As the U.S. midterm elections draw closer, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Trump administration is trying to gain a political advantage by reshaping the election system. The official justification is the same in every case: protecting the “integrity” of elections and preventing fraud. But according to the American press and many legal experts, these initiatives are not in fact aimed at fraud; rather, they create new obstacles to voting that could primarily affect Democratic-leaning voter groups.
American Community Media held an exciting press briefing on this topic with Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School (LMU), former senior White House adviser and former official in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice; Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights and the rule of law at the Campaign Legal Center, an adjunct law professor and one of the leading voting-rights litigators in the United States; John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC); and Andrea Senteno, Washington regional counsel for MALDEF.
With the midterms approaching, the federal government is pushing to tighten voting requirements and is demanding that every state turn over election records. The Department of Justice has sued 23 states and Washington, D.C. because they refused to comply with demands to produce election records, including complete statewide voter registration lists and, in some cases, ballots from prior elections or access to voting equipment.
Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Congress is advancing an elections bill that would tighten voter identification requirements, mandate voter-roll purges, and restrict voting by mail. Considering that in Republican-majority states serious efforts are under way to eliminate Democratic-majority districts by redrawing district boundaries, it can be said that organized, system-level election manipulation is taking place.
When Trump says he wants Republicans to “nationalize” voting in at least 15 places, what else could that mean, and the question is how the law can be enforced to prevent it? Justin Levitt says the disruptions stem from an expansion of executive power: the common problem is that the president is claiming authority he does not have. Therefore, “legally he cannot do it; he does not have operational permission for it.”
“The president has extremely broad power in many areas; some of it is granted by the Constitution or by Congress, but elections are a different matter. He doesn’t have his hand on the switch that affects things related to elections. We’re used to him being able to impose his will even when there are legal limits. But when it comes to elections, he does not control them. State officials or those responsible simply ignore him, or they tell him they disagree. They are the ones who run American elections,” Levitt says.
Trump is trying to collect voter rolls from different states across the country: he cannot do that, and the states are resisting. He issued an executive order directing states what to do, but the courts blocked it, and the states are not listening to him. The “nationalization” of elections does not depend on him. There is greater power in Congress, and serious restrictions are being considered. Some pass the House and get stuck in the Senate. Future laws would restrict access to voter registration, but much of the federal effort has been about marketing, and it gets stuck at this level.
Everyone is expecting extraordinarily high turnout this fall, which is why we see strong attempts from the White House, because most voters appear not to support Trump. What is decisive is that elections are administered by state and local officials, and communities can turn to those officials for guidance. Things do not merely happen to voters; voters have agency and can resist. The strongest resistance to aggressive laws by voters happens at the ballot box. Even so, interference will create chaos for voters.
According to Levitt, the greatest damage is the shaking of confidence in the integrity of elections, because Trump has convinced many people that fraud occurred and that elections are not clean. But when people actually work on local elections, even if they are election skeptics or work as pollsters, they leave with the deepest respect for the election structure. To reduce distrust, the effort is precisely to make everything as transparent and verifiable as possible for everyone.
The House of Representatives passed the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship and a government-issued photo ID to register to vote. A day earlier, the House held a hearing on the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act. Both bills, however, have little chance of passing the Senate. The MEGA Act would require voters to show a photo ID, would limit mail ballots to voters who request them, and would require that mail ballots be received by the time polls close on Election Day.
The problem with these measures is that people who do not have a car often do not obtain a driver’s license, which in America also serves as a photo ID. Under normal circumstances, state records and a Social Security card make it clear whether someone has voting rights and is a citizen. A photo ID excludes many Black voters or other minority Democratic voters. This is even more true in the case of a passport, which costs money, and not everyone has a passport because not everyone travels.
The bill would also require states to verify citizenship during voter registration, would have required verifiable paper ballots, would ban ranked-choice voting, and would eliminate universal vote-by-mail systems. Legal scholars and voting-rights advocates say that despite House Republicans’ aggressive posture, the constitutional structure of American elections prohibits federal overreach, such as Trump’s executive order last March requiring citizenship to be documented with papers such as a passport for federal voter registration.
“Unlike other areas of federal power, elections are decentralized,” Levitt explained. “The simplest thing state and local officials do is simply ignore him, or tell him they disagree, and they run American elections.” States are fighting the interference and winning in court. These are the pillars of American democracy: the decentralized election system, which is under attack, but is still holding.
“If you generally follow the news, you may not have a positive view of how courts, or perhaps the Supreme Court, have responded to abuses of executive power,” Danielle Lang said. “But that is simply not true in elections.” For example, on January 15 last year, in response to the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against 23 states for not turning over complete voter rolls, a federal court dismissed the suit. The ruling came one day after a federal judge preliminarily rejected a similar lawsuit against Oregon.
Courts recognize the limits of executive power. The president has no constitutional authority to determine election rules, the courts have said. States and Congress are entitled to set rules, Lang confirmed. Courts have found that the Department of Justice has no basis to steal voter data. They tried to use the Civil Rights Act as justification, which gives the Department of Justice investigative authority, but does not give the government the right to obtain all voter data from every state without cause.
John Yang said that the laws are clearly discriminatory, burdening minorities who are assumed to be overwhelmingly Democratic voters. And the MAGA Republicans and the president can do the most about this, because state-level racism, exclusion, the dismantling and persecution of DEI programs, and the disadvantage of white Christian nationalism show up at election time. But the measures also burden others, because voter ID requirements cannot be applied to people who marry and change their names. This keeps supporters of any party away from voting; it is a restriction of rights.
Citizenship documents such as birth certificates and naturalization papers are difficult to obtain, and access to them is unequal across the country. “People of color have a harder time accessing these documents; this produces disenfranchisement,” Andrea Senteno said. These laws are based on disinformation about fraud.
In a 100-page opinion, the federal district court made clear that “the president has no constitutional power over elections,” Lang said. “Since then, every court order dealing with that executive order has repeated that text.” Americans support voter identification and verification, but voters “do not support a law that would deprive millions of Americans of the right to vote and, for example, would make it difficult for married women to prove their eligibility to vote.”
Strict proof-of-citizenship requirements can create barriers that are unevenly distributed among communities, including for military and overseas voters who submit ballots by mail. “America’s basic assumption is that voting is a right, not a privilege,” Yang said. “Unless someone can prove that the benefits of the restriction absolutely outweigh the burden, then the matter is closed.” Voting by mail is particularly important for Asian American communities, because if a ballot is at home, “it gives us additional time for translation and to think through the question in a way we would feel pressured at the polling place,” he added.
He emphasized how documentation requirements can create challenges for naturalized citizens and immigrants whose names appear differently across records: “For naturalized Asian Americans, their names can create problems.” Different transliterations often mean that a voter’s Social Security number, birth certificate, and passport do not match. There is no fraud, but Trump cries fraud over such things if the outcome is not favorable to him. And that is inevitable.
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The root of this entire process is the political narrative built after the 2020 election. Trump then claimed the election was “stolen” and that massive election fraud occurred. These claims were not substantiated by courts, state election authorities, or independent investigations. Dozens of lawsuits were filed in various states, but courts rejected them one after another for lack of evidence. Even the cybersecurity office operating under the Trump government called it “one of the most secure elections in history.” But the election-fraud narrative became a political tool, on which a series of new measures have been built ever since.
One central element of current legislative attempts is the so-called SAVE America Act, which would tie voter registration to stricter conditions. The proposal would require voters to prove U.S. citizenship with documents such as a passport or birth certificate. Supporters say this is necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting. The problem is that such cases are extremely rare, while the new rules would make voting harder for millions. In the United States, many voters do not have a valid passport or readily accessible birth documents, so critics say the law’s actual effect could be to exclude many eligible citizens from voting.
The proposal also sparked further controversy by requiring states to provide detailed voter data to federal authorities. Critics fear this would amount to federal government interference in an election system that traditionally falls within the authority of individual states. Under the U.S. Constitution, the manner in which elections are administered is primarily determined by the states, not by the executive branch.
The Trump administration has, however, tried on multiple occasions to gain direct influence over state election systems. The federal government has taken legal action against several states to obtain access to their voter registration lists. The official justification is that this serves to check the accuracy of voter databases, but several of the affected states have resisted, saying this is federal overreach. The disputes continue in court, while the Department of Justice has sued additional states to force the release of the data.
One of the key points of the conflict is the extent to which the White House is trying to centralize oversight of the election system. Trump previously issued an executive order aimed at a comprehensive reshaping of election rules. Among other things, the order sought to tighten voter registration and restrict voting by mail. Federal courts, however, held that the president does not have such authority and found several provisions unconstitutional.
Efforts to gain control over the election system have also appeared in other forms. Trump and his allies have repeatedly raised the possibility that federal authorities should examine voting machines and systems, even citing national security grounds. Legal experts say this would be a highly controversial step because elections are traditionally administered by local authorities, and federal intervention would raise serious constitutional questions.
During these disputes, several Republican-led states have introduced their own bills to tighten voting conditions. These include stricter ID requirements, restrictions on voting by mail, and excluding certain IDs, such as student IDs, from the list of acceptable documents for voting. Critics say these rules could disproportionately harm young voters, minorities, and low-income voters.
Democrats and civil rights organizations say this is part of a longer process aimed at politically reshaping the election system. They argue that under the slogan of “election integrity,” measures are being adopted that in reality reduce participation. The Trump administration, by contrast, claims that the legitimacy of elections can only be preserved if the system contains as few opportunities for abuse as possible.
Thus, the dispute is not merely a technical question about election rules. In reality, it is about who controls one of the most important institutions of democracy: elections. In the history of the American system, the consensus has been that election administration remains decentralized and within state authority. But the current legislative and political battles show that this tradition is coming under increasing pressure ahead of the approaching midterm elections.
