President Trump moved to crack down on noncitizen voting in federal elections with a new executive order Tuesday requiring people who register to vote to use a federal form to provide proof of citizenship.
The order also directed the Department of Homeland Security to make its databases available, free of charge, to states and local officials who want to use the information to scour their own voter rolls for noncitizens who are registered.
Mr. Trump ordered Homeland Security and his own Department of Government Efficiency to review states’ voter lists, and he ordered the Justice Department to more strenuously pursue cases of noncitizen voting and other voter fraud.
And the president ordered the Justice Department and the Election Assistance Commission to target states that allow mail-in ballots to be collected and counted after Election Day.
The White House described the wide-ranging order as the most vigorous voter-protection actions in decades.
“The right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated, without illegal dilution, is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election,” Mr. Trump said in the order. “Yet the United States has not adequately enforced Federal election requirements that, for example, prohibit States from counting ballots received after Election Day or prohibit non-citizens from registering to vote.”
The fight over election rules has intensified in recent years as Republicans push for voter identification and in some cases for stricter rules on mail-in and absentee voting. Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, often oppose voter ID laws and support more lenient voting rules as a way of expanding the voting pool.
Mr. Trump in particular has cited election fraud as the reason he didn’t win the popular vote against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the reason for his loss to President Biden in 2020. Both of those claims are largely without merit, as voting experts say whatever levels of fraud there might have been didn’t affect the outcome of either election.
Mr. Trump joked that some people might not want him to sign the order, given his 2024 election victory, but he said “we’ve got to straighten out our elections.”
The moves Mr. Trump announced will be deeply contentious for voting-rights groups, who say noncitizen voting is nonexistent and voter fraud is less of an issue than voter disenfranchisement.
Mr. Trump made an aborted attempt in 2017 to scour voter rolls for noncitizens. He created a commission to study the issue. But the commission quickly ran into difficulty in getting data from states, faced a tangle of lawsuits and disbanded with a whimper.
Mr. Trump also tried to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census.
That effort was halted by the Supreme Court, which ruled that while such a question is not illegal, the president’s team cut too many procedural corners in its attempt to quickly shoehorn it in for the decennial count.
Voting rights groups on Tuesday vowed to take the president to court.
“A president does not set election law and never will,” said Virginia Kase Solomon, president of Common Cause. “Trump’s executive action is an attempt to take away our right to vote or make it so hard that we don’t participate.”
His push to add proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form will prove particularly controversial.
Voting in federal elections is restricted to citizens, and the form currently requires new registrants to attest that they are citizens but it does not demand proof.
Mr. Trump’s order says proof can be a passport, a military ID or a state-issued identification card that has an indication of citizenship on it or is accompanied by another document with that proof.
Some Republican-led states checked their own rolls last year ahead of the election and culled thousands of names they said were noncitizens from the lists.
But some of those efforts proved too hasty, with U.S. citizens reporting they were snared in the removals.
The Biden administration went to court to challenge several of the GOP-led efforts, saying it was hurting the right to vote.
Mr. Trump is effectively reversing those priorities, urging his Justice Department to support states that clean their lists and to attack those that don’t.
The executive order is freighted with other suggestions of foreign interference in elections.
It specifically tasks Homeland Security and the Justice Department with policing election administration to make sure noncitizens aren’t accessing ballots or voting machines.
And it asks the Justice Department to enforce laws blocking foreign nationals from contributing money to U.S. elections.
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