The First Circuit Court of Appeals should affirm the District Court for the District of Massachusetts’s decision blocking a portion of President Trump’s executive order attempting to exert federal control over elections, according to an amicus brief filed by CREW on behalf of a bipartisan group of former secretaries of state. 

On March 25, 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) entitled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” seeking to unilaterally add new requirements to the federal voter registration form, take federal control over some voter roll list maintenance, require the review and potential decertification of certain voting systems and prohibit states from processing absentee and mail-in ballots received after Election Day. In June 2025, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the provisions in the EO that would require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registrants using the federal voter registration form and punish states for processing ballots received after Election Day, ruling they were unconstitutional and risked voter disenfranchisement. Federal judges in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, Washington also struck down those requirements, similarly ruling that Trump’s executive order was an overreach of presidential power. 

As the amicus brief argues, “[t]he Executive Branch does not have constitutional authority to exercise—let alone usurp—the states’ and Congress’s Constitutionally delegated power to regulate and administer elections.” In addition to violating the Constitution, the EO directly conflicts with statutes that Congress enacted to maintain the states’ central role in election administration. Under the National Voter Registration Act, the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), which was established by the Help America Vote Act, is responsible for developing the federal voter registration form in consultation with state election officials. The President does not have the authority to direct the day-to-day activities of the EAC, which is an independent, bipartisan entity. Moreover, the EO also attempts to invalidate numerous states’ laws for receiving and tabulating votes, which they have the authority to do under the Elections Clause of the Constitution. 

Aside from constituting an unlawful intrusion into states’ powers, the EO also is irreparably harming states’ abilities to administer their elections. As the amicus brief points out, the EAC has already taken steps to implement the EO, including sending letters regarding revisions to the voter registration form and demanding that states turn over their voter rolls. These changes are forcing states to divert resources away from established administrative processes, which are already constrained by chronic underfunding. Election administrators across the country have confirmed that the EO is disrupting their work. The burden of implementing the EO is compounded by the EO’s threatened stripping of necessary, already-appropriated state election funding. Simultaneously, the EO has also proliferated misleading narratives about the safety and security of elections by falsely claiming that the United States has not been adequately enforcing election requirements. 

Given that the Trump administration’s EO compromises election integrity instead of protecting it, it is imperative that the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirms the District Court’s decision to block its unconstitutional and unlawful provisions. 

Read the amicus brief here.

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