President Donald Trump's campaign to take control of U.S. elections suffered a blow after a federal judge blocked his order to limit mail-in voting.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, sitting in Boston, voided the core of Trump's March 2026 executive order — the one that tried to make the U.S. Postal Service decide who gets a mail ballot and threatened criminal prosecution of election workers who didn't comply.
The Constitution gives states and Congress — not the president — the power to run elections. Trump has spent more than a year trying to change that.
Talwani said the criminal threat provisions were designed to "intimidate" local election officials. Trump "lacks any authority" to build federal voter lists for the states, she wrote.
The ruling is the second courtroom loss for Trump's election agenda in two days. The day before, a separate federal judge permanently blocked Trump's first election executive order — the one from March 2025 that tried to require a passport or birth certificate to register to vote.
"Here we go again," Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D-MI) told NBC News as the administration's election pressure campaign escalated earlier this year. "The bottom line is the 2020 election was secure, it was accessible, and it was an accurate reflection of the will of the people."
In its overall effort to shape elections, the U.S. Justice Department sued 31 states for trying to seize private voter data — including Social Security numbers — and has lost every case decided so far, going 0-9 in court. The FBI raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, and subpoenaed the Arizona State Senate for records from its partisan audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County.
Congress has so far failed to do legislatively what Trump couldn't do by order. The Senate killed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act this month — the proof-of-citizenship bill Trump said would mean Republicans would "never lose a race."