A federal judge on Wednesday permanently blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from carrying out most of his first executive order on elections, including the requirement that people show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote. U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston turned a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago into a permanent ban.
The ruling matters now because it shuts down, for the moment, Trump’s effort to change election rules by executive order rather than through the states or Congress. Casper agreed with the argument that the Constitution leaves election regulation to states and Congress, and wrote that it does not give the President any specific power over elections.
The blocked order went beyond voter registration. It also would have barred mail ballots from being counted if they arrived after Election Day, even when they were postmarked on time, and it would have punished states that did not comply by withholding certain federal money. By making the earlier injunction permanent, Casper closed off the administration’s most direct path to those changes.
There was also a second path already being pursued. Trump is pushing legislation in the Republican-controlled Congress to create the same proof-of-citizenship mandate, and the SAVE America Act has passed the House but stalled in the Senate. He has also argued for eliminating the filibuster that is blocking the legislation, a reminder that the fight over voting rules has moved from the courtroom to the Capitol even as the court has shut the door on executive action.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said she was grateful the court had blocked Trump’s unconstitutional attempt to seize control of elections, adding that generations of Americans fought for the right to vote and that those rights must be protected against anyone who tries to undermine them. Requests for comment sent to the White House and the Department of Justice were not immediately returned.
The decision is part of a string of losses for Trump’s elections order. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., already blocked steps to add the proof-of-citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form, and later barred the Secretary of Defense from requiring documentary proof of citizenship when military personnel register to vote or request ballots. What remains of the order is the part that other courts have not yet reached, but the central voting-registration mandate is now barred in Boston and under fire in Washington, D.C., leaving Trump to try to change election law through Congress instead of the presidency.
