ATLANTA (AP) 鈥� 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 siding with late-arriving mail ballots was the latest example showing the limits of his reach.
It followed back-to-back rulings last week that his two sweeping seeking to change national election rules, more preventing his Department of Justice from and his stalled attempts to . 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.
鈥淚t鈥檚 been a mixed bag for Republicans,鈥� said University of Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller. But the president, he added, 鈥渉as come up mostly empty-handed.鈥�
Trump’s efforts have not been entirely fruitless. Republican-run states have to redraw congressional district lines, efforts buoyed by the Supreme Court a key section of the , 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.
All the activity around how the nation votes and runs its elections is a reflection of the Republican president’s long fixation on his that his 2020 was rigged. He has been so frustrated by the inability of the Senate to pass the SAVE Act that he has a bipartisan housing bill.
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 鈥渟ave America from crooked elections.鈥� 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.
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.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 how federalism works,鈥� Muller said.
Here鈥檚 a look at 罢谤耻尘辫鈥檚 efforts to reshape election rules and what options he might have left for the November midterms.
Focus on noncitizens and voter data has met roadblocks
The president has U.S. elections are riddled with fraud in part because of noncitizen voting. Research , 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.
罢谤耻尘辫鈥檚 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 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.
Homeland Security citizenship check rejected in court
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.
Last week, a federal judge as a mass citizenship check.
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 as ineligible.
U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan ruled that 罢谤耻尘辫鈥檚 changes aggregated Americans鈥� sensitive personal data in a way that could result in voters being wrongly purged from the rolls.
鈥淎ll 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,鈥� Sooknanan said in her order.
Executive orders used in place of legislation
As presidents before him, Trump signed executive orders when Congress would not enact his policy preferences.
罢谤耻尘辫鈥檚 reflected his emphasis on noncitizens. Like the SAVE Act pending on Capitol Hill, it sought to require would-be their citizenship to be able to register to vote.
U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper put a temporary block on the order last year as she considered the case and last week . The Constitution, Casper wrote, 鈥渄oes not grant the President any specific powers over elections.鈥�
Trump issued in March, as the SAVE Act鈥檚 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 to determine who gets an absentee ballot and threatened local elections officials with prosecution.
Absentee voting is a staple of U.S. elections, but Trump describes the practice, incorrectly, as allowing fraud 鈥� . A 2025 report by the Brookings Institution found that mail voting fraud occurred in only 0.000043% of total mail ballots cast.
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, 鈥渦nconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.鈥�
The White House has indicated it will appeal.
Even Trump says the SAVE Act has long odds
Trump on Monday called the Senate logjam 鈥渃razy鈥� and one of the holdouts, Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, 鈥淭rump-deranged.鈥�
It鈥檚 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鈥檛 matter in this case, with four of the Senate鈥檚 53 Republicans declaring their opposition to the bill itself: Murkowski, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
The president acknowledged Monday that the SAVE Act is 鈥減robably not going to happen.鈥�
Trump still has options for the November elections
Both major parties have national operations to monitor elections, including legal teams ready to file challenges.
Despite the Republican National Committee losing the mail ballot case, Chairman Joe Gruters on Monday alluded to those efforts: 鈥淲e are not going to be deterred by this decision, and the RNC will keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day,鈥� he said.
Meanwhile, Trump has been developing a possible roadmap for more aggressive actions.
His U.S. attorney in Los Angeles said in June that he had opened , 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 and other records from the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.
Muller, the law professor, said 鈥渁lready are having conversations about chain of custody disputes鈥� for ballots as they are cast, collected, counted and stored.
He and UCLA law professor Rick Hasen noted that judicial warrants are required for the kinds of actions that happened in Fulton County. Muller predicted 鈥渢he bar would be even higher鈥� for any warrant the administration requests during a live election.
Hasen added that he’s working to educate judges around the country on the importance of chain of custody for ballots.
鈥淩epublicans believe him when he says the election is rigged. And then when Republicans try to change voting rules to tighten things up, that causes Democrats to also think that the election system is being rigged,鈥� Hasen said. 鈥淪o, if what he鈥檚 trying to achieve is undermine voters鈥� confidence in the election process, he seems to have succeeded spectacularly.鈥�
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Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in New York contributed to this report.
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