Carl Nichols Declines to Block Trump Executive Order on Mail-In Ballots
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols declined to block Donald Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots, leaving the plan in place for now. The ruling lets the administration move forward unless federal agencies begin acting in a way that gives challengers a fresh basis to return to court.
In a written ruling, Nichols said the Democrats who sued had not shown present harm. He wrote: “Given that the Executive Order does not command Plaintiffs to do anything, and that no agency has yet acted pursuant to the Order in a way that could harm Plaintiffs, they have not suffered any harm at present.”
Judge Carl Nichols
Trump signed the executive order on May 31 and said it would “enhance election integrity” via the U.S. Mail. The order asks the Department of Homeland Security to create “state citizenship lists” from federal citizenship and naturalization records, Social Security records and other federal databases.
Those lists would help state election officials verify voter rolls and determine who is eligible to vote. The order also asks the U.S. Postal Service to only mail ballots to approved voters under the plan.
May 14 hearing
Nichols had pressed challengers earlier over the timing of their lawsuit. At a May 14 hearing, he asked how he could block the order before he knew “how DHS is going to compile the list,” and said, “We don’t know, sitting here today, whether any of these steps are going to take place.”
That left Democrats arguing a broader constitutional point: they said the order infringed on states’ rights to regulate elections. Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, called the move “voter suppression” and “a desperate move by Trump to steal the next election.” She also said, “This is a blatant attempt by the president to undermine states’ control over election administration for his own benefit—which is a direct attack on the Constitution and our democracy,”
Mail-in ballot challenge
Nichols said the Democrats who filed the original challenge could come back with a fresh injunction once federal agencies begin implementing the executive order. That keeps the case open at the point where the order becomes operational, not merely announced.
The dispute also lands against Trump’s long-running opposition to mail-in voting. He has pushed the debunked claim that mail-in ballots caused widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, even though he himself used mail-in voting in a March Florida special election for a district that includes Mar-a-Lago. Democrat Emily Gregory won that race over Republican candidate Jon Maples.
For now, the order survives the first court test. The next fight will hinge on whether agencies start building the citizenship lists and whether those steps create the kind of harm Nichols said had not yet occurred.
