What Is Trump’s ‘Election Integrity’ Order Even Trying to Achieve?

President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order seeking to create federal lists of eligible voters that could then be used to restrict mail-in ballots. “I believe it’s foolproof,” he said. “And maybe it’ll be tested. Maybe it won’t.”

The order isn’t foolproof: The Constitution explicitly gives the states and Congress, not the White House, power over elections. Also, it will be tested: Already, top elections officials in Arizona and Oregon have vowed to take the White House to court over the directives, and so have a collection of voting groups. One or more are almost certain to have the standing necessary to challenge the measure in court. 

But whether or not the president will ultimately lose in court, it’s worth trying to understand what the executive order appears to be trying to achieve, the precise steps the order purports to take, and the enforcement mechanisms by which it purports to take them.

What the Order Does 

The executive order is, thanks either to intention or incompetence, terribly confusing. 

The EO announces its aim as “maintaining public confidence in election outcomes” as well as enhancing “election integrity” via mail. Over the subsequent pages, it details two directives: one involving the Department of Homeland Security creating lists of eligible voters to share with each state, and the second involving the United States Postal Service standardizing the formatting of ballot envelopes as well as creating lists of individuals, also to share with each state, whose mail-in and absentee ballots it will transmit. The following sections are devoted to implementation and enforcement. 

The document mandates that the Department of Homeland Security construct “State Citizenship Lists” derived from federal citizenship, naturalization and social security records, as well as other databases, that determine who is eligible to vote, and transmit these lists to the relevant state at least 60 days before an election. 

But what happens next after those lists are transmitted to states is unclear. The order contains no requirement that states use the lists to do anything—it simply enables them to “routinely supplement” or suggest modifications to the lists should they desire. 

The EO also specifies that states “may choose” to notify the Postal Service if they intend to transmit mail-in or absentee ballots through the Postal Service, instructing them also to indicate whether they intend to submit to the Postal Service “no fewer than 60 days prior to an election” a list of eligible voters to whom they intend to send those ballots. 

The only mandatory part of this process involves a proposed Postal Service rulemaking. This rulemaking must include provisions specifying that the Postal Service “shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual unless those individuals have been enrolled” on state-specific “Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists” prepared by the Postal Service and provided to the states. 

What, reasonable people may wonder, are these “Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists”? The prevailing interpretation, at least in the early hours after the order was signed, was that after the “State Citizenship Lists” were transmitted to the states, the states would verify their voter rolls against them; create a list of mail-in or absentee voters from the verified rolls; and share that list with the Postal Service. The Postal Service would then convert said list into the aforementioned “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List,” possibly cross-referencing it with the “State Citizenship List” to check accuracy. Effectively, every entity—the federal government, the states and the Postal Service—would be drawing from the Department of Homeland Security’s “State Citizenship Lists.”

It’s still possible that its own rulemaking will require the Postal Service to compare any list of mail-in or absentee ballots to the “State Citizenship Lists” to create its “Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists.” But that is not what the order actually mandates—nor does it mandate that the lists states submit to the Postal Service include only voters deemed eligible on the Department of Homeland Security’s lists. 

The executive order also says that the Postal Service rulemaking must include standardized markings for envelopes carrying ballots, including unique barcodes. Many states do some form of this already, and many voting groups believe it’s good policy. But—the constitutionality of the design decree aside—the changes seem oriented toward facilitating the Postal Service rulemaking requirement that the agency “shall not” transmit ballots addressed to individuals who don’t appear on its “Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists.”

How the Order Does It 

Precisely how the White House hopes to ensure the executive order has any practical effect remains uncertain. For one thing, the Postal Service is an independent agency run by a board of governors, over which the president has no direct authority. This state of affairs presents similar obstacles as the administration confronted in its attempt to strongarm the also-independent Election Assistance Commission in a (largely invalidated) elections-related EO issued around this time last year. 

What’s more, little in the order is actually required of the states—which aren’t told what they must or must not do with either the “State Citizenship Lists” or the “Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists” transmitted to them. 

The order resolves this problem by threatening states “noncompliant” with federal law, citing a bevy of statutes barring everything from conspiracy against rights; to conspiracy to defraud the United States; to non-citizen voting; to false statements within U.S. government jurisdiction; to false statements related to naturalization or citizenship; to various voting-related acts. (The Postal Service rulemaking portion of the order also refers to mail fraud and theft statutes.) Those states, the order says, risk losing federal funding—a punishment written so broadly it appears to refer to any form of federal funding, rather than funding specifically related to the mailing of ballots or even elections.

The order also directs the attorney general to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of state or local election officials, states or localities and their instrumentalities against whom there is evidence of having violated federal law—as well as the investigation and prosecution of “individuals and public or private entities engaged in, or aiding and abetting, the printing, production, shipment, or distribution of ballots” to ineligible individuals. 

These enforcement provisions may have the effect—even the aim—of intimidating relevant parties into using the  State Citizenship Lists to determine mail-in and absentee voter eligibility, despite the order itself not requiring them to do so, to avoid attracting federal enforcement scrutiny.

Can the Order Do That?

This executive order is sure to encounter the same impediment that thwarted the president’s previous elections-related executive order: the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section IV delegates regulation of the time, place and manner of elections to the states, with a secondary role reserved for Congress.

Congress hasn’t authorized anything remotely similar to what the executive order contemplates on the formatting and transmission of mail-in or absentee ballots; the EO’s citation of the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act, both of which facilitate rather than restrict voting, hardly helps. (In fact, the order’s 60-day pre-election deadline for the transmission of eligibility lists directly conflicts with the NRVA’s “quiet period” of 90 days preceding a federal election during which registration removals are severely limited.)

Absent such authorization, the president can’t claim any authority over elections. The Article II Take Care Clause argument the order appears to make—by noting the federal government’s “unavoidable duty” to enforce federal law—is unlikely to sway the judiciary.

The president can instruct the Department of Homeland Security to put together a list (though exactly how it does so may invite legal questions of its own, as has become apparent in the administration’s efforts, presumably related to this latest gambit, to acquire the voter rolls of every state). But it can’t force states to do anything in particular with that list, nor can it tell the Postal Service only to transmit mail-in or absentee ballots to voters on that list.

Similarly, while the executive does have the authority to prosecute certain types of election fraud, as statutorily specified, a successful prosecution would demand much more of the Department of Justice than proving a voter or voters didn’t appear on a federally generated list of eligible individuals. That means this enforcement mechanism can’t really bite. And if its bark is enough to scare states into complying with requirements the White House has no right to foist on them, that’s an issue in itself. The threats to withhold funding to force compliance with federal law are similarly dubious, according to recent Tenth Amendment jurisprudence.

The order anticipates objections under the Privacy Act, saying three separate times that the preparation of its multiple lists must take place consistent with that statute. Whether that’s really possible is unclear. But there are other conflicts with existing law, too: The USPS’s conflicting mandate for universal service also presents a problem for the Trump administration, considering the obligation would be impossible to fulfill under a dictate not to deliver mail from a designated group of constituents. Even more alarmingly, experts agree that federal eligibility lists of any sort are likely to contain manifold inaccuracies—becoming out of date almost the moment they’re compiled. That means the White House’s voting regime would almost certainly deprive eligible voters of the right to vote.

Why Is the Order Even Trying? 

This week’s executive order doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Rather, it exists in a vortex of similar efforts by the administration to alter federal elections even absent congressional or constitutional authority.

Some of these are backward-looking, transparently motivated by a 2020 loss that President Trump still hasn’t accepted: The FBI seized ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, in a search whose supporting affidavits are stuffed with conspiracy theories. The agency has also subpoenaed records from Maricopa County, Arizona, also a locus of unfounded accusations about a stolen contest. 

The White House’s focus on the midterms ahead may be forward-looking—but it also connects to those same fantastical grips. Heather Honey and Kurt Olsen, both reportedly involved in discussions around the latest order, are notable election deniers. The president has said that the only way to stop the opposition from cheating again is to introduce the reforms precisely like those the order contains. The largely invalidated spring 2025 EO sought to restrict mail-in voting; give the Department of Homeland Security greater access to voter rolls; compel voters to prove their identity and citizenship while registering; and decertify a wide array of voting machines. The latest EO, read together with nationwide demands for voter rolls, takes a step toward realizing the same vision. 

As for voter ID and proof of citizenship? “We’d like to have voter ID,” Trump said as he signed the EO. “We’re working on it. You would think it’d be easy.”

It isn’t easy for the executive to impose voter ID requirements, because the Constitution makes it impossible. But that hasn’t stopped the president from trying—and it’s unlikely to stop him next time, either.