New executive order is everything election deniers want

The Trump administration is setting the table to call future election results into question — again.

Mar 27, 2025

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Another insane week of news here at American Doom — threats to Social Security by Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, illegal data-gathering by DOGE, and now, an executive order aimed at completely changing how U.S. elections are run. There’s more coming on all these fronts — but this is a lot of work, and I imagine I’m looking at another weekend of non-stop reporting just like the last one, when I went down to Florida to report on threats to Social Security. So, I’d love if you’d consider supporting my independent journalism here with a paid subscription. You can also throw a few bucks in our Coffee Fund if that’s more your thing. Now, on to the news…

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The Trump administration has issued an executive order that gives the federal government unprecedented power and influence over how elections are run, who can vote in future elections and how ballots are counted, as well as providing broad powers to Trump-backing government agencies to pursue investigations based on bogus claims of election fraud.

Some of the most important provisions of the order — signed Tuesday by Donald Trump and titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of Elections” — are identical to a list of demands from some of the nation’s most prominent election deniers.

The order is an aggressive attempt to fundamentally remake the nation’s election infrastructure, voter registration rules, and other election and voting procedures to favor Trump and Republicans. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who also leads a coalition of Democratic secretaries of state, told VoteBeat the order was “an attempt to federalize elections.”

This order will be immediately challenged in court by a wide array of pro-democracy groups, but whether all of those legal fights are resolved by next November’s midterms is anyone’s guess.

Of the order’s most controversial implementations are the following, all of which are included in the “Voting Bill of Rights,” a list of demands created by Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network:

The elections executive order is blatantly unconstitutional

The order seeks to overrule state election laws by claiming that federal laws supersede them, including questionable interpretations of court rulings that came down in the wake of the 2020 election. Trump’s order seeks to give final authority on the following matters to the federal government, requiring the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan government agency, DHS, the Justice Department and DOGE to enforce provisions of the order. The order requires federal agencies to:

Effectively have a single day of voting for future elections, with some mail-in ballot exceptions
Requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote
Conduct voter list maintenance by obtaining voter data from states and double-checking states’ work maintaining accurate lists of eligible voters — DOGE is stipulated in the order to perform this scrutiny of state voter rolls
Share data collected by federal agencies with states in order to ensure ineligible voters aren’t registered to vote
Withhold federal election funds for any states that refuse to comply with the order’s provisions
Require the use of election equipment that comply with a new set of guidelines that no voting machines in the entire country are currently in compliance with. This requires many states to essentially agree to use voting machines that do not yet exist — and get rid of the ones they currently use.
Investigate bogus claims of election fraud like election equipment having internet access
Sue states with the full power of the Justice Department that don’t comply with the order’s provisions
Prevent mail-in ballots, including those from members of the military, to be counted after Election Day

More Doom reporting on threats to free elections

The order could prevent half the country from registering to vote

A requirement of the order demands that people registering to vote provide documentary proof of citizenship — but birth certificates don’t count under the order’s provisions. Among the documents that do count as proof of citizenship are passports, which only half of Americans have. Drivers licenses that state whether the holder is a citizen are also acceptable, but many states don’t have licenses that say this.

The order demands that states use voting machines that simply do not exist

“[V]voting systems should not use a ballot in which a vote is contained within a barcode or quick-response code in the vote counting process except where necessary to accommodate individuals with disabilities and should provide a voter-verifiable paper record to prevent fraud or mistake,” the order reads. All states but Louisiana currently have election equipment that produces a paper receipt of an individual’s vote.

Additionally, the order makes all voting machines currently in use obsolete, dictating that the Election Assistance Commission “rescind all previous certifications of voting equipment based on prior standards.” Under the order, all election equipment and voting machines would have to comply with what’s called the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0. There’s two problems with this — these guidelines are supposed to be voluntary, meaning states can either choose to comply with them or come up with their own rules for election equipment. Secondly, election equipment that complies with these guidelines has not yet been constructed.

The order will prompt more bogus election fraud investigations

DHS and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) “shall assess the security of all such systems to the extent they are connected to, or integrated into, the Internet and report on the risk of such systems being compromised through malicious software and unauthorized intrusions into the system,” the order states. Conspiracies about voting machines being connected to the internet — thus making them vulnerable to hacking — have been the bread and butter of the election denial movement for years. Now, the Trump administration has added more fuel to that fire.

The order also requires DHS and DOGE to double-check voter rolls for ineligible voters — by subpoena if necessary. That means Elon Musk’s DOGE teams can legally demand access to voter information from states.

The order drastically restricts mail-in voting

The order dictates that “there be a uniform and nondiscriminatory ballot receipt deadline of Election Day” for most ballots. This means that states accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day are prohibited by the order from doing so. The order also makes no exceptions for military and overseas ballots, meaning that if those ballots don’t arrive by Election Day, they won’t count.

The order punishes states and gives DOGE access to voter data

The EAC is to withhold funding to any states that accept ballots after Election Day. DHS, meanwhile, is required by the order to withhold funds from states who don’t hand over voter data to DOGE. Elon Musk’s organization is granted subpoena power under the order to demand access to this information from states.

What pro-democracy groups are saying

The Brennan Center for Justice tells Mother Jones that Trump’s order is “astonishing and unprecedented voter suppression.” A spokesperson for the organization said that Trump “is issuing policy directives with the unmistakable intent of stopping Americans from participating in our democracy.”

Verified Voting’s Mark Lindeman says in a statement: “The Trump administration's executive order seeks to undermine the constitutional framework that ensures elections are administered by the states." Additionally, the provision in the order requiring new voting machines “does not adequately consider,” the time it takes for states and localities to acquire that equipment. “Election offices are already underfunded, and recent federal cuts to services they relied upon make preserving and protecting the integrity of our elections that much harder.”

Fair Fight says in a statement this order is simply a part of DOGE’s data-gathering operation. “The order gives more power to Elon Musk’s DOGE to comb through state voter files — a recipe for unprecedented voter purges, human and database errors, and the disenfranchisement of potentially thousands or millions of eligible American voters.”

Walter Olson of the Cato Institute — right-leaning, I might add — said this order is a clear power grab from Trump. “The Framers took care to leave the running of elections in state hands because they feared a strongman figure would try to seize national power over it,” Olson wrote on Bluesky. “Trump must not be allowed to rule by decree, and most especially not here. It’s dangerous, wrong, and unconstitutional.”

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