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(CNN) — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday seeking to boost proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration, which critics say could disenfranchise poor and older voters who don’t have easy access to citizenship documents like passports or birth certificates.
Republican state lawmakers have long sought to require such documents for voter registration, but a major hurdle has been a Supreme Court ruling mandating that states accept, at least for federal elections, the generic voter registration form offered by the US Election Assistance Commission, which currently does not require documents proving citizenship.
Trump’s order directs the EAC to add the requirement and to withhold election funding from states that don’t enforce the requirement for voters who use the federal form to register. The EAC is currently made up of two Democratic and two Republican appointees.
“The U.S. Election Assistance Commission is carefully reviewing the President’s Executive Order and determining the next steps in enhancing the integrity of voter registration and state and federal elections,” EAC Chairman Donald Palmer said in a statement. “We also anticipate consulting with state and local election officials.”
The order also instructs the Department of Homeland Security to work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to review state voter rolls in an effort to identify foreign nationals on the rolls, and to turn over that list to the state and local officials tasked with managing elections.
The directive is likely to raise alarm bells among voting rights advocates who have argued that DHS immigration databases are not equipped for vetting voter rolls without proper guardrails, as they pose a risk of identifying naturalized citizens for purges.
The order facilitates potentially sweeping changes to election practices long sought by conservatives while capitalizing on Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. The impact of the order won’t be fully clear until it is implemented, and parts of it could be challenged in court.
Elections are run by state and local officials, with the federal government playing only a limited role. But Trump’s order uses a number of tools, including the threat of withholding federal funding, to push changes to election policies that Republicans say will make elections more secure. Their opponents counter such changes create needless hurdles for legitimate voters.
In a blog post, Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, called Trump’s order “an executive power grab” with the potential to disenfranchise millions of voters. “The aim here is voter suppression pure and simple,” he wrote.
“Trump’s executive order is unlawful. It would prevent eligible Americans from exercising their sacred right to vote,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The Trump administration is weaponizing the federal government and trying to make it harder for voters to fight back at the ballot box.”
The order was welcomed by conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation. “President Trump is finally taking the action long needed to put the resources of federal agencies like the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice to work helping states, instead of trying to hinder their efforts to reform our election process,” said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of Heritage’s Election Law Reform Initiative.
The order also makes it easier for states to access such federal databases for their own list maintenance activities.
Trump is also ordering his attorney general to take “enforcement action” against states that accept mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. Roughly 20 states, including some battleground states, currently do so, and the practice was the target of GOP litigation in the lead-up to the 2024 election, even as many of those states require a postmark confirming the ballots were in the mail by Election Day.
CNN’s Fredreka Schouten contributed to this report.
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