President Donald Trump is moving ahead with plans to crack down on mail-in voting, with his approval rating falling to unprecedented levels, and just over seven months remaining until voters decide whether to let his party retain unified control of the country.
The president signed an executive order on Tuesday purporting to ban the United States Postal Service from sending absentee or postal ballots to any voter who does not appear on a list he has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to establish with the help of the Social Security Administration.
Speaking from the Oval Office just before he signed the order, the president claimed it was “foolproof” and said the order’s purpose was “stopping the massive cheating that's gone on.”
He attributed the new initiative to “great legal minds” and said it was necessary “because the cheating on mail in voting is legendary. It's horrible, what's going on, and it's very clearly covered very, very clearly. So I think this will help a lot with elections,” Trump said.
He also falsely accused Democratic leaders of wanting to cheat in elections through registering and soliciting votes from non-citizens — something that has always been illegal under American law — and claimed the only way Democrats can win elections is “by cheating.”
Trump has spent years railing against postal balloting and making wild accusations of election fraud and cheating on the part of Democrats since he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden nearly six years ago, even as he and his family continue to vote by mail.
After it became clear Trump would lose multiple key swing states on election night, he and his allies began filing what became 40 baseless lawsuits that were uniformly rejected by courts across the country while falsely accusing Democrats of cheating with the help of mail-in ballots and voting machines that he claimed were programmed to reject GOP votes.
Voter fraud in the U.S. is exceedingly rare, according to a study by the Brookings Institution, which used data compiled by the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation, to reveal that 0.000043 percent of all ballots cast in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections were fraudulent. That’s about four cases out of every 10 million mail votes. None were outcome determinative.
Trump’s efforts to illegally overturn the 2020 election resulted in a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters who stormed the building in a fruitless, last-ditch attempt to prevent Congress from certifying his loss in January 2021.
The action signed by Trump on Tuesday orders DHS to provide each state with the list of Trump administration-approved voters at least 60 days before the November 3 general election while simultaneously directing the Department of Justice to prosecute state election officials who ignore the federal voter list and utilize a state’s own voter rolls when sending out ballots to registered voters.
Details of the order were first reported by the conservative Daily Caller website, which cited a White House fact sheet provided to the outlet. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent.
Trump’s latest attempt to restrict postal balloting comes nearly a year after he issued a March 2025 order purporting to assert sweeping presidential control over numerous aspects of American elections which have long been the responsibility of each of the 50 American states under the U.S. Constitution.
It attempted to require states submit their voter rolls to DHS for examination by the formerly Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, and purported to cut off federal funds from states that allow the counting of mail-in ballots postmarked before Election Day but received after.
That order, which has been largely blocked by at least three separate federal courts, also purported to mandate that the federal Election Assistance Commission require proof of citizenship from voters registering to vote with a national voter registration form.
Trump told reporters he expects his latest action to be met with a court challenge and claimed only a “rogue judge” would dare overturn it.
“You get a lot of rogue judges, very bad, bad people, very bad judges. But that's the only way that can be changed,” he said.
The order was almost immediately panned by election law experts and voting rights advocates, with top election officials in Oregon and Arizona pledging to sue to block it from being enforced.
David Becker, the executive director of Center for Election Innovation & Research, called the order “hilarious” and “clearly unconstitutional” in a post on BlueSky and predicted that it would be “blocked immediately.”
“The only thing it will accomplish is to make liberal lawyers wealthier. He might as well sign an EO banning gravity,” Becker said.
Joe Morelle, the ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee — which has jurisdiction over election law matters — said in a statement that the order shows Trump “fears the American people and is willing to violate the Constitution to stop them from voting.”
“His Executive Order is illegal, dangerous and subversive. It will not stand,” he added.
By contrast, Republican National Committee chair Joe Gruters applauded the move in a statement, writing that the RNC “fully supports his action to secure mail-in ballots and stop non-citizens from voting.”
The president’s attempt to restrict voting comes as his approval rating hit new lows amid skyrocketing gasoline and fuel costs as a result of the war he started with Iran one month ago.
An average of polls compiled by statistician Nate Silver found Trump’s average approval rating at a second-term low of 39.9 percent as of Monday.
Polling also shows his Republican Party in dire straits with voters, based on generic ballot surveys, in which voters gave Democrats as much as an 11-point advantage in the upcoming midterm elections.
As his standing with the American public has eroded over his first year in office, Trump has responded by urging Republicans to enact harsh new voting restrictions laid out in a bill he has dubbed the “Save America Act.”
While the GOP-controlled House has passed the anti-voting legislation, the Senate has not due to the upper chamber’s de facto 60-vote supermajority requirement.
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