President Donald Trump is again demanding Congress pass a sweeping set of voting restrictions and refuses to rule out sending troops to the polls, as Democrats and voting rights groups assemble a sprawling effort to guard against federal election interference.

The fight over election security is intensifying in Washington, D.C., as the White House and its allies seek to rewrite rules around voter registration and mail-in ballots ahead of the November midterm elections. The stakes of the contests are massive — control of Congress and the future of Trump’s legislative agenda.

Trump wants lawmakers to attach the SAVE America Act to unrelated housing and surveillance legislation after it stalled in the U.S. Senate. The SAVE bill would require individuals to show documents, such as a passport or birth certificate, proving their citizenship to register to vote. It would also mandate voters show photo ID to cast a ballot.

“Voter I.D., and Proof of Citizenship, must be approved, NOW,” Trump wrote Saturday on Truth Social, his social media platform. On Wednesday, he took to social media again to call for the firing of the Senate parliamentarian and suggested she’s an impediment to passage of the bill.

“We need THE SAVE AMERICA ACT passed, and NOW,” Trump wrote.

Democrats and voting rights advocates say the measure would cause chaos if passed this close to the election. They warn it would disenfranchise voters and create additional obstacles to voting for married women and others who have changed their names.

Vote possible soon

The Senate may hold another vote as early as this week on adding the SAVE America Act to a budget reconciliation bill. Senators rejected a prior effort to advance the legislation in a 48-50 vote in April, but  Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, has vowed to try again. 

The SAVE America Act is popular among Republicans in the U.S. House, which passed the bill in February. But a handful of Senate Republicans have joined Democrats in opposing the proposal, which doesn’t have enough support to overcome a filibuster.

“It is voter suppression with a suit and tie,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said Tuesday in a speech at a progressive conference.

Some House Republicans have kept up pressure on the Senate to act. During a House Administration Subcommittee on Elections hearing Wednesday, Rep. Mary Miller, an Illinois Republican, called for the passage of the bill multiple times.

“American citizens deserve secure elections and to know that their votes are guaranteed,” Miller said.

Thune blames Democrats

Senators spent several weeks this spring debating the legislation before moving on to other business. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, on Monday said the chamber held a “robust debate” but indicated senators were unlikely to return to the legislation.

Speaking about the bill in the past tense, Thune cast the measure as a political cudgel that Republicans would use against Democrats in November.

“Democrats are on the record against all of it,” Thune said on the Senate floor. “And we’ll be sure the American people know that Democrats are blocking commonsense policies that have broad support from the American people.”

Democrats, fearing that Trump may try to assert unilateral control over elections regardless of whether the legislation advances, have begun outlining how they plan to combat any attempted election takeover. 

Schumer on Tuesday said Senate Democrats are launching an election protection task force. The group, which will include 11 senators and election experts, will be prepared to mount “lawsuit after lawsuit” throughout the election process.

“Let me be very clear: local officials run elections. Voters decide elections. Donald Trump does not,” Schumer said.

Troops at polling places

In describing their concerns, Schumer and others point to Trump’s refusal earlier this month to close the door on deploying troops to polling places. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also recently dismissed the possibility as a “gotcha hypothetical” without actually ruling it out. 

Federal law prohibits federal troops and agents at election sites in nearly all circumstances.

“I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” Trump told reporters when asked about sending troops of immigration agents to the polls.

Trump’s critics also emphasize his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and his continuing portrayal of the contest as stolen. He has pardoned rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, disrupting Congress’ certification of the election. 

On Monday, the Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who say they were victims of past administrations.

“This is pure fraud and highway robbery,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said in a statement.

Executive orders

Preparations for possible interference in the midterms come amid a series of steps by the Trump administration over the past year aimed at giving the White House greater authority over elections — though the U.S. Constitution says they are administered by the states.

Trump signed an executive order last year that sought to mandate proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, but the measure was blocked in court. He signed another order in March restricting the sending of ballots through the mail; a federal judge is expected to rule soon on a request to halt its enforcement.

Trump this week attacked Maryland officials over a mistake that caused voters to receive incorrect mail-in ballots for the state’s June primary. Maryland election officials have faulted a vendor for the error and are resending the ballots, but the president has called for a Justice Department investigation.

“You want to have proof of citizenship, you want to have voter ID, you want to have all these things. But to me, maybe the worst of all is the mail-in ballots,” Trump told reporters on Monday.

DOJ battles states

For months, the Department of Justice has demanded states turn over sensitive personal data on voters, such as driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers and dates of birth. 

It has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the information, which it plans to run through a computer program called SAVE at the Department of Homeland Security to identify possible noncitizens.

Federal judges have so far ruled against the Justice Department. Several voting rights groups have also sued to block the DOJ effort, alleging the Trump administration wants to build an illegal national voter database.

Anthony Nel, a Texas resident and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement that his voter registration was canceled a month after SAVE wrongly identified him as a possible noncitizen.

“The DOJ should not be building a national database out of our most sensitive, personal information when it can’t even get this right,” Nel said.

WASHINGTON — About 100 rallygoers gathered on Capitol Hill Wednesday to hear from activists and members of Congress protesting the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down federal protections for the voting power of minorities.

The justices diluted a major part of the Voting Rights Act in their 6-3 decision on April 29 that declared Louisiana’s congressional map that created a second majority Black district an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.”

Kentravius Coleman, 27, of Alexandria, Louisiana, at a United for Democracy rally on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, May 20, 2026. (Video by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom) 

Speaking to the crowd Wednesday, Louisiana native and resident Kentravius Coleman said “we are not a powerless people.”

“Black people in Louisiana may feel defeated because on a random Wednesday we learned we’d have less reflective representation,” said Coleman, 27, who works as an administrative coordinator at the progressive organization United for Democracy, which hosted the rally.

“We need to demand accountability from all three branches of government. As the nation watches Louisiana, we need to focus on the aspect that there is no more business as usual,” Coleman, who lives in the state’s central city of Alexandria, added.

State legislatures across the South quickly began work to draw new congressional districts following the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said voters are “angry.”

“When you see respected, leading Black members of Congress who win, and have enjoyed the respect of their states, redistricted out of their office by political manipulation, that gets you mad,” Whitehouse said.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., at a rallly on Wednesday, May 20, 2026. (Video by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

“Whatever they may gain in redistricting mischief, let’s make sure that they lose where they can’t redistrict, like in Senate races … and governor’s races,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Analilia Mejia, D-N.J., said the country is at a “crossroads” and urged rallygoers to remember Civil Rights Movement leaders.

“Let’s be good ancestors for those who will come later, who will say in a moment in which a despotic authoritarian and his cowardly lackeys attempted to revert to, frankly, pre-Civil War or Jim Crow-era level of politics, that we stood up and we stood strong and we said, ‘Oh hell no,’” said Mejia.

Republicans on a U.S. Senate panel suggested Tuesday a recent Supreme Court decision weakening the federal Voting Rights Act invalidated U.S. House districts in Democratic states where most residents belong to a racial minority group. 

Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, signaled that Republicans will target majority-minority districts in blue states as they seek to maximize their opportunities to reshape the political map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. GOP-controlled Southern states are already rushing forward gerrymanders.

Schmitt urged the Department of Justice to crack down on states with maps drawn to protect majority-minority districts. A top DOJ official has suggested the agency supports scrutinizing the districts. The demand seems to extend the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision that limited states from using race to draw districts.

“These maps do not become constitutional because they’re already in use,” Schmitt said. “They do not survive because politicians call them voting rights maps. Yet, they will not disappear on their own. The Department of Justice has an obligation to act.”

The court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision gave states the OK to eliminate districts where most residents belong to racial minority groups in the pursuit of a partisan advantage. Alabama, Florida and Tennessee have advanced new maps, and Louisiana is expected to follow soon. South Carolina is debating its own gerrymander.

The new district lines, along with gerrymanders enacted before the Callais decision, could ultimately provide Republicans with a net gain of upwards of 10 seats.

The seats could prove critical as Republicans face political headwinds approaching the midterm elections amid sagging approval numbers for President Donald Trump. A successful legal campaign that forces Democratic states to break apart majority-minority districts could create additional competitive House races.

Breaking up Democratic districts

About one-third of all House districts drawn following the 2020 census were majority-minority, according to a Ballotpedia analysis — 148 in all. Democrats held 122 as of 2024. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote on social media on April 30 that the department continues to prioritize equal protection under the law, including in voting. Dhillon’s post came in response to a letter Schmitt sent to DOJ raising similar points to what he said on Tuesday.

“Senator — we are ON IT!” Dhillon wrote.

Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat and the subcommittee’s ranking member, said the Supreme Court’s decision leaves many communities of color with few enforceable tools to fight unfair maps. He called on the Senate to act by passing a federal ban on mid-decade redistricting and partisan gerrymandering.

“Our democracy depends ultimately on protecting and preserving the right of individual citizens to pick their politicians, not intensifying the control that politicians have about who the voters are that they will permit to be involved in the election,” Welch said.

‘The definition of racism’

Some Republicans have begun to cast majority-minority districts as racist. The loaded rhetoric suggests eliminating these districts is not just politically useful but also a legal and moral imperative.

Missouri, where Republicans hold six of the state’s eight congressional districts, exemplifies the new reality under Callais. The Republican-controlled General Assembly approved a map in September that divides Kansas City in a bid to oust Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat who has long represented the city core. 

State lawmakers left in place a St. Louis-area district held by Democratic Rep. Wesley Bell where fewer than half of residents are white. But some Missouri Republicans have called the district a racial gerrymander and want the General Assembly to split it apart, too.

“That’s the definition of racism, is drawing districts based on the color of one’s skin,” Missouri Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins told reporters last week. “We don’t want that in Missouri.”

The Supreme Court in the Callais decision did not formally strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race and other characteristics. In practice, however, it may be effectively impossible for gerrymandering opponents to prove discrimination, voting rights experts say.

“It begs the question whether or not lawmakers will have to say, ‘not only do I not like Black voters, but this is the reason why I’m drawing up this piece of legislation,’” Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO of the nonpartisan voting rights group Fair Elections Center, said in an interview with States Newsroom days after the release of the Supreme Court opinion.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court cleared away a court order that had blocked Alabama from implementing a map passed by state lawmakers in 2023 that could hand Republicans another seat. A lower court had found the map violated Section 2.

In Louisiana, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the state’s ongoing congressional primary election in anticipation of a new map that will likely eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts. The Supreme Court fast-tracked paperwork in its Callais decision to clear the way for state lawmakers to act quickly.

Obligation to act

During Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the Article III Project, a conservative legal group, said all states with maps drawn to protect minority representation have a “clear duty” to redraw them using race-neutral criteria. 

The calendar should be no obstacle, he argued, saying state legislatures can be called into special session and primary elections delayed until new maps are in place.

“The fact that we are well into the 2026 election cycle provides no blanket exemption from these constitutional obligations,” Chamberlain said.

Callais has unleashed chaos and already undercut fair representation for Black voters, Todd Cox, associate director-counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, told the subcommittee. But he argued the decision doesn’t call into question the constitutionality of majority-minority districts or other districts that give voters of color an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

Cox cautioned against using Callais to justify targeting majority-minority districts that provide that opportunity, saying it might indicate that states intentionally discriminated against minority voters.

As the long tail of the 2020 presidential election continues to reverberate through Wisconsin politics, a bipartisan pair of former elected officials sought to deliver a message of trust Tuesday in how the state counts votes and runs elections.

Meanwhile, the official Republican nominee for governor, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, has been ramping up his campaign refusing to admit President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, including in Wisconsin.

Former Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett appeared at Viterbo University in La Crosse Tuesday as representatives of the Democracy Defense Project, a bipartisan multi-state initiative to build trust in the country’s election systems. 

“The 2020 election has been litigated and relitigated and relitigated over and over again, and nothing has changed,” Barrett said. 

A day earlier, fresh off winning the GOP endorsement at the party’s weekend convention, Tiffany was asked at a campaign stop in Elm Grove Monday if Biden won the 2020 election. He replied that “the problem with the 2020 election was the improprieties that happened.” 

It was one of multiple appearances in which Tiffany declined to directly engage the outcome of the 2020 race.

Trump’s endorsement of Tiffany earlier this year helped clear out the Republican primary field for the three-term congressman. 

Tiffany was also one of the Wisconsin congressional delegation’s most ardent election deniers following Trump’s 2020 loss — which was affirmed by several reviews, recounts, investigations, audits and lawsuits in the years since. 

On Jan. 6, 2021, Tiffany voted against certifying election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania and told reporters at the time that he would have voted to not accept Wisconsin’s results as well. He also supported a lawsuit from the state of Texas that sought to overturn the election results of Wisconsin and three other states. 

The effort from right-wing congressional Republicans to reject the electoral votes for Biden from swing states was one of the mechanisms that led directly to the attack on the U.S. Capitol that day. 

In the days following the Jan. 6 attack, Tiffany appeared at a closed door rally with other right-wing figures who called for “war.” 

Tiffany’s comments come as the Trump administration has increased its effort to use the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to relitigate the 2020 election. Swing states across the country have seen increased scrutiny surrounding previously debunked 2020 allegations and in recent weeks the FBI has begun digging into Wisconsin’s election administration — including questioning Milwaukee election workers. 

On Monday, Tiffany supported the FBI’s work. 

“Whatever they’re searching for, the investigation should be allowed to continue and let’s find out what happened there,” Tiffany told reporters. “If there’s improprieties that happened then there should be charges filed. If not, then you let the investigation cease.”

In La Crosse on Tuesday, Van Hollen and Barrett both lamented the FBI sticking its nose into an issue that’s already been closed. Barrett called the investigation a “fishing expedition” while Van Hollen criticized the waste of FBI time. 

“There are a lot of better uses for our FBI resources right now, so I don’t think that that is a great use of our resources,” Van Hollen said. 

The former attorney general also said the agency’s investigation didn’t concern him. 

“I don’t think the FBI is going to turn out and fabricate something, and if they, for some reason, uncovered something that we hadn’t known in the past, by all means, we want to make sure to enforce our laws as well, to make sure that people have confidence in our election system,” Van Hollen said. “So, is it something that I think is necessary? No. Do I think we should be concerned? Not necessarily.”

The Democracy Defense Project continues previous work done by state and local election officials across Wisconsin who have sought to respond to election conspiracy theories with basic facts about the state’s election system. 

During their visit to La Crosse, Barrett and Van Hollen highlighted Wisconsin’s decentralized election system in which local clerks across the state do the brunt of the work to administer the state’s elections and noted that those local officials are broadly trusted by their communities. 

“The general public believes very strongly in the folks in this room and other people who are running their local elections,” Van Hollen said, citing polling data from the project. “They believe you’re doing a good job, they recognize that you’re doing a nonpartisan job, a very important job.”

Polling shows that a majority of voters “have great respect for the people who are working the polls at a local level — yet they don’t necessarily have a belief that we have election integrity, which seems to me to be a bit of an oxymoron,” Van Hollen added. 

Lack of information is a primary culprit, he said. 

Many people are “just not informed as to the way our elections are run, and when we have so much misinformation out there,” Van Hollen said.

While calling it a problem involving Democrats as well as Republicans, he acknowledged Republicans have been a bigger contributor to the problem. 

“It comes from both political parties of late, certainly a lot more from my party,” Van Hollen said, “which has probably given rise to everybody’s desire to finally step forward and try to inform the public a little more.”

The federal government’s probe into the 2020 election has reached Wisconsin, with several current and former election officials, including multiple people in Milwaukee, confirming they have been interviewed or approached by the FBI.

The exact nature of the investigation remains unclear, though it appears to be at least somewhat centered around the 2020 election. The agency’s election investigations elsewhere in the country have featured subpoenas for ballots and other election records, but legal experts still say it won’t be easy for the federal government to convince a court to give it access to ballots.

Milwaukee County officials are nonetheless preparing for that possibility, in part because they still retain ballots from the 2020 election, though they declined to discuss those preparations or comment on the record. Those ballots contain identifying information that could, in some cases, allow otherwise unidentifiable absentee ballots to be matched to the voters who cast them. Milwaukee is one of the few jurisdictions in Wisconsin that still has ballots from that election, and the city has long been a target of voter fraud accusations and related attacks from the political right.

Elsewhere in Wisconsin — in communities whose elections have faced less scrutiny and in the vast majority of municipalities where 2020 ballots were destroyed according to the standard retention schedules in state law — election officials are less alarmed and are instead focused on preparing for the midterm elections.

Still, news of the FBI interest has created confusion and some fear on the part of voters and election officials.

What happened?

So far, the FBI has contacted multiple current and former election officials in Wisconsin.

The FBI interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission deputy administrator Robert Kehoe within the last few weeks. The news of the interview was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The interview focused on the 2020 election, with agents asking Kehoe to explain how Wisconsin elections operate.

The agency has also attempted to contact Milwaukee County Election Director Michelle Hawley. An agent left a business card at Hawley’s home when she was not there. Milwaukee County Clerk George Christensen criticized the agency for approaching Hawley at her home rather than through the county.

“While we cooperate with all legitimate law enforcement actions, we will defend against any attack on our democracy and will defend the rights of voters of Milwaukee County,” Christensen said in a statement.

Agents also left a card for, called and texted a former Milwaukee election official, who confirmed the contact to Votebeat but requested anonymity because of personal safety concerns. That official declined to say whether they responded to the FBI.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson confirmed the FBI has reached out to city employees about the probe.

“The president for whatever reason cannot seem to let it go that he lost an election,” Johnson told a WISN 12 reporter.

Wisconsin Elections Commission spokeswoman Emilee Miklas declined to comment for this story. Other officials declined to speak on the record, and an FBI spokesperson didn’t answer Votebeat questions about the probe.

David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department voting section attorney, said the federal government’s actions appeared more to be aimed at intimidating election officials than producing actionable criminal cases.

He pointed to FBI Director Kash Patel’s public statements in April suggesting arrests related to the 2020 election were coming, as well as federal officials discussing potential cases on social media before they’re brought before courts.

“If you think you’re going to bring charges and prosecute individuals, you don’t do anything that the federal government has done over the last few months,” he said.

Becker also noted that any potential federal crimes connected to the 2020 election are “well beyond the statute of limitations for any potential federal jurisdiction or crimes,” adding, “This is a problem for any investigation relating to 2020.”

Even so, Becker said election officials’ worries were justified. He said the Election Official Legal Defense Network, which he leads, has received more requests for legal assistance from election officials than ever before “even though all of these efforts indicate that the federal government knows it’s got nothing.”

How do the events in Wisconsin relate to probes elsewhere?

It’s unclear how the FBI interviews in Wisconsin relate to the agency’s scrutiny of the 2020 election in other states.

In January the FBI raided a Fulton County, Georgia, election office seeking records tied to the 2020 election. About a month later, the agency subpoenaed records related to the audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix.

Separately, the U.S. Justice Department has sought access to 2024 ballots in Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit.

Those jurisdictions share several characteristics with Milwaukee County.  All are located in highly competitive swing states won by former President Joe Biden in 2020, and all became central targets of President Donald Trump, who repeatedly challenged the election results despite court rulings, audits and reviews repeatedly reaffirming his loss.

Fulton, Wayne, Maricopa, and Milwaukee County are the largest and most heavily scrutinized election jurisdictions in their respective states. Each has been the subject of persistent conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, many of which remain prevalent on social media, even after extensive investigations found no evidence of widespread fraud.

“What’s really disconcerting,” said former longtime Wisconsin election chief Kevin Kennedy, “is the fact that there is a clear pattern here to try and continue to stir up issues that were resolved in every single opportunity there was to review them, whether it was a court case, an independent audit or the actual certification and review process that exists.”

What comes next?

The short answer is that nobody really knows.

Officials have been considering the possibility that the federal government may seize the city’s 2020 ballots, which contain personally identifiable information.

Kennedy said recent actions by the Trump administration offer “no reason to think that information that should be protected is going to be protected.”

Kennedy said Wisconsin’s decentralized election system was intentionally designed to distribute authority among local jurisdictions — both to keep election administration accountable at the community level and to limit the amount of sensitive voter information concentrated in any one place.

“You put that at the national level,” he said, “and it only takes one bad actor — and we’ve got evidence there’s more than one of those already in the federal government — to totally disrupt the process when you consolidate that kind of information that’s protected through the various state and local laws and practices.”

Becker said it will be an uphill battle for the federal government to successfully obtain Milwaukee’s ballots. But he said the mere possibility that federal officials could theoretically identify how individual people voted is deeply troubling.

“That is not the way a democratic society works,” he said. “Now, I don’t think they’re likely going to be able to do that. I think that’s going to be incredibly difficult. It’s not impossible, but the fact that they seem to engender this fear is troubling enough.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat’s free national newsletter here.

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To republish, go to the original and consult the Wisconsin Watch republishing guidelines.

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The Wisconsin Elections Commission should not have ordered the city of Madison to remove 23 late-arriving absentee ballots from its April 7 election count, a Dane County judge ruled.

The ruling, issued last week, was forced by a lawsuit from two of the voters whose ballots were affected. The lawsuit was brought by the voting rights-focused firm Law Forward. 

During the April 7 election, the voters returned their ballots on time, but due to what city officials called an election administrator’s error, they were not delivered to the proper polling location until after polls closed at 8 p.m. State law requires that ballots be “delivered to the polling place no later than 8 p.m.” 

At a May 6 meeting WEC decided to follow the exact letter of the law and found that the city must exclude the ballots. But the lawsuit argued that voters shouldn’t be punished because of an error outside of their control. 

“Voters who comply with every element that is required for them to vote a special absentee vote, and then not being allowed to have the votes count, is contrary to what good law in Wisconsin has been,” Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell said in court.

WEC Chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, voted not to count the ballots, but expressed her hope during the commission discussions that a court would overturn the ruling. 

“As I have indicated previously, as an administrative agency we are bound by the language of the state statutes which precluded counting those ballots,” Jacobs said in a statement after the ruling. “That said, it has been my firm belief that voters should not be penalized by the actions of a clerk as these 23 voters were. The right to vote should not be predicated on a clerk failing to deliver properly and timely submitted ballots.”

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When the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Texas’ gerrymandered congressional map to take effect in December, its conservative majority wrote that a lower court had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign” when it blocked the map more than three months before the election.

Now, the Supreme Court is the one upending elections.

For the past two decades, the Supreme Court has advanced the idea that federal courts should not order major changes close to an election to limit voter confusion. Over time the doctrine, first articulated in the 2006 case Purcell vs. Gonzalez, became known as the Purcell principle. 

But election law experts and one of the court’s liberal justices say the Supreme Court is wielding — or disregarding — the principle unevenly in ways that aid Republicans.

In recent weeks, the Supreme Court has effectively allowed last-minute election changes in Southern states that hold major consequences for what districts voters are assigned to and the future of Black political representation across the region.

These Republican-controlled states are racing to redraw congressional maps to eliminate majority-Black districts, many of which have elected Black Democrats to Congress. The gerrymandering rush has come even with early voting underway in some states.

Wilfred Codrington III, a professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, who has studied the Purcell principle, said limiting voter confusion is common sense. But after that general idea,  the principle “just falls apart” because the Supreme Court has never answered questions raised by the doctrine — like how close to an election is too close.

“The court has not thought through them and it seems like when the court applies them, they’re being applied in partisan ways,” Codrington said, about questions the doctrine raises.

April ruling OK’d redistricting

After the high court gutted the federal Voting Rights Act in Callais, a landmark decision on April 29 that found Louisiana’s map unconstitutional, it fast-tracked paperwork so the state could quickly redraw district lines. 

Voting had begun in the state’s congressional primary election, which Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended, discarding 42,000 votes already cast.

A majority of the court voted to immediately certify its decision instead of observing its typical 32-day waiting period. In a blistering dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the justices were disregarding their previous insistence that courts shouldn’t risk assuming political responsibility for a redistricting process that often produces hard feelings.

“There is also the so-called Purcell principle, which we invoked only five months ago to chide a federal district court for ‘improperly insert[ing] itself into an active primary campaign,’” Jackson wrote. “The Court unshackles itself from both constraints today and dives into the fray. And just like that, those principles give way to power.”

The conservative justices on May 11 then cleared a path for Alabama to move toward implementing a Republican gerrymander that state lawmakers approved in 2023 but was blocked by a lower court. Their decision came a little more than a week before the state’s primary election. 

Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has called an August special primary election for some of the state’s congressional districts.

“The United States Supreme Court’s decision is plain common sense and enables our values to be best represented in Congress,” Ivey said in a statement.

‘Like it doesn’t exist’

The Supreme Court’s actions this spring stand in stark contrast to its December decision to allow Texas’ gerrymander to take effect. After President Donald Trump urged GOP states to redraw their maps for partisan advantage, Texas was the first state to respond, enacting new lines that could help Republicans pick up five seats.

A three-judge district court panel ruled against the map, finding that it was racially gerrymandered. The Supreme Court paused the panel’s decision, finding that the panel likely made serious errors and that the district court was “causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections” amid the campaign season.

That language echoed the Purcell decision, which found that an appeals court had erred in blocking an Arizona law requiring a photo ID to register to vote. The Supreme Court’s unsigned opinion cautioned that court orders affecting elections can cause voter confusion. 

“As an election draws closer, that risk will increase,” the 2006 opinion said.

Nearly 20 years later, the Supreme Court made no mention of Purcell in its Callais opinion, which dropped like a political bomb across the South. Since the decision, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee have either enacted new maps or are seeking to do so ahead of the November midterm elections.

Mark Johnson, a Kansas City-based lawyer with a long history of working on election litigation, noted that Callais was argued at the Supreme Court twice, first in March 2025 and again in October. The justices then waited a long time before releasing their decision, he said, adding that if they didn’t realize the implications of their ruling they were “asleep at the wheel.”

“That’s why the Callais case is so disturbing, because a Supreme Court that has by and large followed Purcell just acted like it doesn’t exist,” Johnson said.

Court legitimacy at stake

Several high-profile observers of the Supreme Court have been unsparing in their criticism of the justices’ approach. 

Steve Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center and a foremost expert on the court, wrote in an online post that the court’s recent decisions “fatally undermine” the animating purpose of the Purcell principle.

“The Court’s own interventions are now wreaking havoc—and a majority of the justices either don’t think it’s their fault, or don’t care that it is. Either way, they don’t seem to mind the inconsistency—in a context in which it’s having the remarkably coincidental effect of benefiting Republicans,” Vladeck wrote.

Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA School of Law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, wrote on social media that the Supreme Court in Chief Justice John Roberts’ hands “has become a chaos agent in elections.”

Public support for the Supreme Court was dropping prior to Callais. An August 2025 Pew Research Center survey found 48% of Americans hold a favorable view of the court, a 22-percentage point drop from August 2020.

In the wake of the decision, Democrats have renewed their calls for court reform. Some have proposed term limits for the justices or expanding the size of the court to dilute its conservative majority. However, major changes are unlikely to become law while the U.S. Senate retains the filibuster and Trump remains in office.

For his part, Roberts has taken pains to paint the court as outside of politics. But at a judicial conference in Pennsylvania in early May, Roberts acknowledged the public thinks the justices are expressing policy preferences rather than interpreting the law.

“I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do,” Roberts said, according to The Associated Press.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another of the court’s conservatives, has drawn a distinction between federal courts ordering last-minute changes to elections and states making changes themselves — suggesting that courts shouldn’t necessarily thwart state legislatures that alter rules and procedures in the run-up to elections.

In a 2020 concurring opinion about a federal judge who had altered Wisconsin’s absentee ballot deadline amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Kavanaugh wrote that it was one thing for state legislatures to change their own election rules “in the late innings” and bear responsibility for unintended consequences.

“It is quite another thing for a federal district court to swoop in and alter carefully considered and democratically enacted state election rules when an election is imminent,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Chaotic campaign season

But voting rights advocates say Callais is unleashing a wave of voter confusion as Southern legislatures rush to gerrymander.

Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a map May 7 that divides the Memphis area among three congressional districts. The move splits a majority-Black district in Memphis represented by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat. Cohen announced Friday he wouldn’t seek reelection.

The state’s primary election is scheduled for Aug. 6.

“This is a year where we’re already in the cycle and they’re going to have to redo everything they’ve already worked on because these districts are completely different,” Matia Powell, executive director of the voting rights group Civic TN, told reporters.

The Tennessee Democratic Party and several Democratic candidates, including state Rep. Justin Pearson, who is running for Cohen’s current seat, have filed a federal lawsuit against the map. They argue the new map will cause “significant voter confusion” and severely burden the right to vote.

Tennessee Republican Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti argues the Democrats have a solution in search of a problem. Tennessee lawmakers have provided more than $3.1 million to implement the new map and that state officials are already working to meet election deadlines, Skrmetti’s office wrote in a Wednesday court filing.

“At bottom, this suit is an invitation to play politics, not law,” Tennessee Senior Assistant Attorney General Zachary Barker wrote in the filing.

U.S. District Court Judge William Campbell, a Trump appointee, on Thursday declined to immediately halt the map.

The Supreme Court has sent states the message that “there are no rules” and that state legislatures are welcome to gerrymander Black representation at any point, said Anna Baldwin, voting rights litigation director at Campaign Legal Center, which has sued over Florida’s recent gerrymander.

And the way the court applies the Purcell principle encourages states to make changes close to elections — because courts are more reluctant to block them.

“The court is creating a perverse incentive structure that ultimately does make it harder for people who are trying to protect voting rights to prevail,” Baldwin said.

Thousands of people joined demonstrations in Selma and Montgomery on Saturday to protest redistricting by southern Republican state legislatures targeting Black Democratic members of Congress.

An afternoon rally in Montgomery that drew over 5,000 people featured politicians, activists and civil rights dignitaries as part of the All Roads Lead to the South campaign, aimed at organizing voters to offset the advantages Republicans may gain from redistricting.

“Our democracy is on the line,” said Victor Coar, who traveled from Birmingham to Montgomery. “Our rights are on the line. They are trying to take it all away. They are suppressing our vote, trying to keep us quiet, trying to silence our vote.”

The events on Saturday deliberately invoked the Civil Rights Movement in cities that featured some of its most famous moments, and came just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court targeted one of its major legacies. In Louisiana v. Callais, decided last month, the nation’s high court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination in voting and election laws, by saying plaintiffs challenging maps under Section 2 would have to prove intentional discrimination, a significantly higher standard than the prior one.

The court’s decision led Republican-controlled legislatures across the South to introduce redistricting legislation targeting Black majority districts. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use a 2023 congressional map it had previously ruled racially discriminatory. Gov. Kay Ivey set special primary elections in four congressional districts for August, though plaintiffs in the state’s major redistricting case, known as Allen v. Milligan, have continued litigation. A federal court Friday set a hearing in the case for Friday.

Earlier on Saturday, faith leaders gathered at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma and offered prayers, criticisms of the Supreme Court and President Donald Trump and calls for voting rights protections for vulnerable communities.

After an hour, 400 people then marched silently from the church to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where civil rights protestors were attacked on March 7, 1965, an assault that eventually led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

“I know how important moments like these are, and I am here because I know that one of us can go far but we cannot go far enough,” said Rev. Cece Jones-Davis, who traveled from Washington, D.C. to participate in the day’s events, in an interview after the march. “It is going to take all of us, and so I am just here to add my voice to the collective.”

At the Montgomery rally, speakers spoke to several grievances aimed at the Trump administration and at the U.S. Supreme Court regarding voting rights, but also urged the crowd to have resolve during the current political climate.

Bernice King, the daughter of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and CEO of the King Center, harkened to the past as a rallying cry for the present.

“Today we return to the very grounds where my parents and freedom families stood, when Black voter registration was scarce, when discrimination was the norm, and when violence was the price for seeking dignity. Their sacrifice opened the door to the Voting Rights Act,” she said.

Now, she said, people are called once again to act.

“Because the recent Supreme Court rulings demand our presence,” she said. “It was not only a legal decision, it is a moral disgrace and a shameless assault on Black political power.”

Lawmakers from Alabama took the stage to urge the crowd to continue their efforts to mobilize the vote.

“Sometimes I wonder what would I have done if I had been present and alive during the movement,” said Sen. Merika Coleman, D-Pleasant Grove. “Would I have marched? Would you have marched? Would I have participated in a boycott? Would you have done that? Would I be one of the lawyers who filed one of those lawsuits? Would I have been a freedom singer, singing and moaning for the movement like my grandfather? We are here to tell you, you don’t have to wonder anymore. This is our time, right now, and we are fired up and ready to go.”

Then Alabama’s congressional delegation and their colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives took the stage to rally the audience and to meet the moment.

Changing Alabama’s congressional maps will significantly threaten the re-election prospects of U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Mobile, and could eventually put U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, at risk.

“It is time to show up and show out, not just in one state capital, not just for one election but we need you to step up and show up for every one of our state legislators who are trying to get out the vote,” Sewell said.

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, said that the freedom that we enjoy also requires responsibility.

“We also stand here with the understanding that the freedoms we inherited from our ancestors are not possessions that we hold, they are rights that we hold in trust,” he said to the crowd. “That we were given to be stewards of. A lot of people are drinking deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that they did not dig. They are eating from banquet tables prepared for them by their ancestors, sitting back, getting dumb, fat and ugly, and happy and comfortable. This is one of moments where we understand our blessings come with obligations.”

Khadidah Stone, one of the Allen v. Milligan plaintiffs, criticized Ivey’s decision to schedule the special session during an interview at Saturday’s event in Montgomery.

“I would really like those legislators to focus on the quality of life of Alabamians,” Stone said. “We have a lot of rural hospital closures, we have the highest maternal mortality rate in the country, 50,000 Alabamians just lost SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, and most of the recipients are the elderly and children.”

Figures said after the rally that he was “inspired by what we see.”

“It is an incredibly humbling experience to see thousands come out and, in essence, help defend my seat, and defend Congresswoman Terri Sewell’s seat, so we can’t help but be overwhelmed by gratefulness and humility by what we are seeing, and encouraged because we think this is going to carry over until November,” he said.

Figures, however, said that he felt there were factual differences between the Callais case and the Milligan case, and expressed confidence that the Milligan plaintiffs could still win.

“The dispute with our district goes all the way back to the 2020 census, and the original maps that the state Legislature redrew, and the three-judge panel, two of whom were appointed by Trump and one by (Ronald) Regan originally, they found that the state had engaged in intentional discrimination in how they drew those maps.”

Several of those who attended the afternoon rally criticized attempts by the various legislatures to reconfigure their district maps.

“It is important for folks to understand what folks are getting taken away from them, and they are getting taken away their right to representation,” said former Sen. Doug Jones, D-Alabama, who is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination to be governor, in an interview at the event in Montgomery. “We have come so far in the state of Alabama. We have 60 years of progress that has been thrown backwards by the Supreme Court and the Legislature just a few blocks from here.”

Reginald Mason, who also traveled from Birmingham, said voting is what matters.

“People who don’t actually vote are not informed, they don’t know about the struggle that our ancestors went through,” Mason said. “I never thought I would be standing here today fighting for what they have already fought for me.”

Religious and faith leaders expressed many of the same concerns when they led congregants in prayers prior to the morning march across the Edmund Pettus bridge.

“What I realize is that it is just our turn, and freedom is not fought for once, freedom has been fought for many times,” Jones-Davis said. “We are here to do our part.”

WASHINGTON — Democrats and advocacy groups urged a quick rejection of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order on compiling citizenship lists and creating traceable mail-in ballots in a federal court hearing Thursday.

Lawyers for the Democratic National Committee, Democratic minority leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and interest groups 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 Trump administration, meanwhile, argued the order had not been put into effect yet and therefore could not be overturned.

The groups are seeking a nationwide preliminary pause on Trump’s late-March order that U.S. citizenship and age data from the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security be provided to states.

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

Thursday’s hearing marked the first courtroom showdown over the executive order. A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general have also sued to block the order. At least five lawsuits have been filed in total.

Trump’s edict also orders the U.S. Postal Service to promulgate a rule that would design special envelopes for mail-in ballots, including a unique barcode. States, which the U.S. Constitution delegates authority over election administration to, have argued the order would restrict mail-in voting.

‘No one knows’

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, had tough questions for both sides. He suggested the Democrats’ and aligned groups’ challenges may be premature because a rule specifying how the order would operate has yet to be written, though he also grasped their argument that the order was inherently unconstitutional. 

“No one knows what’s gonna be in the rule,” Nichols told lawyers for the Democratic groups.

“I think it’s very clear from the EO (executive order) that we know exactly what’s gonna be in the rule,” said Lalitha Madduri, who represented the Democratic groups and congressional leaders.

After back-and-forth, Nichols conceded, “I agree with your point: There can be no rulemaking consistent with the EO that can be lawful.”

Madduri also argued there is “no way to repair that harm” of uncertainty for voters.

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

There’s “certainly no irreparable harm,” Pezzi said.

Of the lists of intra-agency government data compiling U.S. citizens and their ages, Pezzi said “it’s not a list of individuals to be targeted. It’s not a list of noncitizens.” He also said it’s “not a concern” of the federal government what states do with the lists, if they even decide to use them.

“No list’s ever going to be perfect,” Pezzi said, adding that “responsible” states would not blindly kick people off voter rolls if their names do not appear on the lists verifying citizenship.

Commitment to updates

Nichols told Pezzi in the event he denied a preliminary injunction, he would expect information sharing from the government as the case continued.

“Fair enough,” Pezzi said.

“I didn’t hear a commitment,” Nichols warned, prompting agreement from Pezzi.

Nichols said he would soon issue an order and opinion, but did not specify a date. 

“I understand the time pressure here,” he said.

He warned the government to notify him of “anything even approaching a material change” on implementing Trump’s executive order — though he stopped short of issuing an official order requiring updates. But, he said, “it would not be good for the government,” if they do not promptly inform him of new developments.

Trump’s elections push

Democrats and voting rights groups maintain Trump’s order is effectively compiling an illegal national voter list and usurping the state authority over elections. The order’s opponents accuse Trump of trying to unilaterally assert power over elections.

Trump and his aides say the order will help secure the midterm elections this November. While voter fraud is extremely rare, Trump has long promoted false conspiracy theories surrounding his 2020 election loss.

The executive order, signed by Trump on March 31, came amid a broader campaign by the president to influence how elections are run. 

The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for sensitive voter data that it plans to use to identify potential noncitizen voters. 

Trump has demanded that Congress pass the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to show documents proving their citizenship, though the bill has stalled in the Senate. Last year, Trump signed an executive order to unilaterally impose similar requirements that was blocked in federal court.

“President Trump has tried repeatedly to rewrite election rules for his own perceived partisan advantage,” Madduri, an attorney at Elias Law Group, wrote in a court filing.

GOP officials defend order

Republican state attorneys general have intervened in the lawsuits on behalf of the Trump administration and have urged federal judges to uphold the executive order. They have cast the order as offering “optional” resources.

Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas intervened in the suit argued Thursday and were represented in the courtroom.  

The states “would like to access this resource so they may verify the accuracy of their own voter-registration lists. This flow of information between federal and state agencies is a common and critical feature of our federal system,” the Republican officials wrote in an April 20 court document.

The order requires lists of voting-age U.S. citizens living in each state to be provided to state officials at least 60 days before each federal election. 

The order does not tell states how to use the data, but it instructs the U.S. attorney general to prioritize investigations into state and local officials who issue federal ballots to ineligible voters.

The list of citizens will be drawn from naturalization and Social Security records, according to the order. It will 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 order also directs states, at least 90 days before a federal election, to tell the U.S. Postal Service whether they intend 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.

Opponents of the order argue that under federal law Trump cannot direct the postmaster general to take any action — on elections or any other matter. The Postal Service is overseen by a Board of Governors and the postmaster general reports to the board. 

Trump’s allies argue that the Constitution grants the president sweeping authority over executive branch agencies and that Congress cannot place agencies, like the Postal Service, beyond the president’s reach.

The FBI has opened an investigation into Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported. 

President Donald Trump has frequently singled out Wisconsin’s election administration since he began attacking the 2020 election results following his loss to Joe Biden. In the years since, Wisconsin has become a hotbed of election conspiracy theories as well as a source of the mechanisms that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

Numerous reviews, investigations and lawsuits have affirmed that Wisconsin’s 2020 election was conducted without fraud, malfeasance or abuse.

Since returning to office last year, the Trump administration has often worked to relitigate Trump’s 2020 election complaints, including efforts to obtain large amounts of voter data from the state. Other swing states that saw significant election denial after 2020 have been similarly targeted. 

The Journal-Sentinel reported that the FBI has begun a preliminary investigation of the election, which so far has largely included a reassessment of previous complaints. The newspaper also reported that the agency interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission official Robert Kehoe about how the state’s elections work.

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As President Donald Trump tries to assert power over U.S. elections, he has raged on social media, cajoled Republican lawmakers and unleashed the Department of Justice on his political enemies.

What has he accomplished with all that effort? Not a lot.

Six months before the November midterm elections, the Trump administration’s quest to exercise authority over the contests and impose sweeping restrictions on voters has proved largely unsuccessful. The aggressive campaign — separate from Trump’s more effective foray into redistricting fights — has been stymied by the courts, rebuffed by many state election officials and opposed by key Republican senators.

“I think there’s many out there who are worried about the constant drumbeat of what the administration is trying to do and what they might do in the future. I hear this from voters, I hear this from election officials,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

“And what I see is that there is a vast chasm between wanting to do something and trying to do something and actually successfully doing it.”

Months yet to go

Much could change between now and November, of course. 

Facing likely Republican losses in the midterms, election experts warn that Trump could lash out with increasingly brazen attempts to control elections. Or that the Justice Department will conduct more raids targeting election officials, like the FBI seizure of ballots from the 2020 presidential election from Fulton County, Georgia.

Democrats remain braced for federal election interference, especially the prospect of Trump deploying immigration enforcement agents or the military at polling locations — an action prohibited under federal law that some administration aides have nevertheless refused to flatly rule out.

But Trump’s record of achievement up to this point is poor.

The SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship, is stalled in the U.S. Senate despite Trump’s repeated demands for its passage. Federal courts blocked an executive order Trump signed last year that sought to impose a proof-of-citizenship rule unilaterally.

The Justice Department hasn’t secured a single court victory in the 30 lawsuits it’s filed to force states and the District of Columbia to turn over sensitive personal data on voters. A bipartisan group of state secretaries of state is fighting the Trump administration in court — only 13 Republican states have provided the information.

And an executive order signed in March that would limit voting by mail faces five federal lawsuits, with an initial courtroom showdown set for Thursday in Washington, D.C. Federal agencies have yet to finalize plans to implement the directive, which election law experts call illegal and unconstitutional.

“America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World. We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer,” Trump posted on Truth Social in late April.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told States Newsroom that Trump is committed “to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.” 

Jackson named several federal laws that she said provide the Justice Department oversight over states’ election administration. She also noted Trump’s support for the SAVE America Act.

“Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable,” Jackson said in an email.

System under strain

Trump has placed the nation’s electoral system under immense stress before. 

After the 2020 election, the president and his allies worked to overturn the results, with Trump leaning on then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject Electoral College votes. The effort failed but it led to a mob storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and disrupting Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

Today, the system is holding but under strain. An analysis released Thursday by Issue One, a pro-democracy group, likened American elections to a resilient patient with a strong immune system. Yet the Trump administration, rather than boosting the body’s immunity, acts like a virus, it said.

“America’s election system’s immune system is not breaking, but it is actively fighting against the virus of democratic backsliding,” the analysis reads.

The group identified three safeguards it says are in critical condition: Congress, internal checks within the executive branch and the information ecosystem. 

Election officials have watched with particular concern as the Justice Department probes the 2020 election. Trump has long falsely asserted that the election was stolen and in January 2021 pressured the Georgia secretary of state to find him enough votes to overturn his loss in that state.

After the FBI obtained a warrant to seize 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, which encompasses Atlanta, in January 2026, the DOJ last month sent a subpoena for information on the county’s election workers. The subpoena demands the names, positions, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of election workers and poll volunteers who worked the 2020 general election.

Fulton County is fighting the subpoena in court. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that the FBI doesn’t have to give the ballots back to the county, though he noted the seizure “was certainly not perfect.”

The Justice Department has also obtained a grand jury subpoena for election records in Arizona and demanded 2024 ballots from Wayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit. And the FBI recently interviewed a Wisconsin election official about the 2020 election, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Local leaders have promised that they won’t bend to pressure from the Trump administration.

“This whole thing is designed to harass, intimidate and chill participation in our election process,” Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts, a Democrat, said in a video statement. “It’s not going to work, it’s not going to happen.”

Blue state action

Some states are pursuing additional safeguards against federal election interference. 

For example, New Mexico lawmakers passed a bill that makes intentionally obstructing polling places a felony and prohibits the military or any armed federal personnel from polling locations.

The legislative push, concentrated in Democratic states, comes as Trump administration officials have sidestepped direct questions about whether troops or federal agents could be deployed to the polls.

“It’s yet another gotcha hypothetical,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a recent U.S. Senate hearing.

The Connecticut General Assembly passed legislation May 6 that imposes a 250-foot buffer zone around election sites where warrantless arrests and searches, use of force and ID checks by state or federal officers, including immigration agents, are banned. The measure also bans masked or concealed identities near polling places, among other provisions.

Connecticut state Rep. Matt Blumenthal, a Democrat who chairs the state House Government Administration & Elections Committee, said that if nothing happens during this fall’s elections, “I’ll say, ‘Good, it worked.’” 

The goal of the bill isn’t to create confrontations between Connecticut law enforcement and federal forces, but to deter intimidation in the first place, he said.

“We have a responsibility to protect all of our residents, but especially our voters, related to our elections — to prevent these sorts of tools of threat and intimidation and terror from being used to shape our political life,” Blumenthal said in an interview.

Connecticut state Sen. Rob Sampson, a Republican, said that he wouldn’t support abuse from the federal government. But Democrats, he said, were spinning a false narrative of voter intimidation for political purposes and attempting to distract from weaknesses in election security.

“In the last few years, I don’t always trust the results,” Sampson said on the Senate floor. “Now, some people will go out there and say, ‘Oh, you’re an election denier.’ I’m not saying that there’s tens of thousands of faulty or erroneous or fraudulent votes. I’m just saying that there’s definitely some.”

GOP elections bill stalled

Trump and Republicans in Congress say major action is needed to boost election confidence. 

At Trump’s urging, the U.S. House passed the SAVE America Act in February. In addition to requiring voters to show documents such as a passport or birth certificate that prove citizenship, the legislation also imposes ID requirements at the polls and would require states to bolster efforts to clean voter registration lists.

Polling suggests Americans support at least some of the bill’s provisions. A Politico poll conducted in April found 52% of Americans support requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, while 18% oppose. 

Democrats, election administration experts and some Republicans say the proposal would lead to chaos. Its provisions would take effect immediately, upending voting requirements potentially months or weeks before elections. Married women and others who have last names that don’t match their birth certificates could face additional obstacles registering to vote.

The SAVE America Act hasn’t advanced in the U.S. Senate. Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican and major proponent of the bill, attempted to add the measure onto a budget bill in April, but the Senate rejected it, 48-50.

“This doesn’t mean Trump and his allies in Congress will stop,” Héctor Sánchez Barba, president and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, a Latino voting rights group, said in a statement.

The Senate has since moved off the SAVE America Act and would need to hold a procedural vote to return to it. Whether that happens is in doubt, but Kennedy indicated to Punchbowl News that he intends to force another amendment vote later this month. His office didn’t respond to an email from States Newsroom seeking confirmation.

Postal Service 

Without the SAVE America Act, Trump’s options to legally restrict voting are limited. 

Trump signed an executive order in March attempting to limit the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery of ballots through the mail. The order also directs the Department of Homeland Security to create “state citizenship lists” that include the names of voting-age citizens in each state — effectively creating a national voter list.

But the order has come under legal attack from Democratic groups, a coalition of Democratic states and multiple voting rights organizations. Its opponents are hopeful that federal judges will soon block the directive like they did a March 2025 order that included a proof-of-citizenship requirement.

“I don’t have confidence that the Trump administration or Donald Trump will refrain from trying to interfere with our elections,” Blumenthal said. “But I have great confidence that the American people will stand up against it.”

The day after the U.S. Supreme Court crippled the federal Voting Rights Act, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson addressed a virtual gathering for the group’s members and supporters where he ranked the landmark decision alongside the court’s most infamous cases.

Dred Scott excluded Black people from American citizenship ahead of the Civil War. Plessy blessed policies of racial segregation in 1896. And now there was Callais. 

The opinion will “probably go down in the history book as one of three of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of this nation,” Johnson said.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana vs. Callais on April 29 cleared states to split apart, for political gain, congressional districts where a majority of residents belong to minority groups. The court’s conservative majority said Louisiana lawmakers acted unconstitutionally when they intentionally created the state’s second majority-Black district, which the justices found unnecessary.

A week after its release, the decision is roiling politics across the South as states move at a rapid pace to recast the political landscape that has taken progressives by surprise. 

Republicans, triumphant over their victory at the court, are rushing fresh gerrymanders through Southern statehouses in time for the November midterm elections in an effort to strengthen their party’s control over the region’s U.S. House delegations. They’re acting at lightning speed, over loud protests, and have nullified votes by suspending ongoing elections.

Democrats, especially Black residents, are furious with both the court and GOP politicians, who they believe are poised to wipe away decades of Black political progress in the region. The new maps that seek to oust Black members of Congress and prevent the election of Democrats in the future recall a Jim Crow past of literacy tests and poll taxes, they say.

“We refuse to let you kill us by killing our vote,” Eliza Jane Franklin, a resident of rural Barbour County, Alabama, told a state House hearing Tuesday.

Decision kicked off legislative efforts

The Alabama Legislature is moving to authorize a special primary election using a congressional map currently blocked in federal court, if a district court or, ultimately, the Supreme Court allows the state to move forward. At least one of the state’s two Black members of the U.S. House would be vulnerable.

In Louisiana, the governor has suspended the state’s primary elections for the U.S. House, setting aside some 42,000 votes that were already cast. Republican lawmakers will begin advancing a new gerrymander in a matter of days, aiming to force out at least one of the state’s two Black House members.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new map into law Monday that aims to hand his party up to four additional U.S. House seats. State lawmakers approved the map hours after the Supreme Court’s decision. The map has already drawn multiple legal challenges.

The South Carolina Legislature is weighing whether to redraw maps. And Tennessee lawmakers want to gerrymander a Memphis district currently held by U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat who represents the state’s only majority-Black district. 

“The Supreme Court has opined that redistricting, like the judicial system, should be color-blind,” Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Republican, said in a statement Thursday unveiling a plan to divide the Memphis area among three congressional seats.

More states, in the South and elsewhere, are expected to pursue new maps over the next two years. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp ruled out a special session this year, for example, but supports redistricting before the 2028 election. 

The current moment represents an extraordinary time in America, said Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO of Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group. But she also called it a reversion “back to America.”

Many thought the presence of Black, Hispanic and Asian American elected officials somehow meant racial discrimination no longer existed, she said.

“And unfortunately, that is a misread of American history,” Caruthers said. “And perhaps it is a retelling of American history for those who want to gloss over America’s very sordid past, especially when it comes to voting rights.”

Midterms impact

The scramble by a handful of Southern states to redraw districts comes as Republicans grasp for any scintilla of advantage ahead of the midterm elections in November. 

A U.S. House under Democratic control would spell the end of much of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, produce a wave of investigations into his administration and potentially lead to a vote to impeach him in the House, though the Senate would almost certainly acquit him.

“This is all about Donald Trump wanting to avoid hard questions and oversight hearings about his actions,” Cohen said at a news conference in Memphis.

Seth McKee, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University who has studied Southern politics, said Republicans are attempting to “staunch the bleeding” ahead of unfavorable midterm elections.

“The desperation of this Republican Party, it’s off the charts,” McKee said.

Redistricting push supercharged

Prior to Callais, Trump had already urged Republicans to redraw congressional maps for partisan advantage — a process that typically occurs once a decade after the census. 

Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas enacted more GOP-friendly maps, while Democrats struck back in California and Virginia. In Utah, Republicans want to block a court-ordered map that’s more favorable to Democrats.

Republican primary voters have given their approval to that approach. On Tuesday, five Trump-endorsed state legislative candidates in Indiana defeated GOP incumbents who had defied the president to block a gerrymander in the state last year.

But until now the Voting Rights Act limited how far that gerrymandering push could extend.

For decades, Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act helped protect majority-minority districts from gerrymandering and ensured voters could elect Black candidates to Congress in Southern states following the end of state laws that blocked Black citizens from voting. The Callais opinion guts Section 2 by curtailing the consideration of race when drawing legislative maps.

Republicans have praised the decision and many have been clear that they believe the opinion opens up a path to securing additional GOP seats. Trump has endorsed disregarding primary elections that have already been held so that states can pass new maps — which he predicts can net Republicans an additional 20 seats this fall.

“We cannot allow there to be an Election that is conducted unconstitutionally simply for the ‘convenience’ of State Legislatures,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If they have to vote twice, so be it.”

Calls for GOP seats

Over the past week, some Republicans have cast majority-minority districts previously protected by the Voting Rights Act as racist because they were drawn with attention paid to the racial makeup of the map. U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, wrote on X that there are “no more excuses for keeping racist maps,” for example, and called for their immediate removal.

Other GOP leaders have centered their case for quick action on political power. Like Trump, they have explicitly invoked control of the U.S. House as a reason to gerrymander. While Republicans have the House, their margin of control is razor thin: 217 to 212, with one independent and five vacancies. Even a modest Democratic wave in November will likely sweep away GOP control.

Alabama Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger Jr. and House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said in a joint statement that the state’s lawmakers have a responsibility to offer Alabama a “fighting chance” to elect seven Republican U.S. representatives. Two of the state’s seven districts are held by Democrats.

“Control of the U.S. House of Representatives could come down to just a handful of seats, and when the dust settles, the people of Alabama will know that their Legislature stood firm, acted decisively, and did everything within its power to fight for fair representation,” Gudger and Ledbetter said.

Alabama Republicans want to use a map passed by lawmakers in 2023 that federal courts blocked from taking effect. Alabama’s current map was drawn by a court-appointed special master.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, asked a federal district court Tuesday for an order that would let the state move forward with the gerrymander.

In Louisiana, Republicans obtained special permission from the Supreme Court to quickly move forward on a new gerrymander after the justices struck down its current map in the Callais decision.

Absentee voting was already underway in Louisiana before Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended congressional primary elections set for May 16. Votes already cast for U.S. House candidates won’t count, Republican Secretary of State Nancy Landry, no relation, has said.

Louisiana state lawmakers are set to begin work on a new map this month that will likely break apart a New Orleans district held by U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Black Democrat who has fought with the governor.

“The Court’s decision in these cases has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent of the decision to quickly finalize Callais.

Court challenges

Still, Democrats and other opponents of the gerrymandering effort across the South are turning to the courts. Lawsuits have also been filed challenging the suspension of Louisiana’s congressional primaries and Florida’s new map also faces court challenges.

A petition filed in Louisiana state court by Elias Law Group, a major Democrat-aligned voting rights litigation firm, alleges the governor’s decision to halt the congressional primary is unlawful and unprecedented. Only the state legislature has the power to set the state’s election schedule, the petition argues.

“Governors do not get to cancel elections by executive fiat, least of all elections that are already underway, with ballots in voters’ hands and votes already cast,” Lali Madduri, a partner at Elias Law Group, said in a statement.

Regardless of how the legal challenges play out, Democrats say the Callais decision and the ongoing fallout from the decision underscore the need for massive voter turnout in the November election. A large Democratic turnout that results in a significant Democratic majority in the U.S. House would serve as a rebuke to Trump’s gerrymandering campaign, they say.

Blue state gerrymanders

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, South Carolina’s sole congressional Democrat, said during the NAACP virtual meeting that a Democratic House could pass voting rights legislation. 

“I would hope we could do that because I really think that’s our only hope legislatively,” Clyburn said.

Democrats have long called for the passage of a bill to restore preclearance, a major element of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court paused in 2013, which required states and local governments with a history of racial discrimination to obtain federal permission before making voting changes. 

But the measure would face a certain filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Even if Democrats broke a filibuster, Trump would likely veto it. 

In effect, Democrats’ most realistic opportunity to enact major voting rights legislation relies on regaining control of the White House and Congress and ending the filibuster — a set of conditions that’s out of reach until at least 2029.

In the meantime, more Democrats are calling for aggressive gerrymandering of blue states as a way to punch back. U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Rep. Joseph Morelle, both New York Democrats, on Monday announced an initiative to encourage their state to redraw congressional districts ahead of the 2028 election.

Gerrymandering New York would be an intensive effort, likely requiring voters to repeal or suspend anti-gerrymandering provisions in the state constitution. But voters in California and Virginia have previously endorsed Democratic gerrymanders.

“This is just the beginning,” Jeffries said in a statement. “Across the nation, we will sue, we will redraw and we will win.”

The voting rights-focused firm Law Forward filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission Wednesday over the commission’s decision to throw out the spring election votes of 23 Madison voters whose absentee ballots were properly filled out and filed in time, yet were delivered by the city clerk’s office to poll sites after 8 p.m. on Election Day. 

The six-member commission voted last week to order the Dane County Board of Canvass not to count the votes in its certification of the election results because the ballots were delivered minutes after the polls closed April 7. State law allows absentee ballots to be returned until polls close. Ballots can be returned through the mail, to absentee ballot drop boxes located around Madison, to the city clerk’s office or directly to the voter’s polling location. 

The lawsuit, filed in Dane County Circuit Court, argues WEC’s application of the law is unconstitutional because the voters followed all the rules and their ballots were late through “no fault of their own.” 

Madison’s election administration has generated negative headlines several times in the last few years after the city clerk’s office misplaced and failed to count nearly 200 absentee ballots during the 2024 presidential election. The clerk in charge during that election no longer works for the city and the commission has instituted a number of requirements on city election officials to prevent similar errors from happening again. 

Law Forward President Jeff Mandell said in a statement that in this case, WEC is overreaching. He pointed to a long history of Wisconsin court precedent that states voters can’t be disenfranchised over administrative failures of election officials. 

“These voters did everything Wisconsin law asked of them, and the city and county properly counted their ballots,” Mandell said. “Their votes were cast, received, and counted on Election Day. WEC is now trying to erase them from the record because of a clerical error these voters had absolutely no control over. Failing to count these absentee votes will only erode trust in our elections and jeopardize access to voting in future elections. It’s critical that the court take urgent action to ensure these votes are counted.”

No local or state election results will be changed by the 23 votes. The lawsuit must move quickly because state law requires that the results of the state’s April 7 election must be certified by May 15.

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s new decision gutting a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act clears the way for state officials to drastically reshape not only Congress but also state legislatures, county commissions, city councils and even local school boards.

The ruling, released last week in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, dismantled some of the final guardrails protecting the electoral power of Black, Hispanic and other racial minority voters that had been enshrined in the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal civil rights law that bars racial discrimination in voting access.

The 6-3 decision all but nullifies a provision called Section 2 that required states to draw electoral maps to give racial minority voters the opportunity to elect their chosen candidates.

And while intense national attention on the case’s fallout has focused on the U.S.  House as the 2026 midterm congressional elections loom, the new ruling also applies to state legislative districts and maps for county or municipal elections.

Those localized changes are just hovering further down the road.

“While everyone has been focusing on what this means for the power in Congress, there’s a whole other sector of power that it changes,” said Davante Lewis, an elected member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission and one of the litigants in a case that pushed Louisiana to create the congressional maps that were eventually struck down in the Callais ruling.

“This is a decision on who gets to serve on a school board, who gets to serve on a city council, who gets representation in the judiciary,” Lewis said.

Electoral maps are typically redrawn every 10 years after a census, but the Trump administration has encouraged Republican-led states to redraw districts to favor the GOP, a controversial move that has prompted some Democratic-led states to retaliate with gerrymandering of their own.

“But after 2030, I think we’re definitely going to see the impact of the Callais decision at the state level,” said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis whose research focuses on voting rights, race and federalism.

Effects across the South

Critics of the ruling say it will fundamentally dilute the voting and governing power of Black and other minority citizens up and down the ballot, particularly in the South. There, many of the seats held by Black elected officials are in so-called opportunity districts that were created after the Voting Rights Act to allow Black and other minority voters to elect their preferred candidates.

“On the congressional level, we’re in this race to the bottom of redistricting, but when it comes to the state legislative level, we’ll have to wait and see,” Crum said.

In 10 state legislatures across the South, Republicans could gain more than 190 seats currently held by Democrats, most of them Black representatives in majority-minority districts, according to an analysis released in December by voting rights groups Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund. At the federal level, one analysis from The New York Times found that Democrats stand to lose a dozen U.S. House seats across the South.

In the hours after the Supreme Court ruling, Republicans across the nation began calling for maps to be redrawn, particularly in states where courts had forced them to create districts where Black or other racial minorities made up the majority of residents.

A US Supreme Court ruling hammered voting rights. What does it mean and what happens now?

“These lines should all be colorblind. You should never be basing a decision on race,” said Arizona Republican state Sen. Warren Petersen, who’s president of the state Senate and running for attorney general.

He told Stateline he believes both congressional and state legislative maps should be redrawn in Arizona — even if it takes litigation.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves called a special legislative session set for later this month, when he wants lawmakers to draw new election maps for Mississippi state Supreme Court districts. A federal judge in Mississippi will have to quickly decide whether to adopt a new map for some special elections scheduled for November.

Democrats, too, took action. In Illinois, lawmakers backtracked on a proposed constitutional amendment that would have directed lawmakers to consider race in drawing district lines, a provision taken directly from the Voting Rights Act. Instead, Illinois Senate President Don Harmon, a Democrat, told Capitol News Illinois that lawmakers want to learn more about the ruling before putting such an amendment on a ballot for voters to decide, to prevent unintended consequences that could undermine voting rights.

In many states, Republicans are focusing first on congressional redistricting. Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry postponed his state’s U.S. House primaries even though absentee voting has already begun. In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey called a special state legislative session aiming to move the state’s May 19 primary in at least a handful of districts. Prominent Georgia Republicans were also calling for their state’s political maps to be redrawn, though GOP Gov. Brian Kemp said in a statement that it’s too late to do that this year.

And in North Dakota, the ruling leaves a tribal redistricting case in limbo. Tribes had used Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to sue the state over a legislative district map the North Dakota legislature approved in 2021.

Gerrymandering for partisan advantage is legal at the federal level, though some states do have their own laws restricting or prohibiting it. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is arguing the Supreme Court ruling invalidates voter-approved amendments that prevent the state from gerrymandering districts based on race or political party.

For most states, though, state officials can redraw maps explicitly to favor Republican voters, for example, so long as they don’t state their intention to disadvantage voters based on race.

‘Ripple like wildfire’

Critics of last week’s Callais ruling also worry it will rapidly erode the pipeline that has made it possible for Black and other minority candidates to get elected to office.

“Now, state legislatures can draw maps where they are picking their voters instead of their voters picking them,” said Lewis, the Louisiana commissioner. “They can dilute the power of Black and brown people serving in the state legislature, which means there’s fewer people to fight a congressional map” that pulls voting power away from minority communities.

He worries that if Black Democratic state lawmakers oppose their white Republican colleagues in legislatures with GOP majorities, those colleagues could redraw maps to eliminate the Black lawmakers’ seats, claiming they’re doing it only for partisan reasons.

The diluting of minority voting power, he said, “is going to ripple like wildfire.”

At the most local level, city councils and county boards typically draw those voting maps, but the ruling could be used to apply to them as well, said Crum, the law professor. 

Arizona is one of a handful of states where an independent commission, rather than the state legislature, determines both congressional and legislative districts. Outside of a court order, it can’t convene before the turn of the decade.

Petersen, the Arizona state senator, said he’s prepared to litigate if the state’s redistricting commission doesn’t take action to redraw districts that he said are unconstitutionally drawn. He doesn’t expect new maps before 2028, though.

“We’ve heard complaints from constituents that they don’t like the way their district was drawn,” he said. “We have some people here in Arizona that represent completely far-flung areas.

“I do think you’ll get a better outcome on some of these legislative districts” by removing race-based districting, he said.

Lawmakers in some states have tried to guard against the loss of federal protections by introducing their own state-level voting rights bills. Ten states have their own versions of the federal Voting Rights Act, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Virginia and Washington.

Lawmakers in at least 10 other states have introduced such bills this year alone: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The new Supreme Court ruling doesn’t render those laws unconstitutional, said Crum.

“But people who are seeking to undermine those state Voting Rights Acts are certainly going to rely on some of the themes” of the recent ruling, Crum said. “You might see them try and replicate some of the moves the court made.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct that Maryland has a state-level voting rights law, which was enacted last week.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

Federal agencies say they have yet to take steps to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail, as the Department of Justice fights a Democrat-led lawsuit against it.

The Justice Department late Friday filed documents asking a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit and to not block the executive order on a preliminary basis because the order hasn’t been implemented. The filings marked the Trump administration’s first effort to defend the order in court.

The March 31 order directs the creation of state citizenship lists and restricts how ballots can be sent through the mail, instructions that Democrats and election experts have called unconstitutional and illegal. It comes as Trump has seized on the specter of noncitizen voting, an extremely rare phenomenon, to demand sweeping voting restrictions.

In its Friday filing, the Justice Department sought to persuade Judge Carl J. Nichols in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia that a legal challenge is premature.

“If and when the Executive Branch takes some action to implement the Executive Order” then a lawsuit can be brought, Stephen Pezzi, a senior trial counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Division, wrote in a court filing.

Nichols has scheduled a hearing for May 14.

No action taken, officials tell court

The DOJ’s argument relies on statements by key federal officials that the agencies affected by the order — the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Postal Service — are still deliberating over how to carry out Trump’s directive. In declarations filed in court on Friday, officials at all three agencies say final decisions haven’t been made.

“As the Postal Service is still in the deliberation phase of determining how to implement the Executive Order, we have not yet published a proposed rule, nor have we reached any final decisions about the substance of a proposed rule,” Steven Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer, wrote.

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. 

The order also instructs 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.

Michael Mayhew, deputy associate director of the Immigration Records and Identity Services Directorate within U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, wrote in a declaration that the agency “has not yet begun preparation” of state citizenship lists. USCIS is a subsidiary of Homeland Security.

At the Social Security Administration, Jessica Burns MacBride, head of program policy and data exchange, wrote that the agency hasn’t made any final decisions “about its role” in implementing the executive order.

Focus on Postal Service

The order’s opponents are especially watching the Postal Service’s response, since it is an independent corporation overseen by its Board of Governors — not the White House.

Democrats and experts on postal law say Trump has no authority to order the postmaster general to take any action. The Board of Governors hires and fires the postmaster general, and board members serve seven-year terms, helping insulate them from political pressure.

Last month, 37 Democratic U.S. senators signed a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner and the Board of Governors urging the Postal Service to not implement the executive order. The senators pointed out the president has no authority to regulate federal elections or the Postal Service.

“Like the President, the Postal Service has no authority to regulate the manner of voting in federal elections, nor who is eligible to vote by mail in such elections,” the letter says.

The Postal Service is a named defendant in the lawsuit filed by Democratic groups and leaders in Congress. 

The Justice Department, which is representing the Postal Service, sidestepped questions about the president’s authority in Friday’s court filing. It called arguments about Trump’s authority over the Postal Service an “abstract legal question” that can’t be resolved before the agency takes action.

Still, Monteith appeared to nod to concerns within the Postal Service over the order’s legality while avoiding specifics.

“I am aware that deliberations are currently ongoing within the Postal Service regarding the implementation of the Executive Order,” Monteith wrote, adding that the deliberations include “legal considerations” regarding the order.

Unitary executive theory

The executive order faces at least five lawsuits, including a challenge brought by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta. The Justice Department has not yet filed court documents defending the order in that case.

For their part, Republican attorneys general — led by Catherine Hanaway of Missouri — are defending the executive order. Their position, if adopted by courts, would give Trump sweeping control over the Postal Service.

In a May 1 court filing, the GOP attorneys general argue those challenging the executive order are unlikely to succeed in showing that Trump cannot direct the Postal Service to propose a rule. They say that federal law doesn’t specifically prohibit the president from ordering the postmaster general to put forward rules on mail ballots — and it’s unconstitutional if it does.

“The Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President,” The Republican coalition says, articulating a view commonly called the unitary executive theory: the idea that Congress cannot constitutionally create agencies that exist outside of White House control.

The Republican states involved also include Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas.

Democrats and many constitutional law experts reject the unitary executive theory, though it has gained support among Trump-aligned Republicans as the White House seeks greater control over independent agencies.

If the U.S. Supreme Court eventually greenlights Trump’s efforts to control the Postal Service and other independent agencies, it would mark a “tremendous” change in how the federal government operates, James Campbell Jr., an attorney in the Washington, D.C., area who consults on postal law, said in an interview last month.

“What you’re basically talking about is redesigning the U.S. government,” Campbell said.

Responding to President Donald Trump’s pressure, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has called a special session to redraw the state’s U.S. House map as the party tries to eliminate the only Democratic-held seat in Memphis.

Lee is calling on state lawmakers to return to the state Capitol on May 5 to pass a new Tennessee U.S. congressional district map, less than two weeks after the state legislature wrapped its annual session.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that no longer requires Tennessee and other southern states to create majority-minority districts in their U.S. House and state legislature district maps.

Tennessee, with a Black population of around 16%, was previously required by the Voting Rights Act to draw at least one of its nine congressional districts as majority-minority, effectively helping Democrats hold on to a Memphis-based seat.

“We owe it to Tennesseans to ensure our congressional districts accurately reflect the will of Tennessee voters,” said Lee in a news release. “After consultation with the Lt. Governor, Speaker of the House, Attorney General, and Secretary of State, I believe the General Assembly has a responsibility to review the map and ensure it remains fair, legal, and defensible.”

Lawmakers need to move fast to change the maps before the 2026 midterm elections, as Tennessee’s Congressional primaries will be held on Aug. 6. The qualifying deadline to run in those elections has already passed, and campaigns are in full swing

Republicans currently hold an 8-1 advantage in congressional seats over Democrats. Tennessee is a Republican stronghold that Trump won with around 64% of the vote in 2024. But if party representation were equally distributed without gerrymandering, Democrats would likely hold two or three of the state’s U.S. House seats.

The Republican advantage is even stronger in the state legislature. Republicans control 75% of the state House seats and 81% of the state Senate.

Tennessee Republicans in 2022 were legally able to eliminate a Democratic-held seat in Nashville by splitting it across three congressional districts. This led Democrats to lose the 5th district seat, which the party had held since the end of the 1870s Reconstruction era.

Tennessee U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican running for governor this year, shared a photo on social media of a map showing the GOP winning all nine congressional districts by large margins.

The Lookout, using the nonpartisan Dave’s Redistricting, was able to replicate a similar map to the one Blackburn proposed, but not with the same margins she posted. Based on the 2024 Presidential election, Republicans could achieve a 9-0 outcome, essentially cracking Nashville and Memphis, but would shrink their margins in almost every district.

The map created by the Lookout shows nine districts where Republicans won 60% of the vote based on the 2024 Presidential election. But now six districts would have Republican advantages of less than 12 percentage points, compared to the current two.

Blackburn’s map appears to be based on the 2024 presidential election margin, not the Republican percentage of the vote over 50%, which is how nonpartisan organizations like Cook Political Report rate districts.

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision gutting the federal Voting Rights Act could upend American politics and trigger a new rush to redraw congressional districts.

The opinion released on Wednesday, in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, holds sweeping consequences for how states and local governments draw district lines at all levels of government, from Congress to school boards. 

Louisiana, whose congressional map is at the center of the case, may even suspend an upcoming primary election so state lawmakers can pass a new map. Other states are also weighing new gerrymanders, either this year or before the 2028 election. 

Gerrymandering refers to drawing political maps for the purpose of gaining some form of unfair advantage — whether partisan or racial or to help or hurt an incumbent or candidate.

Following the decision, Democrats are calling for Congress to pass new federal voting rights legislation, but President Donald Trump would likely veto it. Others are urging more radical changes, including expanding the size of the Supreme Court.

As the nation responds to the decision, here’s a States Newsroom look at the decision, what it means and what could happen next.

What is Louisiana v. Callais?

After the 2020 census, the Louisiana Legislature passed a congressional map that included one district where a majority of residents are Black. About a third of the state’s population is Black.

States typically draw new congressional lines once a decade following the census, though several states have pushed through new maps this year after Trump called on Republicans to maximize their political advantage heading into the midterm elections this November.

Black voters challenged the Louisiana map and an appeals court ordered lawmakers to pass a new map. The legislature in 2024 approved a map that includes a second district where a majority of residents are Black, also called a majority-minority district.

In response, a group of white voters sued over the new map, claiming it violated the U.S. Constitution and was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law and the 15th Amendment prohibits denying the right to vote on the basis of race.

The lead plaintiff in the case is Phillip Callais, hence the case’s name. The New York Times reported last year that Callais is a veteran who lives near Baton Rouge. 

The Supreme Court held its first oral argument on the case in March 2025. But instead of issuing a decision later that spring, the court held a second round of oral argument in October. 

At that time, comments by the conservative justices strongly suggested the court was interested in weakening the federal Voting Rights Act.

What is the Voting Rights Act and what role did it play in redistricting?

The Voting Rights Act, or VRA, is a 1965 federal law passed by Congress and signed by President Lyndon Johnson.

The law was designed to stop racial discrimination in voting and combat Jim Crow laws like literacy tests that Southern states used to prevent Black people from voting.

It contains several sections but the Supreme Court decision in Callais dealt with Section 2. That section prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race and other characteristics. In 1982, Congress expanded Section 2 to ban voting practices that have a discriminatory effect, whether or not the law was intended to discriminate.

Section 2 has acted as a ban on racial gerrymandering, or the practice of drawing districts to minimize the political influence of minority voters. Over time, that’s led to the creation of numerous majority-minority congressional districts.

Many of these majority-minority districts are located in Republican-controlled Southern states  but are held by Democrats. In the past, if states drew new maps to spread minority voters across several districts, they could face challenges in federal court under Section 2.

What did the Supreme Court decide?

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 

The court found that because the Voting Rights Act didn’t require Louisiana to create a second majority-minority district, the state didn’t have a compelling reason to consider race when drawing its map.

Under the court’s reasoning, Section 2 only applies when evidence supports a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred. In other words, lawmakers only violate Section 2 when they draw districts with the purpose of affording minority voters less opportunity because of their race.

The court’s majority opinion says “none of the historical evidence presented by plaintiffs came close to showing an objective likelihood that the State’s challenged map was the result of intentional racial discrimination.”

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by all of the court’s conservatives: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neal Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

The court’s three liberal justices — Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented.

Why is the decision a big deal?

The decision empowers states to gerrymander in ways that break apart districts where a majority of residents are Black, Hispanic or belong to another minority group.

In 2019 the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts would no longer take cases about partisan gerrymandering. That’s where states draw maps to help a political party.

Because many majority-minority districts in the South are held by Democrats, the Callais decision gives Republican states the power to break apart these districts if they can show they are doing so for a partisan purpose.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote in a dissent.

In the short term, the decision means several Black Democrats in the U.S. House may lose their seats if states pass new maps either this year before the November midterm elections or before the 2028 election. At least one projection has pegged the potential losses as high as 19 seats.

The loss of even a few Black representatives would constitute the largest drop in Black representation in Congress since Reconstruction following the Civil War, according to an NPR analysis. 

In the long term, minority voters will have a more difficult time electing their preferred candidates if they are moved into majority-white districts. The decision also applies to state legislative districts, meaning the number of Black state lawmakers may drop as well.

What impact does the Voting Rights Act have after the ruling?

Not nearly as much.

The Supreme Court’s decision didn’t strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. But Kagan and other critics of the opinion say the protections once extended by Section 2 are effectively dead.

To block a map under Section 2, challengers will now have to show states intentionally discriminated against minority voters, a very difficult standard when states can say they drew maps for partisan advantage.

In a series of decisions during the past 13 years, the Supreme Court has also weakened other elements of the Voting Rights Act.

In 2013, the court effectively blocked preclearance, another major portion of the law contained in Section 5. Preclearance required states and local governments with a history of discrimination to obtain federal permission before making voting changes.

Preclearance applied to most Southern states and a handful of others. The justices didn’t strike down preclearance, but ruled that the criteria used to determine whether governments should be subject to preclearance was unconstitutional.

The law required districts that had voting tests in place in 1964 and had less than 50% turnout in the 1964 presidential election as eligible for preclearance. The court found that the criteria no longer made sense and were outdated. 

In theory, Congress could pass new criteria that would restore preclearance.

How are Republicans responding?

Republicans in Southern states are pushing for new maps that could hand their party more seats in the November elections — but also oust Black Democratic members of Congress.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, announced on Thursday that the state’s primary election, set for mid-May, would be paused. The suspension will give time for state lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional map to eliminate the state’s second majority-minority district.

“We are working together with the Legislature and the Secretary of State’s office to develop a path forward,” Landry said in a statement.

Florida lawmakers passed a new map hours after the court’s decision that could provide Republicans with up to four additional seats. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis had introduced the map earlier in the week and had cited Callais in urging lawmakers to act.

In Tennessee, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican running for governor, called on state lawmakers to pass a new map. Prominent Republicans in Georgia said the state should pass a new map.

Not all Republicans are pushing for immediate action. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said that while she supports the Supreme Court’s decision, the state wasn’t in a position to hold a special session to redistrict.

How are Democrats responding?

Democrats have condemned the Supreme Court’s opinion and say lawmakers and the public should fight back.

Many Democrats say Congress should pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named after civil rights activist and Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis, who died in 2020. The legislation would set new criteria for preclearance, seeking to restore the practice after the Supreme Court stopped it in 2013.

The U.S. House passed the measure in 2021, but it didn’t advance through the Senate. 

Enacting the measure remains extremely difficult. If Democrats retake control of Congress in the November elections, Trump would almost certainly veto the measure. Republicans in the U.S. Senate would also likely block the bill, unless Democrats eliminate the filibuster.

Democrats are also weighing a new round of gerrymanders in blue states. While most attention has focused on Southern Republican states, Democrats can now also engage in racial vote dilution in states like California to secure additional U.S. House seats.

Some Democrats and opponents of the Supreme Court’s decision are pushing for other responses. 

They include expanding the size of the court from nine justices to dilute its conservative majority, implementing term limits for justices, banning mid-decade redistricting or requiring states to use independent commissions to draw congressional maps.

“We must continue to fight for a democracy in which every vote counts, and in which every vote holds equal power, starting by banning mid-decade gerrymanders nationwide and establishing fair redistricting criteria,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, said in a statement.

But those changes would require federal legislation, giving Republicans the opportunity to stop the proposals through filibusters in the Senate or by Trump’s veto.

A lawsuit seeking to throw out Wisconsin’s congressional maps on the basis that they’re unconstitutionally anti-competitive was dismissed Tuesday by a panel of three circuit court judges. 

The lawsuit was brought last summer by bipartisan business group Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy Coalition, represented by the progressive nonprofit Law Forward. 

For more than a decade, Wisconsin has been a national symbol of the effects of extreme partisan gerrymandering and Tuesday’s dismissal comes amid a effort by both major parties to redraw maps ahead of this fall’s midterm elections. 

A national mid-decade redistricting tit-for-tat started last year when Texas Republicans drew new maps, at President Donald Trump’s request, in an attempt to limit the number of Democrats in the House of Representatives. A number of other Republican states, including Missouri and North Carolina, followed suit. In response, voters in California and Virginia voted to change state laws to allow Democrats to re-draw their maps to minimize Republican seats. 

This week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis introduced a bill that would redraw his state’s maps to give Republicans four more seats. 

While both parties have drawn political maps to favor their own candidates, only congressional Democrats have proposed a bill that would ban partisan gerrymandering. In Wisconsin, state Democrats have long pushed for the adoption of a non-partisan redistricting commission. 

Wisconsin’s current congressional maps were adopted in 2021 by the state Supreme Court after Gov. Tony Evers and Republicans in the Legislature were unable to reach a deal on their own. When forced to weigh in, the Supreme Court instituted a “least change” rule that required any maps proposed to the Court to hew as closely as possible to the maps instituted by Republicans in 2011. The map the Court chose was proposed by Evers, a Democrat, but resulted in a heavily Republican congressional delegation, since they were drawn to adhere to the “least change” standard.

The 2011 political maps and the least change decision allowed Republicans to hold six of the state’s eight congressional seats. The state Supreme Court tossed out the state’s legislative maps in 2023 — which remained heavily gerrymandered under the “least change” standard — on the grounds that the shapes of the districts, some of which were broken into noncontiguous parts, were illegal. 

Over the years, the court system has heard a number of challenges to Wisconsin’s congressional maps on the basis that they are an illegal partisan gerrymander. A separate three-judge panel dismissed another lawsuit on partisan gerrymandering grounds late last month. 

Despite that dismissal, the Law Forward lawsuit argued that its claims were new and therefore deserved to be considered by the courts. The lawsuit argued that the maps were drawn to unfairly give incumbents of both parties an advantage, pointing to the fact that only one of the state’s congressional districts, western Wisconsin’s 3rd CD, is regularly decided by a single-digit margin. 

“After the Wisconsin Legislature adopted the 2011 congressional map, congressional races over the ensuing decade were, as intended, highly uncompetitive,” the lawsuit stated. “The Court’s adoption … of the ‘least change’ congressional map necessarily perpetuated the essential features — and the primary flaws — of the 2011 congressional map, including the 2011 congressional map’s intentional and effective effort to suppress competition.”

Republicans and their allies intervened in the case, arguing that it should be dismissed because the anti-competitive argument treads the same ground as the partisan gerrymandering claims the Court has already declined to hear. 

The three-judge panel, made up of Dane County Judge David Conway, Marathon County Judge Michael Moran and Portage County Judge Patricia Baker, agreed and dismissed the case, noting that the makeup of the state’s political maps is a question best left to the political branches of government, not the judicial system.

“Plaintiffs’ anti-competitive gerrymandering claims are functionally equivalent to partisan gerrymandering claims, at least for purposes of the political question analysis,” the judges wrote. “In a two-party system, partisan fairness and competitiveness are correlated: a more competitive map is typically a fairer map, whereas less competition usually means less partisan fairness. The objective of both theories is to change ‘the partisan makeup of districts,’ whether by achieving proportional representation, electoral competitiveness, or both.” 

Doug Poland, Law Forward’s director of litigation, said in a statement Tuesday that it’s disappointing the panel dismissed the case before it had the opportunity to hear evidence. He also said the panel’s ruling will be appealed directly to the Supreme Court. 

“This is the first anti-competitive gerrymandering case ever filed in Wisconsin courts, and it deserves to be heard,” Poland said. “We believe that the circuit court was wrong in concluding that anti-competitive gerrymandering is ‘functionally equivalent’ to partisan gerrymandering. They are different claims, based on different evidence, that target different ways of manipulating representation to the detriment of voters.”

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National leaders warned the Detroit NAACP of an ongoing attack on democracy during what organizers say is the largest sitdown dinner of its kind in the world Sunday.

Speakers at the 71st annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner, including U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York Attorney General Letitia James, said efforts to obtain Michigan ballot data, require proof of citizenship to vote and potentially weaken the Voting Rights Act present a major threat to the rights of Americans.

James received the Ida B. Wells Freedom and Justice Award, which she said she shares with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel after Nessel pledged to deny the federal government access to Michigan’s ballots from the 2024 presidential election.

“This award’s namesake once said, ‘The way to right wrongs is to light the truth upon them, to shine light in the darkness,’” James said. “AG Nessel is the holder of that light of liberty in Michigan, just as our ancestors grabbed the torch of freedom and used it to light the way forward for all of us.”

Jeffries said the election of President Donald Trump in 2024 “was definitively a setback,” but said that “a setback is nothing more than a setup for a comeback.”

He said 2026 will be the year of the “great American comeback.”

“We’re not here to step back,” Jeffries said. “We’re here to push back at all times and ensure that this country will have a free and fair election in November.”

The Democratic leader – who was introduced by several speakers as the next speaker of the House – said that “when the gavels change hands,” Democrats will pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act “so we can end the era of voter suppression in the United States of America once and for all.”

The theme of this year’s dinner was “Liberty or Oppression – The Choice is Ours.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said the “choice between liberty and oppression is really one between apathy and action.”

“They don’t want Detroit to have a voice. They can’t defend their record of failure, so they want to rig the game to win. But not on my watch, not on your watch, not on our watch,” Whitmer said. “I know it’s hard to feel energetic right now, but nothing changes if we take a back seat.”

The dinner came one day after a gunman opened fire near the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., reportedly targeting Trump.

Jeffries condemned political violence and thanked law enforcement for protecting the attendees at both events.

“Here in America, we should be able to agree to disagree without ever being disagreeable with each other,” Jeffries said. “At the same time, I can assure you that we will continue to speak truth to power at all times as we navigate our way through the trials, the turbulence and the tribulations of this moment.”

James said political violence “has no place in society,” adding that she has faced threats to her own life.

But she added that she continues to “yearn and pray for a compassionate, civil, competent and inclusive government in Washington, D.C.”

The Detroit NAACP also honored civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, who was the first Black child to attend the formerly whites-only William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.

Jeffries said “our community has always had the ability to imagine a better future here in America and then work hard to bring it about.”

James said Bridges set an example for everyone to follow.

“If a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges can find the courage to walk through an angry, screaming mob just to get to school, so can we,” James said.

President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting would shatter decades of U.S. Postal Service independence intended to shield it from partisan politics, postal experts and attorneys say.

Postal experts said Trump ordering the postmaster general to take any action — let alone on a matter as sensitive as elections — violates guardrails in federal law against presidential control of the mail. Multiple people with deep knowledge of Postal Service history said they couldn’t recall a similar order in the agency’s modern era.

“For the president to direct the postmaster general to do anything, including handling these ballots, is contrary to the statutes, contrary to law,” said James Campbell Jr., an attorney in the Washington, D.C., area who consults on postal law.

The order, signed March 31, attracted swift condemnation as an unconstitutional attempt by Trump to control state-run elections. If it stands, the directive would also represent a White House power grab over the Postal Service, which remains a key part of American life and business.

Trump’s order directs the postmaster general, who acts as the Postal Service’s CEO, to set out rules that would require states to notify the Postal Service if they intend to send ballots through the mail during federal elections. States that want to use the mail would be required to provide lists of mail voters to the Postal Service, which would be prohibited from delivering ballots to individuals not on a list.

A Board of Governors leads the Postal Service, and holds the power to hire and fire the postmaster general. No more than five of the nine governors may belong to the same political party. 

While presidents nominate the governors and the Senate confirms them, they serve seven-year terms. The length, in theory, insulates them from political pressure.

S. David Fineman, a Philadelphia attorney nominated to the Board of Governors by President Bill Clinton who served as its chairman from 2003 to 2005, said he had never heard of the White House or a president directing the postmaster general to take certain actions. He called the executive order highly unusual.

“The postmaster general serves at the pleasure of the board,” Fineman said.

The board currently has only four members, all appointed by President Joe Biden, and five vacancies. Trump has sent four nominations to the U.S. Senate this year. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has not scheduled confirmation hearings for the nominees.

Cash-strapped service

Trump has expressed interest in having more control over the mail. 

Last year, he floated the possibility of merging the Postal Service with the Commerce Department, a move that would require approval by Congress. The Washington Post reported in February 2025 that Trump was expected to try to fire the Board of Governors and take control of the Postal Service.

The Trump administration takes a dim view of independent agencies. Many allies of the president subscribe to the unitary executive theory, the idea that the U.S. Constitution grants the president full power over the entirety of the executive branch — meaning Congress cannot constitutionally create agencies that exist outside of White House control.

Trump has moved to assert authority over a number of independent and quasi-independent agencies since taking office, most notably the Federal Reserve. The Department of Justice is investigating cost overruns on a Federal Reserve construction project, widely seen as a pretext to target Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman whose interest rate policy has angered Trump.

The Postal Service is under tremendous financial pressure — potentially making it more vulnerable to proposals to bring it under White House control. Mail volume peaked in 2006 at 213 billion pieces that year. The Postal Service today handles 109 billion pieces annually.

The current postmaster general, David Steiner, told a U.S. House committee last month that the Postal Service will run out of cash within a year without changes to its prices and operations. The Postal Service is generally funded through stamps and other forms of user revenue, not by tax dollars.

Steiner emphasized the independent nature of the Postal Service throughout his prepared testimony. He has laid out a number of options to improve the Postal Service’s financial stability, including changes to pension funding and raising its borrowing limit from $15 billion, a level that’s remained unchanged since 1992.

“It is important to remember that we face these challenges as a self-financed, independent establishment of the Executive Branch,” Steiner wrote.

Congress approved sweeping legislation in 1970 reorganizing the U.S. Post Office Department into the U.S. Postal Service, an independent corporation. Before that, the postmaster general was a Cabinet-level position nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Trump’s order marks “a dramatic shift away from the intent of the 1970 legislation to insulate the Postal Service from interference,” Joseph M. Adelman, a history professor at Framingham State University in Massachusetts who has researched mail history, said.

Election security

The White House didn’t directly answer States Newsroom’s questions about Trump’s views on the independence of the Postal Service or the legal justification for the executive order.

“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump, and the American people sent him back to the White House because they overwhelmingly supported his commonsense election integrity agenda,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.

“The President will do everything in his power to lawfully defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”

Jackson also called on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship when registering. 

The Postal Service didn’t answer questions about how it plans to respond to the order. A USPS spokesperson said only that the Postal Service was reviewing it. 

Lawsuits

Steiner has indicated he’s awaiting a court decision on how to proceed. 

“If a court says that’s not what the law means, we’ll follow that,” Steiner told The New York Times after the executive order was signed. “And so from our perspective, we don’t get involved in policy or law, we just follow the law.”

The order on mail ballots faces at least five lawsuits. The Democratic National Committee, top Democrats in Congress and Democratic state officials have all sued. The legal challenges emphasize the Postal Service’s independence in federal law.

The lawsuit filed by the DNC, top Democratic lawmakers and other Democratic campaign groups, asserts the Postal Service is structured to operate independently of partisan politics. The complaint calls the Postal Service “indispensable” to voting by mail, noting that it delivered more than 222 million pieces of ballot mail in 2024, including nearly 100 million general election ballots.

A dozen Republican state attorneys general filed motions in court this week seeking to defend the executive order from the Democratic legal challenges. The motions call the order an example of cooperative federalism to provide states with optional resources to help protect their elections.

The GOP officials argue the Democrats lack standing to challenge the Postal Service provisions of the order and that their objections are premature because the Postal Service hasn’t finalized any new rules on mail ballots.

The order “simply directs” the Postal Service “to initiate rulemaking—it does not regulate the States directly and it does not directly inhibit anyone’s voting rights,” a court filing by the state attorneys general says.

The states involved in the Republican-led defense of the order include Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas.

Vote-by-mail 

Mail-in voting surged in 2020’s general election amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when 43% of voters cast their votes by mail. The percentage of voters mailing their ballots has fallen from that peak but remains above pre-pandemic levels. About 30% of voters cast mail ballots in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

During the 2024 election, 584,463 mail ballots returned by voters were rejected by election officials — 1.2% of returned mail ballots. About 18% of those ballots were rejected because they didn’t arrive on time.

American Postal Workers Union President Jonathan Smith said in a statement that the Postal Service doesn’t block mailers from sending letters or refuse to deliver letters because of the identity of the sender. Postal workers take extraordinary measures to ensure ballots reach their destinations promptly and securely, he said.

“Postal workers take the sanctity of the mail seriously, and every process and policy of the Postal Service ensures that mail is accepted, processed, and delivered, no matter who sent it or where it is going,” Smith said.

On Monday, more than 100 U.S. House Democrats sent a letter to Trump demanding he refrain from future actions that undermine the Postal Service’s independence and calling on him to rescind the executive order. The letter says the order sets “a dangerous precedent for political interference” in postal service operations.

Senate Democrats followed up with a letter to Steiner and the USPS Board of Governors on Tuesday, urging the Postal Service to not implement the order. The letter, signed by 37 senators, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, calls the Postal Service’s independence a “hallmark” of its operations.

“The Postal Service doesn’t care which politicians you may support,” Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, said on the Senate floor last week. “Its only priority is to deliver the mail to every community in the country.”

“The president is now trying to corrupt this mission,” Peters, the top Democrat on the Senate committee that oversees USPS, said. “If the president is successful in forcing the Postal Service to play a role in running elections, he will completely erode the trust of this storied institution.”