Trump Vows Executive Order Voter ID Mandate Bypassing Congress
President Donald Trump announced Friday via social media that he would issue an executive order mandating voter identification for midterm elections if Congress does not pass legislation to that effect. Trump stated, “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” and claimed there are “legal reasons” supporting such an order, though he provided no specifics. The House passed the SAVE America Act on Wednesday with unanimous Republican support, requiring states to obtain documentary proof of citizenship before voter registration and imposing new mail-in ballot restrictions.
Legal experts directly contradicted Trump’s authority to unilaterally alter election procedures. Stanford law professor Nate Persily stated the Constitution explicitly grants election regulation power to state legislatures, not the president, and that “the Constitution is clear on this.” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, said any executive order requiring states to comply with Trump’s voter ID mandate would “similarly be found to be unconstitutional” based on a federal judge’s January ruling that permanently blocked a prior Trump executive order attempting to alter voting laws. Trump issued that sweeping order in March 2025 seeking to impose mail-in ballot deadlines and citizenship proof requirements, which a federal court determined exceeded presidential authority.
The SAVE America Act now faces a Senate vote requiring 60 votes to succeed—an unlikely threshold given Democratic opposition and Republican defections. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska became the first Republican senator to oppose the bill, noting that GOP colleagues claimed in 2021 to oppose federal election mandates imposed on states. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer characterized the legislation as imposing “Jim Crow type laws to the entire country” and declared it “dead on arrival in the Senate.” Democrats argue voter ID laws are designed to disenfranchise voters, emphasizing that voting by noncitizens is already illegal and exceedingly rare.
Persily connected Trump’s voter ID push to broader attempts to federalize election administration, including the FBI’s recent seizure of ballots and voter records from Fulton County, Georgia—a seizure Trump’s continued false claims about the 2020 election have motivated. Persily stated Trump’s push represents a coordinated effort: “It’s not an isolated tweet here, right? There’s a lot that’s going on. So you’ve got the action in the legislature, in Congress, you’ve got these, the earlier executive order, you have the seizing of the ballots and other materials from Fulton County, right? And so it’s all of a piece with the desire to have greater federal oversight of elections.”
Trump’s pattern of attempting to circumvent constitutional limits on presidential power reflects his stated goal to federalize election administration from states he deems incapable of running elections honestly, specifically targeting Democratic-led jurisdictions. His explicit threat to impose voter ID requirements “whether approved by Congress or not” contradicts the constitutional separation of powers and follows his documented history of pressuring state officials to overturn legitimate election results.
(Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/trump-vows-voter-id-requirements-midterms-rcna259018)