Right to Vote

Ossoff: "Among today's false prophets are the election deniers who indulge this president's obsession with overturning the 2020 election. Hear me when I say this — they tell a lie so absurd, and therefore so debasing, that the act of telling it proves the teller's total and humiliating submission."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 16, 2026 at 12:22 PM

Yeah this is kind of key. There isn't really an executive order that the president can sign that meaningfully changes election administration. Basically what he can do is direct the FEC to work with states to change things (or something) and maybe impose penalties somewhere if they don't?

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— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) February 16, 2026 at 10:30 AM

It’s not wrong to keep highlighting Trump’s feckless rhetoric, but it’s foolish to succumb to doomerism about it. Per an actual legal specialist, Steve Vladek, at his SubStack One First:

… In an effort to cajole the Senate into passing the deeply controversial “SAVE” Act, President Trump has continued to publicly make claims about his putative authority to ban certain voting practices (like mail-in ballots) through unilateral executive action. Leaving aside the wildly overstated voter fraud claims purportedly animating these efforts, and the not-so-subtle attempt to make it harder for Americans without ready access to government-issued identification to vote, I wanted to use today’s “Long Read” to explain why the President’s threats are both legally and practically empty.

The legal argument is straightforward enough: the President has neither unilateral constitutional authority nor delegated statutory authority to set nationwide election rules. (This is why the SAVE Act is even on the table.) But for those who wave their hands and say “that hasn’t stopped this administration before” (even though, in point of fact, it has), there are also some pretty significant practical reasons why the President’s threats can’t amount to anything in practice, most of which sound in long-settled principles of constitutional federalism.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see other efforts from this administration and its supporters to interfere with—and otherwise attempt to undermine—the electoral process come this fall. But the President changing the rules all by himself is, both legally and practically, a complete non-starter…

… The relevant constitutional provision is the Elections Clause—Article I, Section 4: “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.”…

This reality matters to President Trump’s ongoing efforts to purport to interfere with state election rules in two different respects: First, any legal authority to so interfere must come from a statute—not from the Constitution itself. And there’s no existing federal statute that gives the federal government as a whole, let alone the executive branch by itself, the unilateral authority to set identification requirements for everyone voting in federal elections.

Second, the distribution of responsibility for elections is also the biggest practical obstacle to President Trump attempting to impose new federal rules through executive order: no one who’s actually in charge of those elections would be bound to comply with such an order. So unlike the President’s ability to order, say, executive branch agencies (or, say, immigration judges) to obey an unlawful executive order, here, he’d have no coercive power whatsoever. Some jurisdictions may choose to comply with an unlawful election-related executive order from the Trump administration, but the key for present purposes is that it would be those state/local officials’ choice, not a federal mandate, that does the work…

It is, or at least ought to be, deeply alarming that we’re even having to talk about a President trying to unilaterally change the rules for federal elections—especially given this particular President’s … history … concerning respect for the integrity of our electoral processes. One might also point out that the number of eligible voters who would likely be disenfranchised by the SAVE Act this fall is many degrees of magnitude higher than the total number of documented cases of voting by non-citizens over decades’ worth of elections. But without getting too deep into the policy debate here (which ought to militate against both disenfranching eligible voters and empowering this specific President), it’s worth underscoring that there’s just no viable legal argument, and no plausible practical basis, on which a President could unilaterally tell states that don’t want to listen how they must run their elections—including what, if any, identification registered voters need to produce in order to cast their ballots.

If the SAVE Act doesn’t make it through the Senate, that should be the end of the matter, at least on this topic, and at least for now.

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