Here’s What 34 Courts Have Said About the Trump Administration’s Attempts to Take Over Elections

In March 2025, the president issued an unprecedented, far-ranging executive order that sought to require people using the federal voter registration form to show a passport or another document proving citizenship to register to vote. 

The next month, the federal district court for the District of Columbia ordered the administration to pause efforts to implement the order’s “show your papers” requirement. As the court delved into the history of the Constitution’s separation of powers over elections, it stated a clear message:

The States have initial authority to regulate elections. Congress has supervisory authority over those regulations. The President does not feature at all. In fact, Executive regulatory authority over federal elections does not appear to have crossed the Framers’ minds.

League of United Latin American Citizens v. Trump, April 24, 2025

Six months later, in October 2025, the court permanently blocked the same requirement. Then, in January 2026, the court blocked additional provisions of the executive order. The court began with another clear statement about the Constitution:

Simply put, our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.

League of United Latin American Citizens v. Trump, January 30, 2026

In total, three federal courts have blocked the implementation of most provisions of the order.

Two months later, President Trump issued a second executive order on elections. It directed the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to refuse to deliver mail ballots to voters not appearing on newly created federal mail voter lists. Like the first executive order, it was an unconstitutional attempt by the president to exercise power over elections. Numerous lawsuits were filed, including one by a coalition of 23 states and another by voting rights organizations represented by the Brennan Center and others. 

In June, a federal district court in the District of Massachusetts blocked parts of the order from going into effect in the states that had sued. But two months later, on August 24, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order holding that the states did not yet have legal standing to sue because the USPS had not yet published a final rule attempting to implement the executive order. 

Two days after the Supreme Court’s order, the USPS published a final rule. The Massachusetts court blocked USPS from implementing the rule ahead of the November 2026 election. In doing so, the court made clear that the rule illegally attempted to exceed the Postal Service’s authority:

Unauthorized by the Elections Clause, the Final Rule clashes with Congress’s statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress’s Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States.

League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump, September 4, 2026

And the court noted that millions of voters could be blocked from casting ballots this fall if the rule were implemented:

Immediate implementation of the Final Rule issued less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail.

League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump, September 4, 2026

The Supreme Court agreed that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits, leaving the district court order in place. The ruling affirmed that voters can cast their mail ballots for the midterms without the threat of the USPS refusing to deliver ballots.

When it comes to the administration’s unlawful executive orders, several court decisions have made it clear that only states and Congress can make rules for federal elections.

In May 2025, the Trump administration’s Justice Department began demanding voter files from almost every state, apparently seeking to amass a national voter file and force states to remove certain voters. Election officials from both parties have refused to turn over their complete voter rolls, which contain voters’ confidential information like driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers. The Justice Department has filed 31 lawsuits seeking this sensitive voter data. Appeals are continuing. Yet the Justice Department is currently 0–26 in these cases. And in another case where voting rights organization Common Cause and four individual voters challenged the department’s nationwide policy of seeking such data, a federal court recently blocked the department’s efforts. From rulings across the country, three themes have emerged.

Unconstitutional Demands

In the first case to rule on the Justice Department’s demands, a federal district court in California held that the administration could not “unilaterally usurp the authority over elections it seeks” in its demands for state voter rolls.

The taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece-by-piece until there is nothing left. The case before the Court is one of these cuts that imperils all Americans.

United States v. Weber, January 15, 2026

As the court observed, giving the Justice Department unfettered access to sensitive voter data could erode privacy and voting rights. Since that court’s decision, multiple courts to consider these cases have likewise observed that the Constitution does not give the executive branch the power to force states to hand over their sensitive voter data.

The federal court that recently rejected the department’s nationwide policy of seeking sensitive voter data came to the same conclusion.

The challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote. But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.

Common Cause v. U.S. Department of Justice, October 9, 2026

Misuses of Civil Rights Law

While courts have differed on their reasons, every court to decide these cases has held that the laws the Justice Department cites cannot be used to justify the department’s efforts.

Several courts have called these demands what they are: baseless.

Absent from the demand are any factual allegations suggesting that Rhode Island may be violating the list maintenance requirements of the [National Voter Registration Act of 1993] and [the Help America Vote Act of 2002], let alone the [Civil Rights Act of 1960].

United States v. Amore, April 17, 2026

Clearly, this demand is devoid of any factual basis.

United States v. Warner, July 13, 2026

Some courts have also contrasted the department’s efforts with the history of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which the Justice Department has argued allows it to demand any election-related records it wants from state and local officials.

Congress passed that law, however, to address rampant attempts to block access to the ballot through racially discriminatory restrictions, not to give the Justice Department unfettered access to voters’ data. Courts recognizing this have included judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. A Maine federal judge appointed by Trump discussed how the demands ignored Congress’s decisions:

Construing the Civil Rights Act of 1960—enacted as strong medicine to address the stubborn ill of racial discrimination in voting booths across the Jim Crow South—to implicitly provide the United States a right to every state’s [Statewide Voter Registration List] . . . would take a sledgehammer to the balance Congress struck when it required states to create and maintain computerized lists of registered voters in the first place. 

United States v. Bellows, May 21, 2026

So did the federal court in California:

It is not for the Executive, or even this Court to authorize the use of civil rights legislation as a tool to forsake the privacy rights of millions of Americans. That power belongs solely to Congress.

United States v. Weber, January 15, 2026

Nationwide Effort to Undermine Elections

Some courts have pointed to the Justice Department’s concerning plans for voter data, and the ways those plans could impact voting.

Soon after the California court’s decision, a federal court in Oregon observed that the Justice Department’s claims were “troubling for several reasons.”

[The Justice Department’s] words and actions outside of the four corners of its Complaint in this case, including statements that it intends to create a nationwide database of confidential voter information and use it in unprecedented ways, including immigration enforcement efforts, is chilling.

United States v. Oregon, February 5, 2026

The court then explained why those chilling statements matter: they could “lead to an erosion of voting rights and voter participation.”

Similarly, a federal court in Pennsylvania, pointing to potential data breaches, asked, “What, a reader rhetorically may ask, could possibly go wrong?” The court echoed the Oregon court’s concern about efforts to create a “nationwide voter database.” And the court contrasted Congress’s passage of laws responding to voting barriers with the administration’s justifications for its voter roll demands.

Unlike race discrimination in the south (the Civil Rights Act of 1960); recognized deficiencies in accessing the right of suffrage (National Voting Rights Act of 1993); and to assuage contention in the face of a close election (Help America Vote Act of 2002) — concerns regarding widespread voting by non-citizens simply are not borne out by reality.

United States v. Schmidt, June 27, 2026

The message is clear: Courts have questioned the administration’s proffered justifications for sensitive voter data — and should keep doing so.

So far, federal courts have largely rebuffed the administration’s efforts to meddle in elections. The Supreme Court has not always done the same. While the Court maintained a federal district court order blocking a USPS rule on mail voting, it recently overturned another court order that would have temporarily blocked the administration’s efforts to use the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, an error-prone program that could lead to eligible citizens being blocked from voting. 

The SAVE program was originally designed to help verify the citizenship of applicants for government benefits. An expanded program implemented by the current administration allows states and counties to conduct bulk searches for anyone with a Social Security number and to access passport data from the State Department to identify supposed noncitizens on voter rolls. The program’s data has several shortcomings and could fuel false or misleading claims of widespread fraud.

The League of Women Voters and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the Department of Homeland Security, Social Security Administration, and other federal governmental actors to block the collection and use of Americans’ personal data. In June 2026, a federal district court in the District of Columbia ruled that the SAVE overhaul was illegal. The court highlighted the multitude of ways in which the SAVE program could be used erroneously to disenfranchise voters, such as false positives and inaccurate removals:

The agencies were scrambling to comply with an Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification. So they haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.

League of Women Voters v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, June 22, 2026

And the court’s order squarely raised the privacy issues at stake:

All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote. This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.
 
League of Women Voters v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, June 22, 2026

The court’s order had stopped use of the expanded SAVE program in most of the country (despite another federal court ordering DHS to restore access to the program in four states). The administration asked the federal court of appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to stay, or pause, the order while litigation continued. The appeals court declined to do so.

At the administration’s urging, however, the Supreme Court stayed the district court’s order. This means that the expanded SAVE program, which the district court found to be illegal, may continue in use while the case goes through the regular appeals process. The Court sidestepped plaintiff organizations’ arguments that use of the program violated federal privacy laws, concluding the government would likely prevail on the merits. 

The Court’s order likely will not affect the midterms. But it does remove a key safeguard as litigation over the program continues, and it overlooks the facts behind a federal data program that could be exploited to sow doubt in elections. 

•  •  •

Although some cases continue and others have been affected by the Supreme Court, legal challenges to the president’s coordinated campaign to undermine elections are succeeding.

The 34 federal district court decisions reviewed above include, as of October 16, 2026, 8 orders in cases challenging Trump administration actions related to elections and 26 dismissals of Justice Department demands for statewide voter registration lists.

Orders in cases challenging Trump administration actions related to elections include the cases below.

For dismissals of Justice Department demands for statewide voter registration lists, see Tracker for Justice Department Requests for Voter Information.