\n<\/p>\n
ATLANTA — <\/span>President Donald Trump has tried many ways to tighten his grip on U.S. elections, from signing executive orders to pushing restrictive legislation in Congress. Monday’s Supreme Court ruling<\/a> siding with states that accept<\/a> late-arriving mail ballots was the latest example showing the limits of his reach.<\/p>\n It followed back-to-back rulings last week that barred<\/a> his two sweeping executive orders<\/a> seeking to change national election rules, more court rulings<\/a> preventing his Department of Justice from obtaining detailed state voter data<\/a> and his stalled attempts to get the Senate to pass the SAVE Act<\/a>. That measure would eliminate nearly all absentee voting, require citizenship documents to register to vote and impose photo identification requirements nationwide right before the midterm elections.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been a mixed bag for Republicans,\u201d said University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller. But the president, he added, \u201chas come up mostly empty-handed.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump’s efforts have not been entirely fruitless. Republican-run states have satisfied his demands<\/a> to redraw congressional district lines, efforts buoyed by the Supreme Court striking down<\/a> a key section of the Voting Rights Act<\/a>, and he has been directing his Department of Justice to investigate voting and election operations, which Democrats see as a possible prelude to their involvement in November.<\/p>\n All the activity around how the nation votes and runs its elections is a reflection of the Republican president’s long fixation on his false claim<\/a> that his 2020 election defeat<\/a> was rigged. He has been so frustrated by the inability of the Senate to pass the SAVE Act that he has refused to sign<\/a> a bipartisan housing bill.<\/p>\n He weighed in again Monday after the Supreme Court’s decision in the mail ballot deadline case, saying on his social media account that he is trying to \u201csave America from crooked elections.\u201d Voting rights groups and Democrats see him abusing power and attempting to suppress legal voters to gain an advantage in the midterms, when control of Congress is at stake.<\/p>\n Regardless, Muller said Trump faces legal and political realities: The Constitution gives the states and Congress authority over elections while providing no such role for the president.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s how federalism works,\u201d Muller said.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a look at Trump\u2019s efforts to reshape election rules and what options he might have left for the November midterms.<\/p>\n The president has repeatedly said<\/a> U.S. elections are riddled with fraud in part because of noncitizen voting. Research shows the problem to be rare<\/a>, accounting for a minuscule percentage of fraud cases. Convictions are measured in the hundreds over periods in which tens of millions of ballots are cast.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s view resulted in a multiagency push to nationalize voter data and use federal resources to help states remove voters from the rolls. The Department of Justice has sought detailed voter files<\/a> from multiple states, data that would include dates of birth and partial Social Security numbers. Democratic and some Republican secretaries of state balked, and federal lawsuits followed. The administration has lost every case so far.<\/p>\n Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, with help from the DOGE effort led by Elon Musk, revamped a government tool called SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements). The program has been a key pillar of his efforts to cull potentially ineligible voters from state rolls.<\/p>\n Last week, a federal judge blocked its use<\/a> as a mass citizenship check.<\/p>\n The administration, according to its own news releases, had allowed local election administrators to search users by the thousands, using a wider range of metrics rather than DHS-issued identification numbers. At least 67 million registrations, primarily in Republican-controlled states, were analyzed. Tens of thousands were flagged as potential noncitizens or people who have died, but some voters were wrongly identified<\/a> as ineligible.<\/p>\n U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled that Trump\u2019s changes aggregated Americans\u2019 sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from the rolls.<\/p>\n \u201cAll 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,\u201d Sooknanan said in her order. <\/p>\n As presidents before him, Trump signed executive orders when Congress would not enact his policy preferences.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s first order<\/a> reflected his emphasis on noncitizens. Like the SAVE Act pending on Capitol Hill, it sought to require would-be voters to document<\/a> their citizenship to be able to register to vote.<\/p>\n U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper put a temporary block on the order last year as she considered the case and last week made her decision permanent<\/a>. The Constitution, Casper wrote, \u201cdoes not grant the President any specific powers over elections.\u201d <\/p>\n Trump issued a second order<\/a> in March, as the SAVE Act\u2019s rough path in Congress became obvious. He called for a national voter list using data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration. Further, the order would have empowered the U.S. Postal Service<\/a> to determine who gets an absentee ballot and threatened local elections officials with prosecution.<\/p>\n Absentee voting is a staple of U.S. elections, but Trump describes the practice, incorrectly, as allowing fraud \u2014 even as he has used it himself<\/a>. A 2025 report by the Brookings Institution found that mail voting fraud occurred in only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast.<\/p>\n Democratic secretaries of state sued, and U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani made the same legal assessment as Casper. The provisions, she wrote last week, \u201cunconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.\u201d<\/p>\n The White House has indicated it will appeal. <\/p>\n Trump on Monday called the Senate logjam \u201ccrazy\u201d and one of the holdouts, Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, \u201cTrump-deranged.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s the latest legislative tussle that prompted Trump to demand Republicans scrap the filibuster, which requires most major legislation to get support from 60 of the 100 senators. But that likely wouldn\u2019t matter in this case, with four of the Senate\u2019s 53 Republicans declaring their opposition to the bill itself: Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.<\/p>\n The president acknowledged Monday that the SAVE Act is \u201cprobably not going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Both major parties have national operations to monitor elections, including legal teams ready to file challenges.<\/p>\n Despite the Republican National Committee losing the mail ballot case, Chairman Joe Gruters on Monday alluded to those efforts: \u201cWe are not going to be deterred by this decision, and the RNC will keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Trump has been developing a possible roadmap for more aggressive actions. <\/p>\n His U.S. attorney in Los Angeles said in June that he had opened multiple election fraud investigations<\/a>, and he sent a prosecutor to the county’s vote-tabulation center after California’s June primary. Six months earlier, FBI agents executed a warrant and seized ballots<\/a> and other records from the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes Atlanta. <\/p>\n