Lawsuit challenges Trump’s new rules for national elections

Inset: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Brett Kavanaugh watches as Taoiseach Micheal Martin speaks at a breakfast meeting hosted by US Vice President JD Vance at his official residence in Washington DC, as part of his weeklong visit to the US on March 12, 2025. (Press Association via AP Images). Background: President Donald Trump listens to a question from a reporter before signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, March 31, 2025 (Pool via AP).

President Donald Trump is attempting to dictate the rules for national elections in violation of both federal law and the U.S. Constitution, a lawsuit filed Monday in Washington, D.C., federal court alleges.

On March 25, the 45th and 47th president issued Executive Order 14248, titled: “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” The order broadly seeks to reshape how elections are administered in the country by, among other things, purporting to enforce a requirement that all voters prove their citizenship by way of formal documentation and by putting a stop to vote-by-mail systems that count ballots postmarked by, but received after, Election Day.

The plaintiffs, led by the Democratic National Committee, claim in their 74-page lawsuit that the executive order “asserts unprecedented authority” for the presidency over election administration “on a host of topics.” And this effort, the lawsuit claims, contravenes a number of federal laws and the explicit constitutional carveouts for election authority granted to the states and U.S. Congress.

“In the United States of America, the President does not get to dictate the rules of our elections,” the complaint begins. “The Framers of our federal Constitution foresaw that self-interested and self-aggrandizing leaders might seek to corrupt our democratic system of government to expand and preserve their own power. They therefore created a decentralized system of elections based upon separated powers divided among the leaders elected by — and closest to — the people.”