The Supreme Court opinion was a win for Democratic-led states and voting groups. But Trump and his supporters are working on other election fronts.
Blanche responds to Supreme Court ballot decision on elections
Attorney General Blanche says the administration will follow the Supreme Court ruling while continuing efforts to support free and fair elections.
WASHINGTON − In his second term, President Donald Trump has moved aggressively to assert federal control over elections. And in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Sept. 14 ruling blocking his executive order restricting mail ballots, Trump and his supporters are expected to now focus on other parts of that broad campaign in the less than 50 days before the elections.
The Constitution grants states authority over election administration, but some voting rights experts say Trump’s moves are aimed at gaining a political advantage over Democrats and retaining Republican control of Congress.
The Supreme Court opinion was a win for a group of Democratic-led states and voting organizations that challenged the Trump administration effort to have the U.S. Postal Service play a role in deciding who received a mail-in ballot, saying it was untested and could lead to potentially millions of valid ballots being rejected.
Voting rights activists are pleased with the Supreme Court decision, but are worried about the damage the weeks of confusion caused − and that it’s just part of a broader campaign that will continue until voters go to the polls.
“Every lawless gambit has failed, but that desperation means he may try something extreme. He will fail again – the courts have held the line and organizations are preparing legal challenges and coordinating with election officials to be ready,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, told USA TODAY.
The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about what potential next steps they might take. The administration and Republican leaders in Congress have said the changes are necessary to secure elections.
At a White House briefing on Sept. 15, Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Supreme Court decision doesn’t affect ongoing Justice Department investigations into illegal voting.
“Of course we’re going to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision, as we always do,” Blanche said. “That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to do everything in this administration that we can to make sure that there are free and fair elections. … We’re not going to stop the work that we’re doing.”
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a recent interview that the Trump administration is battling what she called judicial “lawfare” nationwide as it races to enforce new restrictions on voting by mail before the November midterm elections.
“We’re facing this kind of lawfare from the courts around the country on many of our important Trump administration priorities and something that we deal with every day at the DOJ,” Dhillon told Newsmax Sept. 8, before the Supreme Court ruling.
Trump administration’s attempts to gain control in midterm elections
In recent months, the administration has pushed on numerous fronts to gain, or tighten, control over the upcoming midterm elections, including by limiting mail ballots, demanding voter rolls from states, trying to create a federal list of U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and using federal citizenship records and other data to challenge voter rolls.
Some of the efforts have been blocked by state or federal courts. Federal judges in at least 11 states have halted 23 lawsuits brought by the administration to force states to turn over voter rolls, according to Andrew Garber of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
“The courts are rejecting all of these illegitimate efforts. It has been a stunning losing streak for Donald Trump when he attempt to outside the lines to break this system,” said Norm Eisen, who is helping lead some of the court battles as executive chair of the States United Democracy Center.
Others are less likely to face legal challenges and are most difficult for activists to push back on. Administration officials have sought to cast doubt on voting machines’ reliability and to pressure local officials by weakening election-security support systems states usually rely on like the Election Assistance Commission, and installing loyalists in key posts.
Ben Hovland, a fellow with the Center for American Progress, told USA TODAY that “so much of this is part of a broader effort by the administration to undermine faith and confidence in our elections.”
“Part of this is obviously a pretext for a larger effort to say you can’t trust our elections, particularly if the administration doesn’t like how November turns out for them,” said Hovland, a former commissioner with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) from 2019 until he was dismissed by Trump in July 2026.
Here’s a rundown of other ways in which the Trump administration is working to gain federal control of elections.
- Citizenship checks: The Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, led by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, are trying to crunch all sorts of federal data – and merge them into the much-criticized SAVE database at DHS – to flag what they allege are supposed noncitizen voters, despite virtually no historical evidence of widespread fraud. Earlier this week a whistleblower came forward saying the department has pulled employees from other national security tasks to search for noncitizen voters in states that will not provide voter information to the federal government.
- Voting machines: Federal officials, including Trump-appointed intelligence officials, and some supportive state officials, are openly questioning whether voting systems that have been commonly used for decades can be trusted. That has fed into existing doubts about election technology Trump and his supporters fanned without evidence during and after the 2020 election, including whether other countries like Venezuela have interfered.
- Personnel: The administration has appointed election deniers and other loyalists to key posts while also pushing out career officials, which many voting rights experts say has weakened the kind of election integrity guardrails that held in 2020.
- Pressure campaigns: Trump administration officials have threatened jail time, criminal charges and the loss of FEMA and other federal funding to force states and local election officials to comply with these efforts.
“Surely someone in the White House knows that most of the stuff that they are trying around elections, trying to interfere with elections, cannot survive judicial review, and yet they persist with it, and that is to plant these seeds of doubt,” said Hannah Fried, co-founder and CEO of All Voting Is Local and a former top “voter protection” official for Democrats, including President Barack Obama.
“What we’re seeing time and again is that they’re getting stopped. The courts are stopping them,” she said.
And elected officials are refusing to comply, especially when it risks violating state or federal law, she added.
“We’re also seeing election officials being like, I’m not going to do that. I cannot do that, I have to follow the law,” Fried said.
Fried said the administration is trying to lay the groundwork through some of the election machine and ballot seizures to normalize the federal government taking election equipment and ballots after the election.
“All of that stuff is meant to normalize the idea that disruption in election administration is something we should tolerate,” she said. But, she added there are laws and rules that could be quickly enforced if it does.
Coming back to mail in ballots
In its Sept. 14 ruling, the Supreme Court left in place a lower-court injunction against the Postal Service mail-in ballot rule, saying the government is unlikely to succeed in challenging it. But the two conservative justices who dissented, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, noted that the Postal Service “has broad authority to regulate the mail.”
That wording, some voting rights experts said, could potentially prompt the Trump administration to try and find a way to revisit the issue, most likely after the midterms.
Conservative elections lawyer Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, said in a interview before the Supreme Court ruling that he supports the ongoing legal battle, including Trump’s efforts to reform mail-in voting.
“Look, the rules make perfect sense,” von Spakovsky told the Salem News Channel Sept. 8. “For example, the Postal Service wanted states to put a barcode on the outside of the envelopes. Why? So they could track the mail-in ballots. Why would states be against that? Why would they not want to know where these ballots are?”
“Well, it’s because they keep saying, ‘Oh, mail-in voting is perfectly safe.’ This would give you data how often those ballots are misdelivered, not delivered, not delivered on time,” von Spakovsky said. “They don’t want that kind of information.”