national environment,” Covey, who specializes in House races, said.

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said redistricting may be more beneficial to Republicans in the long term than in the 2026 election.

“Because of the economic problems that the country is confronting, and the fact that a lot of that blame is going to be at the doorstep of the White House, it’s going to be a challenge for Republicans,” he said. “Republicans are playing the long game, and it’ll eventually pay off, but it’s going to be a tough ride this cycle.”

The case for Democrats

The president’s party has gained House seats in a midterm cycle only three times in the last century. Twice, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and at the height of the Great Depression, history-shaping events explained the exception.

Not only is there no comparable event this year, but the political environment strongly favors Democrats.

A Quinnipiac University poll published Wednesday showed 50% of voters preferred Democrats won control of the House, while only 39% preferred Republicans.

The same survey showed Trump’s approval rating at a second-term low, 34% approval with 58% disapproving. On economic issues, as the price of gas has skyrocketed during the war with Iran, nearly twice as many voters disapproved of Trump’s handling than approved.

Other polls show similar attitudes. Both the preference for Democratic House control and disapproval of Trump have risen steadily.

“Midterms are typically a referendum on the party in power,” Covey said. “So the fact that Trump’s approval rating has been under 40% for the past several weeks, and it has obviously been made worse by the war in Iran, is going to be a really significant issue for Republicans.”

Redistricting might cap Democrats’ best-case scenario, but it doesn’t change the underlying conditions, Democratic campaign strategist Tom Bowen said in a Tuesday interview.

“It’s going to change some outcomes for sure,” said Bowen. “But the environment is what shapes these races more than anything else. Voters aren’t going to vote on redistricting. What they’re going to vote on is high gas prices, and that’s going to make seats where Trump did well… it’s gonna put some of those seats in play.”

Republicans in the Trump era have also struggled to get their voters to the polls when Trump himself is not on the ballot. 

“Your base is depressed,” Bowen said of Republicans. “Sure, you theoretically drew yourself, you know, 10 points of margin. It doesn’t matter if the environment is that terrible.”

US House redistricting arms race

Republicans did have a plan to prop up their House majority.

At Trump’s urging last year, a handful of Republican states redrew their congressional lines, beginning with Texas. Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio followed. States traditionally enact new maps once a decade following the census, but that norm has now been shattered.

Democrats responded with a California gerrymander approved by voters. In Virginia, voters also approved new lines but the election was invalidated in May by the Virginia Supreme Court.

California and Virginia are the only Democratic-controlled states to have advanced the new maps. In conservative Utah, state courts have forced adoption of a new map that could allow a Democrat to win a race to represent the Salt Lake area.

Democrats are actively weighing action in Colorado, Maryland, New York and other states, but their ability to act this year is restricted by state limits on gerrymandering and other procedural barriers.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on April 29 in Louisiana vs. Callais then set off a new round of Republican-led gerrymandering. In a 6-3 decision, the court’s conservative majority sharply weakened the federal Voting Rights Act, which had protected districts where a majority of residents belonged to a racial minority group.

The Callais decision only explicitly struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, which contained a second majority-Black district that the conservative justices found unnecessary. 

But GOP-controlled states in the South interpreted the decision as a green light to eliminate majority-Black districts, often centered on major cities, that reliably elect Democrats.

Florida lawmakers passed a new map within hours of the Supreme Court decision. Alabama and Tennessee advanced gerrymanders, with Louisiana expected to follow soon. South Carolina lawmakers are also advancing a new map.

Federal and state court lawsuits have been filed against the maps, leaving open the question of whether judges could eventually block some of the gerrymanders. But opponents of Republican gerrymanders have not fared well in their legal challenges up to this point.

The U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for Southern states to act quickly to redraw maps, including lifting a lower court order that had stopped an Alabama gerrymander from taking effect. The justices also sped up paperwork to allow Louisiana lawmakers to move forward on developing a new map.

At the state level, the Missouri Supreme Court last week refused to block a gerrymander of the Kansas City region. Opponents had wanted the court to halt the map until state officials decide enough signatures have been gathered to force a statewide vote over the redrawn lines.

The dust is still settling on redistricting this year, but it so far has given Republicans a moderate edge.

The case for Republicans

While it would take a historical anomaly for Republicans to keep their House majority, the party’s campaign apparatus argues that some variables are in its favor. 

Notably, the GOP holds an edge in fundraising and a map with few Republicans running for reelection in districts Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won in 2024.

“House Republicans are on offense and well-positioned to defy history thanks to strong candidates, a historic fundraising advantage, and a message that’s connecting with voters in battleground districts across the country,” Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, wrote in a statement. 

“While Democrats remain bogged down by messy primaries, a weak national brand, and a shrinking battlefield, Republicans are building the infrastructure and momentum needed to grow the majority in November.”

Even without redistricting, the 2026 House map favored Republicans: Sixteen Democrats won 2024 races in districts Trump carried, and only three Republicans came from districts that voted for Harris.

Those so-called crossover districts provide a starting point for the number of competitive districts, which continue to shrink as the country becomes more polarized and lawmakers draw U.S. House districts to favor incumbents.

Chris Pack, a Republican campaign strategist, said the situation was reversed in Trump’s first-term midterms, when Democrats gained 40 seats.

“I don’t think it’s fair to compare this (year) to 2018,” he said. That year, 23 Republicans represented districts that Democratic presidential nominee Hilary Clinton won. “Now, it’s three.”

In fundraising, the two House campaign committees, the NRCC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, have raised similar amounts this cycle and have roughly equivalent cash on hand.

But the Republican National Committee’s cash on hand dwarfs the Democratic National Committee’s, $117 million to $14 million, according to Federal Elections Commission records filed April 30.

The president’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., has also raised more than $300 million this cycle, which it could spend on congressional races.

Pack also said the party could compete, despite the environment, by emphasizing Democratic positions outside the mainstream.

“It’s just really reminding voters that, again, Democrats are far more out of touch with everyday Americans than Republicans are,” he said.

Analysts maintain it is still the GOP at a disadvantage.

“Republicans do have a path — more of a path, certainly, than they did before the Virginia and U.S. Supreme Court decisions,” Covey said. “But they’re still the underdogs.”