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Trump Is Trying to Gain More Power Over Elections. Is His Effort Legal?

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Trump Is Trying to Gain More Power Over Elections. Is His Effort Legal?

President Trump pushed on Tuesday to hand the executive branch unprecedented influence over how federal elections are run, signing a far-reaching and legally dubious order to change U.S. voting rules.

The executive order, which seeks to require proof of citizenship to register to vote as well as the return of all mail ballots by Election Day, is an attempt to upend centuries of settled election law and federal-state relations.

The Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections. Instead, it gives states the power to set the “times, places and manner” of elections, leaving them to decide the rules, oversee voting and try to prevent fraud. Congress can also pass election laws or override state legislation, as it did with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Yet Mr. Trump’s order, which follows a yearslong Republican push to tighten voting laws out of a false belief that the 2020 election was rigged, bypasses both the states and Congress. Republican lawmakers in Washington are trying to pass many of the same voting restrictions, but they are unlikely to make it through the Senate.

The order’s most eye-catching provisions are the requirements of proof of citizenship and the return of mail ballots by Election Day.

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But the order, which threatens to withhold federal funding from states that do not comply with it, includes a range of other measures.

It seeks to give federal agencies, including the Elon Musk-led team known as the Department of Government Efficiency, access to state voter rolls to check “for consistency with federal requirements.” It aims to set new rules for election equipment, which could force states to replace voting machines that use bar codes or QR codes. And it instructs the U.S. attorney general to hunt for and prosecute election crimes.

Probably not all of it, legal experts say — and voting rights groups and state attorneys general are already signaling that they will file challenges.

Several experts predicted that provisions of the order might well be found unlawful, though they said that others, like directions to Mr. Trump’s attorney general and other cabinet members, fell within legal bounds.

“It’s an attempt at a power grab,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The president has been seen in the past as having no role to play when it comes to the conduct of federal elections, and this attempt to assert authority over the conduct of federal elections would take power away from both an independent federal agency and from the states.”

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A central question surrounds Mr. Trump’s attempt to use the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that Congress created in 2002 to help election officials with their work, to enforce the proof-of-citizenship requirement.

Currently, Americans may register to vote in federal elections either through their state or by using a federal form created by the E.A.C. The form includes a box that registrants check to attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are U.S. citizens, but it does not require documentation as proof.

The executive order would force the E.A.C. to change that process to require a passport, state identification that includes citizenship information or military identification.

Legal experts dispute that Mr. Trump has the authority to force the agency, which Congress designated as “independent” and which includes two commissioners from each party, to take any action.

“He can ask nicely,” said Justin Levitt, a professor of constitutional law at Loyola Marymount University who served in the Biden administration. “But he thinks he’s got a power that, at least so far, he does not have. It would take a change in the law and the Supreme Court affirmatively approving a radical expansion of power of the executive.”

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Legal experts say the provision requiring all ballots to arrive by Election Day also probably exceeds the president’s legal authority, particularly the threat to withhold federal funding from those states that do not comply. (Seventeen states currently allow mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive soon afterward.)

“If the president is basically usurping the power of the purse by imposing limits on these grants that Congress itself did not impose, that could be the basis for constitutionally challenging these conditions,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

Mr. Trump’s attempt to force states to turn over voter data to Mr. Musk’s team and federal agencies recalls a similar program from the first Trump administration, a commission on “election integrity” led by Kris Kobach, who is now the Kansas attorney general.

The commission sought data from all 50 states, but 44 of them refused to comply. The Republican secretary of state in Mississippi told the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”

If the full order were to stand, it could potentially disenfranchise millions of Americans and cost state and local governments millions of dollars.

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About 21.3 million people do not have proof of citizenship readily available, according to a 2023 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights and democracy group. Nearly four million people do not have the documents at all because they were lost, destroyed or stolen. The executive order does not allow for birth certificates to prove citizenship.

It is also unclear whether women who have changed their surname after marriage will face new hurdles in proving their citizenship.

The order could also lead election officials to throw out sizable numbers of ballots that arrive after Election Day. For example, in Nevada’s two largest counties in the 2022 general election, about 45,000 ballots arrived after Election Day and were counted, according to state data. In Washington State, Kim Wyman, a Republican former secretary of state, estimated that “about a third of the ballots in any given election” arrived on the Wednesday or Thursday after Election Day.

The order could put states in deep budget holes, as well. Many states, including the battlegrounds of Georgia and Pennsylvania, use voting machines with bar codes or QR codes. Replacing them would cost millions of dollars that the order does not provide.

Mr. Trump has made specious claims about voter fraud for decades, but since his 2020 election loss and the 2021 Capitol riot, he has pushed the issue to the center of Republican politics.

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Even though voter fraud is exceedingly rare, nearly every speech of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign included false claims that noncitizens were voting in American elections. He also railed against mail voting, even as Republican groups successfully pushed more of the party’s voters to cast ballots that way.

Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative advocacy group tied to the activist Leonard Leo, said the executive order was simply enforcing laws already passed by Congress. He referred to a ruling from a federal appeals court that found that Congress’s selection of a federal Election Day meant all voting must be completed by that day, with no late-arriving ballots permitted.

“The executive order is acting well within the four corners of those existing laws, so we’re not breaking new ground in terms of legal authority,” Mr. Snead said. “We’re not breaking new ground in terms of the relationship between the federal government and the states.”

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Greg Casar Pitches a ‘Resistance 2.0’ for Democrats in the Age of Trump

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Greg Casar Pitches a ‘Resistance 2.0’ for Democrats in the Age of Trump

When he was a 29-year-old on the Austin City Council, Greg Casar led a charge to repeal a ban on camping in the city so that homeless people would not rack up criminal records that could make it harder to find permanent housing.

Tent cities sprang up, conservatives protested and residents voted to reinstate the ban.

These days, Mr. Casar, 35, is the chairman of the House Progressive Caucus and a rising star in a Democratic Party struggling to find its footing during the second coming of President Trump. He has shifted his emphasis to respond.

“We can’t be known as the party of just the most vulnerable people,” Mr. Casar, the bilingual son of Mexican immigrants, said in a recent interview in an Uber en route to a town hall in Thornton, Colo. “This isn’t just about lifting up the poorest people, and that’s where the progressive movement has been.”

Mr. Casar’s goal now is winning back the working people who feel as though the Democratic Party is not for them anymore. He said that also means making economic matters, rather than cultural or identity issues, the party’s bread and butter.

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“I’m shifting and changing,” he said. “On immigration, for example, in 2017, I would say, ‘Immigrant rights are human rights.’ I still believe that, but I’m now saying, ‘We need to make sure that all workers have equal rights.’ ”

He and his team refer to it as Resistance 2.0, and Mr. Casar took it out for a test drive last week. On a school stage here in this city north of Denver, more than 900 miles away from his district, he stood beside a cardboard cutout of a Republican lawmaker whose feet had been replaced with chicken claws.

The rest of the cutout’s body depicted Representative Gabe Evans of Colorado, a hard-right lawmaker elected in November who has held just one town hall since being sworn in. So here was Mr. Casar instead, hoping to show Democrats that their leaders were working to fill the void and defeat politicians too scared to show their faces in their districts amid a public backlash against Mr. Trump’s policies.

It was Mr. Casar’s third town hall in a Republican district, and he pushed back on the idea espoused by veteran party strategists like James Carville that Democrats should simply keep a low profile and “play dead,” letting Mr. Trump’s unpopular agenda win elections for them. If Democrats don’t make vast changes, he said, they will pave the way for a President JD Vance.

“A corpse is not an inspiring political leader,” Mr. Casar said at the town hall. “We need to be out there picking a villain and saying, ‘Elon Musk is stealing your Social Security money for himself.’”

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Many attendees did not sound convinced that the Democratic Party was doing much inspiring at all. One after another, they lined up for questions and expressed general fear and pointed concern that the Democrats were not standing up to Mr. Trump in any real way. They demanded to know what, exactly, the plan was.

“I’d like some confidence that my Democratic votes are actually going to result in strengthening a system and protecting it,” Deb Bennett-Woods, a retired professor, told Mr. Casar.

“It’s frustrating when we feel like our Democrats — I’m sure they’re doing the work, but we don’t hear it,” another woman vented at the microphone.

As a young leader in his second term in Congress, Mr. Casar may be uniquely positioned to answer such angst. He is sprightly — in high school, he placed sixth at the Texas state championships in the mile and once ran a 4-minute, 17-second pace. Despite the anxiety of the current political moment, Mr. Casar presents as a sunny, happy warrior. And his roots are in the progressive populism of Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, whom he endorsed early in the 2016 presidential campaign and introduced at Mr. Sanders’s first Texas rally of that campaign.

“Isn’t our party supposed to be working for the many against the few that are screwing them over?” Mr. Casar said in the interview.

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Ahead of the town hall on Thursday, Mr. Casar popped up at a Hyatt in downtown Denver to meet with workers fighting their employer for an extra dollar an hour in pay that they said they were promised in their last contract negotiation.

“You deserve a raise,” Mr. Casar told them, first in English and then in Spanish. “I’m here with you in this. I’m not here asking for your vote. Your vote is your business, but what I want is to make sure that we all push for other politicians to be out here with you. Workers in this country deserve a big raise.”

He then accompanied them to hand-deliver a letter outlining the pay raise request to the head of human resources at the hotel, who looked uncomfortable and begged the group not to film her.

Standing with the workers, he said, was the most fun he’d had all day.

“It feels a lot more productive,” Mr. Casar said. “I prefer to do this than just voting ‘no.’ So often in Washington, we just get trapped in these senseless meetings.” (He likes to kick off his own caucus meetings by playing Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin, hoping to distinguish them from the tedium.)

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Those workers, he noted in the car, may not have voted in past elections. Maybe this kind of outreach from a Democrat could change that in the next one.

Mr. Evans’ spokeswoman responded to Mr. Casar’s presence in Colorado’s Eighth District by calling him a “defund the police activist who wants to see socialism and transgenderism take over America.”

Mr. Casar rolled his eyes at that. But he said he had made a purposeful pivot to responding to the political crisis in which he finds himself and his party. It means fewer purity tests, and a bigger tent.

And it means allying himself with more moderate Democrats who represent competitive districts and emphasize their military backgrounds to get elected — the types who would never fight for urban camping rights for the homeless.

He is on a text chain with Representatives Pat Ryan of New York and Chris Deluzio in Pennsylvania, two Democrats representing swing districts who also want the party to focus on working people and make villains out of the billionaires benefiting from Mr. Trump’s policies.

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“We’re just talking about issues that are central: utility bills, health care bills, housing affordability,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview. “We can rebuild a broad American and patriotic coalition.”

Mr. Ryan does not love the “Resistance 2.0” framing, but he and Mr. Casar share a vision for what the party needs to be about.

“If we’re resisting something, we’re resisting harm to our constituents, from a big corporation or a billionaire or a corrupt government official,” he said.

Mr. Casar concedes that he has made some mistakes since taking over the Progressive Caucus, a group of nearly 100 lawmakers that is one of the largest in the House. It was his idea for Democrats to hold up signs that read “Musk Steals” and “Save Medicaid” during Mr. Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress. The signs were widely panned, and Mr. Casar now admits they were a bit dopey.

“Looking back on it, I think that just showing up and then leaving would have been better,” he said. “We get pressured into acting like we never make a mistake. I learned that some of the things we pushed for in 2017 became too-easy targets, so we’ve got to change. And I learned from that speech that when the president is just going to lie through the speech, it’s probably best just to walk out.”

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But he has been consistent since Election Day that economic populism is the right approach for his party.

After the election, when Democrats were bemoaning that incumbents worldwide lost because of inflation, Mr. Casar advised his colleagues to take a look at President Claudia Sheinbaum’s decisive victory in Mexico, where a representative of the incumbent party won on a populist economic agenda.

Since then, he has participated in a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally with Mr. Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. He sees himself as a team coach, and he refers to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez as “the No. 1 draft pick we’ve seen in my lifetime.”

Jetting around constantly can take a toll, especially on a young person attempting to have a normal life. He got dinged last year for skipping President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s address to House Democrats and going to a Joni Mitchell concert instead. It has also been tough at times on his partner.

“It’s really hard,” his wife, Asha, a philanthropic adviser, said of the realities of being married to an ambitious politician. “Greg is my favorite, but it’s not my favorite.”

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He knows this, but Mr. Casar uses the word “resolute” to describe his commitment to the job and the fight ahead.

“There is a level of anxiety across the country that did not exist under Trump 1,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview, referring to Mr. Trump’s first term. “Greg understands that the future of American politics is to do what the Democratic leadership does not understand. That is to start addressing the serious crises of working families.”

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Spain and Portugal hit by huge power outage

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Spain and Portugal hit by huge power outage

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Spain and Portugal were hit by a huge power cut on Monday that paralysed transport networks and disrupted mobile communications, with authorities warning that obstacles remained before electricity could be fully restored.

Hours after it began, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said experts were looking for the cause of the outage, which immobilised the rail system, delayed flights and made traffic lights go dark.

Data from the Spanish electricity operator showed that consumption dropped by more than 10GW when the blackout hit shortly after 12.30pm local time, suggesting that it was one of the biggest in recent European history.

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Weather data showed that temperatures in southern Spain increased sharply between midday and 1pm local time. Higher temperatures can limit how much electricity cables can carry.

Eduardo Prieto, director of services at Spain’s operator, Red Eléctrica, said that a “very strong oscillation” in the network during that time had cut off Spain’s electricity grid from the rest of continental Europe, which had led to the collapse of the system.

Red Eléctrica said that by late afternoon power had been restored across northern and southern Spain — parts of the country that can be more easily supplied by France and Morocco respectively. But it cautioned that fully restoring supply to the whole country would take between six and 10 hours.

“We are going to go through some critical hours before we totally recover electricity,” Sánchez said after a crisis meeting with top government officials.

In an address to the nation he called on people to minimise travel, pay attention to official statements rather than social media, and restrict their use of mobile phones. He also noted the outage’s “tremendous impact” on everyday life as well as economic loss and “anxiety in millions of homes”.

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Sánchez, who said he was in contact with King Felipe, political leaders and the EU and Nato about the crisis, added that the technical experts were working to provide a solution as soon as possible.

By mid-afternoon, all of the country’s nuclear power stations remained offline, according to Montel, the energy data specialist, as they sought to respond to the disruption.

Metro stations in Madrid were closed during the power outage © Susana Vera/Reuters

Spain’s chief traffic authority called on people not to drive their cars, because traffic lights were out of operation due to the cut. The government added that medium- or long-distance rail transport would not resume during the day.

In Madrid, people spilled out on to the streets, as metro stations were evacuated and shops, restaurants and offices closed. Mobile phone coverage was also initially hit. Local media said some — but not all — hospitals were functioning as normal with the aid of backup generators.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the conservative leader of the Madrid regional government, called on Spain’s Socialist-led national administration to activate emergency plans “to allow the army to keep order, if necessary”.

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Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the head of Spain’s opposition People’s party, criticised Sánchez’s government for being slow to provide updates on the blackout. “We need timely information,” he said.

Nearly 400 flights were delayed at Madrid airport as of mid-afternoon, including more than half of scheduled departures, while at Lisbon airport, 171 flights were delayed and almost 200 flights cancelled.  

Aena, which runs Madrid airport and 45 others across Spain, said it was relying on backup power supplies to operate, adding that the extent of the delays would depend on whether crews and passengers could get to the airports.

Spain gets 43 per cent of its electricity from wind and solar power, but grid and storage capacity has not kept pace with the country’s rapid development of renewable energy.

The country has long lamented being an “energy island” due to its poor connections with France.

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French grid operator RTE said parts of France had been briefly affected by the outage but that power had been quickly restored.

Additional reporting by Philip Georgiadis and Andy Bounds

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Trump to sign executive order highlighting sanctuary cities fighting immigration enforcement

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Trump to sign executive order highlighting sanctuary cities fighting immigration enforcement


Trump’s executive orders will total more than 140 during his first 100 days in office, which press secretary Karoline Leavitt said was more than the Biden administration had in four years.

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  • One Trump order will ‘unleash’ law enforcement, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump will sign two executive orders to bolster immigration enforcement and highlight which jurisdictions restrict cooperation with federal law enforcement, according to press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

The signings April 28 come on the 99th day of Trump’s second term in office. His Republican administration is promoting tougher border enforcement as one of his central priorities, with what border czar Tom Homan called “historic low” border crossings.

“It’s quite simple: obey the law, respect the law and don’t obstruct federal immigration officials and law enforcement officials when they are simply trying to remove public safety threats from the nation’s communities,” Leavitt told reporters during a morning White House briefing. “This administration is determined to enforce our immigration laws.”

DOJ, DHS to highlight sanctuary cities: Leavitt

The first order aims to “strengthen and unleash America’s law enforcement to pursue and protect innocent citizens,” Leavitt said.

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The second order calls on Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to publish a list of the communities nicknamed “sanctuary” jurisdictions. Leavitt said the communities “obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration laws.”

Homan said he would visit Rochester, New York, on April 29 to support local law enforcement officers after several were disciplined for aiding a Homeland Security official who called for emergency assistance.

“Cops need to help cops, especially in an emergency situation. But they got disciplined,” Homan said. “I’m going up there to support the men and women of law enforcement.”

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Focus on sanctuary cities arrives amid court battles

The administration’s conflict with sanctuary cities and states is being fought in court. Leavitt’s announcement came after FBI agents arrested a local Wisconsin judge on April 18 for allegedly interfering with federal authorities trying to arrest an immigrant who didn’t have legal authorization to be in the country.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan was charged with alleged interference with a federal law enforcement operation and unlawful concealment of an individual subject to arrest.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and others were trying to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican citizen previously removed from the U.S. and recently charged with multiple counts of domestic abuse-related battery. Dugan allegedly directed the federal authorities away from Flores-Ruiz after he appeared in her court.

Dugan had an initial appearance in court April 25 to be advised of her rights and her arraignment is scheduled May 15. Trump blasted the judge on April 27 as “terrible.”

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Lawsuits challenge validity of sanctuary cities

A group of 16 cities and counties filed a lawsuit against Trump’s policy withholding federal funding from so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco blocked the policy on April 24 by ruling the government was unlawfully trying to force cooperation from jurisdictions such as Minneapolis, Portland, Santa Fe and Seattle.

The Trump administration isn’t always the defendant. Bondi sued Illinois, Chicago and Cook County alleging they “obstruct” federal authorities from enforcing immigration laws.

Bondi also sued New York state and its Department of Motor Vehicles for a “green-light” law that limits cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

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“The American public doesn’t want illegal criminal aliens in their communities,” Leavitt said. “They made that quite clear on Nov. 5.”

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