A federal judge has blocked key parts of President Donald Trump’s attempt to make it harder to register to vote without providing documents proving U.S. citizenship.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled Thursday that Trump’s sweeping executive order requiring federal agencies to impose the new voter registration standards was an attempt to usurp the powers of Congress and the states.
Legal Challenges and Rulings
Kollar-Kotelly blocked a part of Trump’s order that would change a federal voter registration form to indicate that proof of citizenship is required to register. She also blocked another provision that instructs federal agencies not to assist individuals with registering unless they can assess that those people are U.S. citizens. But the judge left in place a portion of the order that instructs the Department of Homeland Security to share data with states seeking to verify citizenship of people who are seeking to register or already on their voter rolls.
The judge said the provisions she blocked were “incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress.” She said Trump’s demands were at odds with two different statutes: the National Voter Registration, passed in 1993, and the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002.
Implications and Future Legal Actions
Voters are not required to use the federal form to register, but many do, and states and localities are required to accept it.
The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by left-leaning advocacy groups, nonpartisan voter registration advocates and Democratic Party organizations.
Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee, stopped short of blocking Trump’s entire executive order, which also threatened to punish or pull funding from states that count ballots received after Election Day. The judge ruled that challenges to those provisions should be — and in fact already are being — brought by state governments, which are more directly affected.
Another suit over Trump’s election-focused executive order was filed in Massachusetts earlier this month by the Democratic attorneys general of 19 states. No ruling has yet been issued in that case.
