The May 2025 order directed officials to enforce policies on voting and voter registration. The judge said the president lacks the authority to do that.
A federal judge on Jan. 30 struck down key parts of President Donald Trump’s executive order that tightened citizen verification requirements for voter registration, ruling he exceeded his authority.
The case concerns Executive Order 14248, which Trump signed on March 25, 2025, with the goal of preventing illegal immigrants from voting. In the order, the president directed the Election Assistance Commission to require in its national mail voter registration form that voters produce documentary proof of U.S. citizenship such as a U.S. passport.
The commission was established by Congress in 2002 and helps local officials administer elections.
The order also directed federal officials to take steps to make sure illegal immigrants and other noncitizens do not vote in federal elections.
Several sections of the order were previously blocked on a preliminary basis by various court orders.
In the case at hand, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that provisions in the order requiring citizenship verification for those registering to vote or applying for absentee ballots “are inconsistent with the constitutional separation of powers and cannot lawfully be implemented.”
The separation of powers is a constitutional doctrine that divides the government into three branches to prevent any single branch from accumulating too much power.
Kollar-Kotelly said that the U.S. Constitution “does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.”
The framers of the U.S. Constitution gave power over election rules “to the parts of our government that they believed would be most responsive to the will of the people: first to the States, and then, in some instances, to Congress.”
“They assigned no role at all to the President,” added the judge, who is based in the nation’s capital.
Kollar-Kotelly also struck down part of the executive order that directs heads of certain federal agencies to “assess citizenship” before giving the federal form to “enrollees of public assistance programs.”
She said the National Voter Registration Act requires agencies to give the federal form to those who receive their services. That law specifies that voter eligibility should be verified by attestation under penalty of perjury on the form, and that requirement implicitly rejects any other kind of assessment or “pre-screening.”
