Democrats compared President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to overhaul elections to George Orwell’s “1984,” in one of three lawsuits now challenging Tuesday’s executive order, which instructs the US Postal Service to determine who does and doesn’t receive a mail ballot.
Democratic congressional leaders and organizations, as well as two separate coalitions of voter advocacy groups, each filed lawsuits – prompting a sense of deja vu, as those Trump opponents previously brought successful legal challenges that halted parts of a March 2025 Trump executive order that sought to boost proof of citizenship requirements.
The challengers say Trump is again violating the Constitution and several laws by imposing new hurdles to vote by mail in his latest executive order, and by unliterally taking over election decisions that are handled by states.
Additionally, Trump’s order calls for federal agencies to use internal databases to create a “citizen” list to share with states. While the directive doesn’t lay out explicitly how that list would then be used, the challengers argue that it would violate privacy laws intended to protect against the federal government assembling a “personal dossier” on citizens in the vein of the dystopian novel. Further, they warn, the federal databases in question have shown themselves to be a flawed way of determining who is eligible to vote.
“The Executive Order’s provisions are convoluted and confusing,” said the Democrats’ lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in Washington, DC’s federal court. “What is clear is that it dramatically restricts the ability of Americans to vote by mail, impinging on traditional state authority.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Governors Association, and the party’s congressional campaign arms all signed onto the lawsuit.
“In effect, the Order seeks to interpose a federal screening regime between voters and the ballot box by empowering a federal mail carrier to withhold certain voters’ ballots,” a collection of voter advocacy groups said in a case filed Thursday in Massachusetts. “In doing so, the Order displaces the roles that the Constitution and federal law assign to the states and Congress to regulate elections and to USPS as a neutral, nondiscriminatory carrier of the mail.”
Tuesday’s executive order is Trump’s latest attempt to unilaterally insert the federal government in the administration of elections, a job the Constitution largely gives to the states. The order comes as his legislative effort to add restrictions to voting has floundered in Congress.
“Only Democrat politicians and operatives would be upset about lawful efforts to secure American elections and ensure only eligible American citizens are casting ballots,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “President Trump campaigned on securing our elections and the American people sent him back to the White House to get the job done.”
But the challengers argue the order will disenfranchise eligible voters, because it requires that states seeking to use USPS to deliver ballots submit lists of their mail voters 60 days before an election. That process would leave out people who move or become naturalized citizens within 60 days of an election, Democrats note. The order also requires USPS to only deliver mail ballots in states that meet certain ballot design and other requirements, which would “grant the Postal Service unilateral authority to determine who is eligible to vote by mail based on the criteria specified in the Order,” the Democrats said.
The order violates the law governing the Postal Service, the Voting Rights Act, and other statutes, the challengers allege, in addition to being unconstitutional.
The data collection part of the order, according to the challengers, runs afoul of the Privacy Act, which sets requirements for how the government goes about collecting and using sensitive information from Americans.
“Indeed, in enacting amendments that tightened restrictions specifically on ‘computerized matching programs,’ Congress underscored that its purpose was to ensure that it would be ‘legally impossible for the Federal Government … to put together anything resembling a ‘1984’ personal dossier on a citizen,’ and that ‘proper regard for privacy of the individual, confidentiality of data, and security of the system’ would be respected,” the Democrats’ lawsuit said.
But the executive order, the lawsuit continues, directs federal agencies “to make good on President Trump’s repeated claims that the federal government should take charge of who is “eligibl[e]” to vote precisely by amassing such a database.”
While the order does not explicitly state the purpose for the “citizen” list, the voting advocates in the Massachusetts lawsuit say that the “most reasonable inference” is that Trump intended it be used to screen mail ballots.
That further risks disenfranchisement of eligible voters, Trump’s opponents warn, arguing that the existing databases and programs he is instructing the federal government to use are riddled with errors.
Voting officials already have access to one of the federal citizenship data programs – known as SAVE – to review their registration lists, and because of the errors produced, “numerous election administrators have expressed their frustration and mistrust in the system,” a second coalition of voter advocacy groups said in a lawsuit filed in DC Thursday.
