Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has a “17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”
The order will possibly mandate voter identification, ban mail ballots, and according to Trump associate Peter Ticktin, “empower the president to ban … voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference.”
In all likelihood, such an executive order would be swiftly enjoined by the federal district courts, just as happened to Trump’s March 25, 2025, executive order on election administration (“Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections”).
But if made into enforceable law, such an executive order would be a sea change to how Americans vote, and it would likely be administratively impossible for the 2026 midterm elections.
According to the National Vote at Home Institute, NPR, and MIT, about 43 percent of Americans voted by mail in the November 2020 election during the COVID-19 pandemic, and approximately 30 percent voted by mail in the November 2024 election. In many western states, the vast majority of voters use mail ballots. In Arizona, my home state, over 80 percent of votes come from mail ballots. And even if not widely used, the vast majority of states allow for no-excuse mail voting.
Requiring voter identification would be a less disruptive change. The National Conference of State Legislatures writes that “thirty-six states have laws requesting or requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls.”
But we do not yet know what the president means by voter identification. Does this extend to mail voting as well? If so, would signature matching—as is done by the vast majority of states—suffice for voter identification? If not, this, too, will be a significant change for voters and an enormous change for administrators.
The Washington Post also writes that the president might ban “voting machines”—a term often used for the tabulators that read the paper ballots. Only a handful of very small jurisdictions in the country hand count ballots. Glasscock County, Texas, had 813 registered voters when it hand counted its 2022 ballots. My home county, Maricopa County, has over 2.5 million registered voters. According to the election nonprofit Verified Voting, fewer than 0.17 percent of registered voters live in a jurisdiction that hand counts ballots.
More problematic: These changes are likely administratively impossible for the current election cycle. The primaries for Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas will be held in less than a week. But the near-impossibility would be present even for the November general election. California, for example, would have to buy thousands of new precinct-based tabulators to use at voting locations to replace the large central-count tabulators that it uses for the millions of mail ballots it currently receives. California would also have to retrain over 10,000 election workers from mail voting–related responsibilities to an in-person voting model.
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Given that the contemplated executive order is likely a loser in the courts, and that it might be administratively impossible, what is the real goal of the president in drafting such an executive order? Chaos? Something to point to if Republicans don’t do well in November? Or just something else to fire up many of his very online, hardcore MAGA supporters?