Does President Trump have the authority to ‘nationalize’ voting?

Since the beginning of his second term, President Donald Trump has made clear his desire to expand the role of the federal government in the voting process. In March 2025, he issued an executive order that would have mandated extensive changes to voter registration standards, the timing of voting, and other issues. This executive order was immediately challenged in court and remains mired in litigation.

On Feb. 2, Trump renewed his push to assert control over voting, at least in some parts of the country. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” he said. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” Questioned about the president’s meaning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that he was referring to the SAVE Act, a bill that recently passed the House of Representatives and may be considered by the Senate. If so, Trump was acknowledging that Congress has at least some authority to determine voting procedures.

To clarify this issue, the place to begin is the Constitution—specifically, Article I, section 4, which states that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” This language plainly divides authority over congressional elections between the states and the U.S. Congress, with no independent role for the president. Article II, section 1, which vests the “executive power” of the federal government in the president, cannot be cited as a source of “inherent” power in areas where the Constitution has expressly placed this authority elsewhere.

The federal government’s role in presidential elections, which Article I, section 4, does not address, is more complicated. But a comprehensive historical survey of this question found that during the past century, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution to extend congressional power over voting to presidential contests as well, to the extent that the Constitution does not expressly give the states exclusive jurisdiction over these elections. Here again, power in these matters is divided between Congress and the states, with no space for presidential authority.

After the fiasco of the Florida vote count in the 2000 presidential election, Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), which establishes standards and procedures for all federal elections without distinguishing between congressional and presidential contests. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) likewise made no such distinction. And neither does the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” (the SAVE Act), backed by Mr. Trump and many Republican legislators, which requires individuals to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote in any federal election, presidential as well as congressional. The distinction between elections for these two branches of the federal government, although germane for some purposes, cannot serve as an entry wedge for the assertion of presidential authority over federal elections.

This brings us back to President Trump’s executive order of March 2025, which rests, he says, on “the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States.” But because the president has no independent constitutional authority to determine election procedures, his only authority is to enforce the laws that Congress has written and that he (or his predecessors) has signed into law.

The president is entitled to his opinion as to what the law requires, but the final determination of such matters is up to the courts. For example, his executive order notes, correctly, that “Federal law establishes a uniform Election Day across the Nation for Federal elections.” It continues, “It is the policy of my Administration to enforce those statutes and require that votes be cast and received by the election date established in law.

The italicized words appear nowhere in the relevant statutes. This is why 30 states and the District of Columbia allow mail-in ballots to be counted if they are postmarked on or before Election Day, even if they are received after Election Day. As a matter of “policy,” the Trump administration would like the states to exclude ballots received after Election Day. But as a matter of law, it is far from clear that the administration has the authority to mandate this policy.

As Richard Bernstein, an appellate lawyer who clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, has shown, there is a strong case that the 30 states are reading the law correctly and that the administration’s preferred policy is a legal overreach. Unsurprisingly, this issue is currently being litigated, and the Supreme Court—not the president—will resolve it. 

Indeed, every element of Mr. Trump’s executive order is now under judicial review, and decisions in several key cases have gone against him. On Oct. 31, 2025, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the president’s “unilateral instruction to add a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement … is contrary to the manifest will of Congress, as expressed in the text, structure, and context of the NVRA and HAVA.” Because “our Constitution assigns responsibility for federal election regulation to the States and Congress,” not to the president, and because Congress has not delegated this responsibility to the president, his order imposing a specific proof-of-citizenship procedure on the states lies outside his authority.

On Jan. 9, 2026, U.S. District Judge John H. Chun of the Western District of Washington cited the seminal Youngstown Steel case—which prohibited President Truman from seizing steel mills by executive order—to underscore the principle that whenever a president issues an executive order, the authority must stem “either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” Reviewing every challenged element of President Trump’s executive order, Judge Chun concluded that neither source of authority was present and that these elements could not be sustained.

These cases at the district court level do not settle the matter. The administration is likely to appeal, and it can draw some encouragement from a Fifth Circuit decision, Republican National Committee v. Wetzel, which read the relevant statutes and history to permit the imposition of an Election Day cutoff for the receipt of mail-in ballots. The Supreme Court will soon be called upon to determine whether the president’s executive authority extends to ballot procedures and, if so, how far existing statutes allow him to go in exercising this authority.