President Trump vows to eliminate mail-in voting by 2026 midterm elections
US President Donald Trump has condemned mail-in voting and vowed to “lead a movement” to eliminate it for the 2026 midterm elections.
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May 28 (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Thursday rejected an injunction against President Donald Trump’s stricter administrative rules for voting by mail, saying they were a loss to Democrats and could disenfranchise millions of voters, Democratic lawyers said.
The decision comes as President Trump’s Republican Party is locked in a fierce battle to maintain control of both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections. President Trump has long criticized mail-in voting, falsely claiming that his 2020 election loss was the result of widespread voter fraud.
An executive order signed by President Trump on March 31 directed the administration to create a list of verified U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and to leverage federal data to help state election officials confirm who is eligible to vote.
It also requires the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on state-approved mail-in voting lists and requires states to retain election-related records for five years.
The plaintiffs, including New York Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, asked Washington-based U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the bill, arguing that the order violates states’ right under the U.S. Constitution to regulate elections.
Democrats argued that the executive order’s directive for government agencies to use data from the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to create “state citizenship lists” risks unfairly excluding legally registered voters because the data sources are outdated and may contain errors.
The Justice Department countered that the lawsuit is premature because federal agencies have not yet implemented the executive order.
Nichols at times appeared sympathetic to this argument during oral arguments on May 14th.
A coalition of Democratic states has filed a similar lawsuit challenging the executive order in federal court in Boston.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
