Trump is seizing control of America’s elections from the states — building federal databases to decide who gets a ballot, ordering the Postal Service to block ballots that don’t match his lists, and threatening to prosecute the local election officials who refuse to comply.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals said Saturday that he cannot. In a 2-1 ruling, the court rejected the Department of Justice’s request to lift a nationwide injunction that Judge Indira Talwani issued on 25 June on behalf of 23 states and the District of Columbia. The DOJ argued the lawsuits were premature because federal agencies had not yet finalized implementation of the March executive order. The court found the opposite: the order itself set deadlines so close that states had no choice but to fight now. “The [executive order] lays out a clear set of rapidly approaching deadlines by which states must coordinate with federal officials and comply with new voting procedures,” the panel wrote. “The Plaintiff States have no practical choice but to respond to the [order] now.”
The administration’s best argument was procedural. Article II vests executive authority in the president. DHS maintains citizenship and naturalization records. USPS is a federal agency. The agencies had not finished writing the rules. A working DOJ attorney would recognize this as a timing argument, not a merits argument — the kind of motion that might survive at the preliminary-injunction stage if the underlying constitutional question were genuinely uncertain. The First Circuit treated it accordingly.
The constitutional question is not uncertain. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution assigns the administration of federal elections to the states. Congress may “at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations” — Congress, not the president, and statute, not executive order. Trump’s March order bypasses the legislative process entirely. It directs DHS to compile voter-eligibility databases for states to use as their voter rolls. It orders USPS to adopt delivery protocols — new proposed rules requiring states to provide names and barcodes tied to their mail-in ballots — that no statute authorizes. And it instructs the Department of Justice to “prioritize the investigation and prosecution of state and local election officials” who issue ballots to people the federal government deems “not eligible,” based on citizenship lists that do not yet exist and will necessarily be incomplete when they do.
Judge Talwani identified each defect in late June. The president has no statutory authority to direct DHS to compile voter eligibility lists for state use. USPS has no authorization to adopt binding regulations on mail-in voting. The prosecution directive functions as intimidation of the people who run elections. The First Circuit affirmed the core of that analysis. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., had previously rejected a similar Democratic challenge — a ruling that favored the administration.
The individual rulings address individual provisions. The pattern they document is structural. Trump signed the March executive order after years of claiming without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. He has also made congressional passage of the Save America Act — a package of voting restrictions — a priority. Judges blocked an earlier executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The USPS separately proposed ballot-delivery rules that a federal judge also blocked. Each instrument is different. The objective is the same: federalizing election administration that the Constitution assigns to the states, by executive order rather than by statute, because Congress would not pass these restrictions on its own.
The DOJ told the First Circuit it may ask the Supreme Court to intervene. According to a Brennan Center analysis, the administration has filed more than 30 emergency applications at the Supreme Court and prevailed roughly 80 percent of the time. The constitutional answer is in Article I, Section 4, and it is not ambiguous: the president does not have the authority to seize control of state election administration by executive order. The First Circuit has now said so.