Trump signs second federal-elections executive order asserting presidential control over voter eligibility and mail voting

On March 31, 2026, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14399, "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections." The order directs two federal agencies — the Department of Homeland Security (via its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program) and the Social Security Administration — to build federal "citizenship verification" lists for use in determining who may vote in federal elections, and instructs the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people who appear on those lists. The order purports to rest the authority for these directives on Article II of the Constitution and on existing federal voter-registration statutes.

This is the second elections-focused executive order of Trump's second term. The first, issued in March 2025, was substantially blocked by federal courts: in January 2026, D.C. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly held that "our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures." The Elections Clause (Art. I, Sec. 4) vests the regulation of federal-election "Times, Places and Manner" in the states, with Congress empowered to modify state rules. The Brennan Center, the Brookings Institution, NPR's election-law sources, and the coalition of state attorneys general that has filed suit all characterize the new order as duplicating the legal flaw of the first.

Twenty-four state attorneys general, joined by the Governor of Pennsylvania, filed for summary judgment to permanently block the order. Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who is part of that coalition, described the central issue: the executive order asks the U.S. Postal Service to act as an arbiter of voter eligibility, "and that's not a role the Postal Service was built for, not a power the federal government has, and not something Oregon will accept."

Beyond the constitutional question, the order's practical mechanism — restricting mail-ballot delivery to a federally maintained allow-list — creates a likely path to disenfranchisement of eligible voters whose records do not cleanly match DHS or SSA databases, a population that historically skews toward naturalized citizens, voters who have moved recently, and voters whose names differ slightly across records. The practical effect is voter suppression in addition to the structural overreach.