Trump Has No Authority to Federalize Elections

National Review Online

Friday, April 03, 2026

 

President Trump is once again trying to alter the American legal landscape via executive order. His latest missive instructs the Department of Homeland Security to assemble definitive lists of eligible, voting-age U.S. citizens, using data provided by the Social Security Administration; to synchronize those lists with voting officials in the states before each federal election; and then to cooperate with the U.S. Postal Service to ensure that any illegitimate ballots cast by mail are nixed at the source. According to a White House spokesman, Trump’s plan would enable the federal government to “verify” that ballots are not only “being sent to people who are eligible to vote” in the first instance, but ensure that those which are returned are “returned by eligible voters only.”

 

The president has no constitutional authority to do this.

 

Congress enjoys a good deal of power over federally delivered mail. Congress has power as well to secure federal elections. Neither power is unlimited; it would not, for example, be acceptable for the Postal Service to refuse to deliver all mail sent by Christians. But the operative word in each case is “Congress.” Regardless, President Trump, much as he might wish otherwise, is not Congress. As a political matter, it is questionable whether this degree of federal control over elections would be desirable per se. But if it is—and, in general election integrity is indeed much to be desired—any change that enables that control must come from the legislature rather than the executive. Thus far, Congress has not elected to delegate anything close to this level of authority to the president. Under our system, he cannot claim it of his own volition.

 

Practically, Trump’s plan raises a number of questions that would be best answered by our national legislature — including whether it is wise to empower the federal government to this extent, and whether it would weed out fraudulent ballots without an unacceptable risk to legitimate ones. The citizenry has an interest in ensuring that its elections are free of fraud. It also has an interest in preventing enormous bureaucracies from constructing, maintaining, sharing lists of Americans, and, potentially, in preventing Washington, D.C., from overriding the sovereignty of the states. In its peremptoriness, the president’s plan suffers from an age-old flaw: It begins with the assumption that something must be done, identifies something that could in theory be done, and proceeds to conflate the two. And from a second, equally familiar flaw: As the decision of one man, it short-circuits the deliberative process of legislating. We would hope for a little more circumspection before our elections were so comprehensively reformed.