Trump election overhaul effort faces federal lawsuits

WASHINGTON (CN) — President Donald Trump faces a pair of federal lawsuits filed Thursday and late Wednesday challenging his recent executive order aiming to reshape the nation’s election system as a similar congressional bill stalls on Capitol Hill.

On Tuesday, Trump signed “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” which would create lists of U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and instructs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to verified voters.

The president has long railed against mail-in voting — despite using it himself to vote during the March 26 special election in Palm Beach County, Florida — calling it “mail-in cheating” and blaming the practice in part for his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Speaking in regard to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which passed in the House but would need 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster, Trump claimed its passage would ensure Republicans would “never lose a race — for 50 years.”

If the SAVE Act passes, most new voters would need to appear in person at an election office with a valid U.S. passport, a certified birth certificate with a photo ID, a naturalization certificate or a Consular Report of Birth Abroad. Only five states currently issue enhanced driver’s licenses that meet the requirements.

In Wednesday’s lawsuit, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argue Trump’s order would rip control over elections from the states into the president’s hands.

The Democrats filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and are requesting U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Bill Clinton appointee, to declare the order unconstitutional. The Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Governors Association and the Democrats’ Senate and House campaign committees also joined the suit.

New documentation requirements for voter registration threaten to disenfranchise lawful voters, the Democrats argue.

“Our Constitution’s framers anticipated this kind of desire for absolute power,” the Democrats said. “They recognized the menace it would pose to ordered liberty and the ways in which it would corrode self-government like an acid. And so to preserve the people’s own sovereignty, they crafted a system of government to resist that threat.”

The order is clearly outside the president’s authority because it does not stem from either an act of Congress or his enumerated powers in the Constitution, they add, and further violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the Privacy Act.

Specifically, the Democrats claim “State Citizenship Lists” and the requirement they be shared with states within 60 days of every federal election are just as illegal as the administration’s previous efforts to create national citizenship registries to assist its mass deportation campaign.

The Democrats argue they would be severely harmed by the president’s attempts to “upturn the electoral playing field in his own favor and against his political rivals.” Further, their members and supporters will be likewise injured by the order’s obstacles to casting ballots, frustration of the fair administration of federal elections and mandated unlawful disclosures of protected information.

“In view of the rapidly approaching — and in some cases already completed — federal elections and the short timeframes imposed by President Trump’s order, plaintiffs respectfully request urgent equitable and declaratory relief,” the Democrats said.

In a separate lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts Thursday, a coalition led by the League of Women Voters similarly challenge Trump’s Tuesday order.

The groups warn the new documentation requirements would disenfranchise millions of eligible citizens.

“In effect, the order seeks to interpose a federal screening regime between voters and the ballot box by empowering a federal mail carrier to withhold certain voters’ ballots,” the coalition said. “In doing so, the order displaces the roles that the Constitution and federal law assign to the states and Congress to regulation elections and to USPS and a neutral, nondiscriminatory carrier of the mail.”

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