Trump Wants to Change How You Vote. Here's What's Happening.
President Trump is trying to change how Americans cast their ballots, and the 2026 midterm elections are just weeks away. His efforts involve orders from the White House, action by the Justice Department, and a fight at the Supreme Court over mail-in voting.
NPR reporters Miles Parks and Eric McDaniel looked at the situation in an article published August 28, 2026. They reported that Trump is trying to change how people vote and looked at how those efforts might affect voters in November. On August 24, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump to restrict mail-in ballots, giving his administration a win. Days earlier, the administration had asked the Supreme Court to step in, saying a Trump order would tighten the rules for mail ballots before the November elections, according to Reuters. Trump has said he wants to end mail-in voting nationwide before the midterms and has long questioned whether it is secure, Reuters reported.
The fight over mail-in ballots goes back to two executive orders. An executive order is a written command from the president that has the force of law unless a court blocks it or Congress overrides it. In March 2025, Trump signed one called "Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections." It told agency heads and the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that helps states with voting systems, to stop carrying out an earlier order from March 7. That order also called for updates to voting system guidelines and election security standards. Then, on March 31, 2026, Trump signed a second order, "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections," which states that only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. The Brennan Center, a research institute at NYU Law, called the 2026 order Trump's second attempt to change election rules through executive action.
Lawsuits have followed each step. The ACLU, a civil liberties group, filed League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump to challenge the March 31, 2026 order. States led by Democrats renewed their challenge to the mail-in voting restrictions in August 2026, Reuters reported. The Supreme Court's August 24 decision to lift a lower-court barrier to the mail-in ballot rules was the latest turning point in the legal fight.
The Justice Department has also been acting on the administration's election priorities. Its Civil Rights Division enforces federal voting-rights laws. On June 9, 2026, a U.S. Attorney's Office said it would enforce federal voting laws for the 2026 elections, saying that only eligible U.S. citizens can vote. The Justice Department sued five additional states in 2026 for not turning over their voter rolls — the lists of registered voters that states keep. The department also sent staff to monitor primary elections in Minnesota, Florida, and Wyoming.
A Reuters investigation published April 27, 2026 found that the administration's effort to take federal control of elections, which have usually been run by states and local governments, was broader than previously known.
All of these threads together — the executive orders, the lawsuits, and the federal enforcement — raise the question the NPR analysis poses: how will the president's attempts to change voting procedures play out when voters go to the polls? With the midterms weeks away, several disputes are still unresolved. The Supreme Court has shown it is willing to lift barriers to the administration's mail-in ballot rules, but the courts have not made a final ruling on whether those rules are legal. The renewed challenge from states, filed in late August, means the lawsuits will continue right up to the election.
The broader context here is the tension between federal power and the way U.S. elections have traditionally been run. Elections in this country are managed by state and local officials. The administration's actions, through executive orders, lawsuits against states over voter rolls, and monitoring of primaries, are a sustained push for federal control over those procedures. Whether that push survives the courts, and how much of it is in place by November, will affect not just how the 2026 vote works but also how much say the federal government has over elections in the future.
