BOSTON — Attorneys general from 19 states sued to stop the executive order when it was signed. A federal judge blocked it temporarily last year. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper made that block permanent, ruling that President Trump’s attempt to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote exceeded presidential authority — and that the Department of Justice had failed to demonstrate the widespread voter fraud the administration claimed made the order necessary.
The 59-page ruling converts a preliminary injunction Casper issued last year, after attorneys general from 19 states sued in federal court in Boston, into a binding permanent bar. The executive order she struck down sought to do three things: require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, prohibit states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day even if postmarked on time, and withhold federal funds from states that declined to comply. All three provisions fell.
The Constitution, Casper wrote, “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.” Authority over voter registration and ballot handling belongs to states and to Congress — not the executive branch. The administration’s invocation of anti-fraud rationale did not supply the authority the constitutional text withholds. ABC News reported that Casper found the DOJ’s evidence “did not come close” to establishing the systemic failure that might justify a federal override of the state registration processes that have existed for decades.
The ruling also addressed who the order would have affected. Casper found that implementing the proof-of-citizenship requirement would have disenfranchised thousands of eligible voters — newly naturalized citizens whose documentation is held in formats federal systems do not easily accept, Americans who have moved and lack updated paperwork, and registered voters whose state IDs do not double as citizenship verification. The provision withholding federal funds from non-compliant states would have created different registration requirements across state lines, producing the fragmented system the Constitution’s elections clauses were designed to prevent.
Wednesday’s ruling is the third time in less than two weeks that a federal court has blocked a Trump election executive action. A week earlier, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked a separate executive order — one that created a federal voter list and restricted access to mail-in ballots — in a ruling covering 22 states. Earlier this week, a Washington, D.C., district court blocked the DOGE-modified voter screening database from being used by states to purge citizens from voter rolls, finding violations of the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.
The coalition that challenged the order reflects the breadth of state resistance to federal override of election administration. The 19 attorneys general who filed suit in Boston came from California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Their central argument was the one Casper accepted most directly: elections belong to states, and no executive order can reassign that constitutional allocation to the president.
The administration had argued that noncitizen participation in federal elections was an identifiable and growing problem warranting executive intervention. Justice Department lawyers identified instances of noncitizens registered to vote. NBC News reported that Casper found those cases isolated and already addressed through existing state mechanisms — not evidence of the systemic failure the executive order’s rationale required. The “widespread illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error” the order invoked as justification were, in the court’s assessment, unsupported by the government’s record.
The accelerating pattern of court defeats in election cases is unfolding at the same moment Trump is pressing Congress to accomplish through legislation what courts have now blocked three times in executive form. The SAVE America Act — which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot — is stalled in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to advance and has 49. The House spent this week frozen by conservatives demanding Senate action on the bill, forcing Speaker Mike Johnson to send members home without passing any legislation.
The Trump administration did not immediately say whether it would appeal Casper’s ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Emergency stays are possible but have been denied in several similar election cases this term. The Supreme Court still has several pending election-related decisions to issue before its summer recess, including Trump’s bid to end automatic birthright citizenship, but the court’s posture toward presidential authority over election administration has not been definitively resolved in the administration’s favor.
The one thing the ruling does not settle is what evidence, if any, the administration holds but did not present to Casper. It is possible the Justice Department has documentation of noncitizen voter fraud that a higher court, in a different posture, will find more persuasive. What is on record now is what the court assessed and found legally insufficient: not patterns, but instances; not systemic failure, but the assertion of it. The proof the executive order claimed to address was, in Casper’s 59 pages, the thing the government could not provide.
