A federal judge blocked part of an expansive executive order signed last month seeking to overhaul election laws, writing on Thursday that President Trump did not have the authority to require documentary proof of citizenship for all voters.
“Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states — not the president — with the authority to regulate federal elections,” wrote Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the Federal District Court in Washington. She pointed to federal voting legislation being considered in Congress, adding that the president could not “short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.”
But the judge did not block another key part of the executive order that sought to force a deadline for mail ballots in federal elections by withholding federal funding from states that failed to comply with the deadline. She found that the Democrats who brought the legal challenge did not have standing to do so. The legal concerns with this provision, Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote, are being considered in other cases brought by state attorneys general.
The executive order, signed in early March, sought to direct the federal Election Assistance Commission to amend its voter registration form and require any potential voter to show documentary proof of citizenship to register. Acceptable documents included passports, military IDs or other state-issued identification that clarified citizenship. The executive order did not directly mention birth certificates as a valid way to prove citizenship.
In a statement, the Trump administration vowed to continue the legal battle in court.
“President Trump will keep fighting for election integrity, despite Democrat objections that reveal their disdain for common-sense safeguards like verifying citizenship,” said Harrison Fields, a spokesman for the White House. “Free and fair elections are the bedrock of our constitutional republic, and we’re confident in securing an ultimate victory in the courtroom.”
Democrats celebrated the ruling.
“Today’s court victory represents a huge step in the fight to protect our democracy,” the party said in a statement. “Without this decision, Americans across the country — including married women who changed their last name and low-income individuals — could have been unable to register to vote.”
About 21.3 million people do not have proof of citizenship readily available, according to a 2023 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights and democracy group, and the University of Maryland. Nearly four million people do not have the documents at all because they were lost, destroyed or stolen.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly, noting that the Election Assistance Commission was “a bipartisan, independent regulatory commission,” wrote that the president could not force the commission to change procedures without a vote by members, as required by the law establishing the commission.
The executive order amounted to an aggressive attempt to give the executive branch unprecedented influence over how federal elections are run, as the Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections. And it was another example of how Mr. Trump is trying to expand his presidential power.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly made repeated reference to the separation of powers regarding elections, making it clear that the Constitution offered no room for the president to interfere or create rules or regulations that apply to elections.
“The states have initial authority to regulate elections,” the judge wrote. “Congress has supervisory authority over those regulations. The president does not feature at all. In fact, executive regulatory authority over federal elections does not appear to have crossed the framers’ minds.”
Judge Kollar-Kotelly was nominated to a lower court in the District of Columbia by President Ronald Reagan and was named to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton.
Mr. Trump’s order also aimed to create a federal deadline for mail-in ballots, requiring that they arrive by the time polls close on Election Day. (At least 17 states currently allow mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive soon afterward.)
Judge Kollar-Kotelly declined to block this provision solely because the parties bringing the legal challenge — the Democratic Party, Senator Chuck Schumer, Representative Hakeem Jeffries and voting groups — were not able to show that they would be harmed by the provision. Individual states, however, could “challenge the validity of that provision in court.”
But the judge was also clear that the decision regarding the mail-ballot deadline was not one on the merits of the argument.
“The court’s analysis should not be taken to decide any issue more broadly than that,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote. Legal arguments from states “that stand to lose federal funding for their election programs” if they accept late-arriving ballots “is a question for another day.”
