BURSTDemocrats are stepping up their opposition to one of President Trump’s latest executive orders, which would require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.
The order directs state and local officials to record on voter registration forms “the type of document that the applicant presented as documentary proof of United States citizenship,” such as a passport, Real ID, or another state or federal issue identification that proves citizenship, among other aspects.
Critics say the order will only result in large swaths of voters being disenfranchised, and multiple groups, including the Democratic National Committee, have filed lawsuits over the executive order to block it from moving forward.
“There are multiple problems with it,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told The Hill.
“The president [of] United States does not control voting laws. The states control voting laws in America, and Congress can regulate, but Congress has not passed anything the president’s talking about,” added Raskin, who’s also a constitutional law professor,.
Trump late last month signed an executive order that said it was “the policy of my Administration to enforce Federal law and to protect the integrity of our election process.”
In addition to requiring proof of citizenship in order to register to vote, it would also allow the advisory Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), in tandem with the Department of Homeland Security, to “review each State’s publicly available voter registration list and available records concerning voter list maintenance activities.”
The executive order directs members of Trump’s Cabinet to make sure state and local officials have access to systems that can verify a voters’ citizenship or immigration status. And it looks to enter into information-sharing agreements with each state’s chief election official to tackle potential election law violations; if states don’t cooperate with the Justice Department, states could see federal funding withheld.
The proof of citizenship portion of the executive order aligns closely with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which congressional Republicans are pushing. The legislation would require documentary proof of citizenship when voters register to vote.
“Congress acting here would be able to go further than what the executive order can do,” said Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, which supports Trump’s order.
“This doesn’t absolve Congress of its responsibility, I think, to protect the federal elections, and it doesn’t absolve the states, either,” he added.
Trump and his allies have made election interference and fraud central issues — particularly since the 2020 election when Trump narrowly lost to former President Biden — despite the fact that election fraud has been found to be rare. It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal and state elections.
At least three different coalitions have since filed lawsuits against the Trump administration seeking to bar it from being enforced as of Monday morning.
One of those coalitions, which includes the Democratic National Committee and multiple Democratic groups in addition to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), argue in a suit filed Monday that millions of Democrats and supporters would have a harder time registering to vote, vote or administer elections.
The lawsuit argues the president has no authority to changing the country’s voting system and says the order “forces numerous federal agencies to reveal sensitive personal information about millions of voters to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency ('DOGE') without any consent or statutory authority” and “tramples upon the independence and bipartisan structure of the Election Assistance Commission,” among other concerns.
“I’ve seen voter suppression up close as someone who has run in Georgia numerous times,” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) said. “Officials in Georgia looked at the anatomy of my win the first time around and they came after it with surgical precision. I had to beat them in court in order to win my race. And so we’re seeing the president play out of the same playbook writ large.”
Republicans for their part believe the executive order is offering “commonsense” solutions over how to address election wrongdoing.
“The Democrats continue to show their disdain for the Constitution and it continues to show in their insane objections to the president’s commonsense executive actions to require proof of U.S. citizenship in an effort to protect the integrity of American elections,” said Harrison Fields, special assistant to the president and deputy White House press secretary. “The Trump administration is standing up for free, fair, and honest elections and asking this basic question is essential to our Constitutional Republic.”
Republicans, too, point to the example of Georgia, which broke several voting records in 2022 and 2024 despite new restrictions lawmakers imposed around voting after the 2020 election; Democrats and voting groups had argued the changes would disenfranchise voters.
Democrats’ “lies about ‘voter suppression’ with Georgia's election integrity law had huge economic consequences for workers & businesses — all for Georgia to have record voter turnout in 2022 and 2024,” Republican National Committee spokesperson Abigail Jackson told The Hill. “Now Democrats are running the same tired playbook on President Trump’s new executive order, but the American people won’t fall for it.”
Critics of the president’s executive order point to figures from the State Department that showed 51 percent of Americans had access to a passport last year. Additionally, under the order, a birth certificate is not considered an acceptable form of ID. Meanwhile, other forms of identification including REAL IDs and military identification cards do not always show proof of citizenship.
Republicans argue those issues can be remedied.
“That’s what eligibility checks are for,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said when asked about access to proof of citizenship.
Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) noted that he “can’t believe somebody doesn’t have a driver’s license [or] doesn’t have some form of ID.”
“I don’t know that people don’t have access to that, and certainly they should have access to it and want to have access to it so they can vote,” Carter told The Hill. “It’s one of our greatest freedoms that we have, is the freedom to vote.”
Snead said the order is about “setting a baseline standard.”
“Quite literally almost anything is being challenged if it comes out of the Trump administration. An executive order saying that the sky is blue would be challenged at this point,” Snead said.
Experts have found that while examples of voter fraud do exist, they’re exceedingly rare. Even conservative groups have acknowledged as much. The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Map tracker, which the group caveats is not comprehensive, showed only 40 cases of election fraud in Arizona between 1982 and 2024. In the same time span, 36 cases were found in Georgia and 10 in Nevada.
“I think this is just another dog whistle. It's fearmongering,” said Dominik Whitehead, senior vice president of campaigns and mobilization at NAACP, another group suing over the order.
“It's all the things that we see this administration continue to do,” Whitehead said, adding it was “attacking another piece of our democracy that is working like voting to figure out ways to attack, unfortunately, both the immigrant community and other communities that are disenfranchised and vulnerable overall.”