Black and Democratic leaders in Congress are railing against the executive order issued by President Trump on Tuesday seeking to restrict mail-in voting ahead of this year’s midterm elections, and they quickly filed a lawsuit to nullify it. Trump’s order directs Homeland Security Secretary Ma rkwayne Mullin to work with the Social Security Administration to compile lists of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., conducts his weekly news conference in the Capitol Visitor Center on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images) It bars the U.S. Postal Service from sending ballots to anyone not on the state’s approved mail-in ballot list and requires ballots to be secured in envelopes with barcodes for tracking. It also directs the U.S. attorney general to prioritize investigations into cases involving ballots sent to ineligible voters. States that don’t comply with the new requirements could face a loss of federal funding.  Black Congressman Says MAGA Republicans In His State Told Him ‘Slavery Was a Good Thing’ and Believes They Would ‘Absolutely’ Reinstitute Jim Crow“Cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible,” Trump said while signing the order on Tuesday. “Democrats want to use it for cheating.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, immediately criticized the order as an “unlawful power grab,” calling the president’s actions “unhinged” and accusing Republicans of trying to “desperately cling to power” by making it harder for people to vote. “The Constitution is clear. Donald Trump has no power to change the way states conduct their elections,” Jeffries said in a statement. “We will fight back against this desperate Republican scheme to take over our free and fair elections and end the era of voter suppression in America once and for all.” On Wednesday several national Democratic groups, including the Democratic National Committee, as well as U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Jeffries filed a federal lawsuit against Trump, the Department of Justice and several other federal agencies asking the court to declare the executive order in violation of the constitutional separation of powers, the Voting Rights Act, the First and Fifth Amendments, and other federal laws, and to bar the Trump Administration from enforcing it. The complaint, written by attorney Marc Elias, an election law specialist, knocks Trump for once again trying “to rewrite election laws for his own perceived partisan advantage” and notes that the Constitution’s framers “anticipated this kind of desire for absolute power” and “the menace it would pose to ordered liberty and the ways in which it would corrode self-government like an acid.” To resist that threat, “they left most election authority with the States” and “permitted state regulations to be displaced only upon the agreement of both chambers of Congress.” The “radical changes to the manner and conditions under which citizens may cast absentee or mail-in ballots” proposed in the order “threaten to disenfranchise lawful voters and plainly exceed the President’s lawful authority,” the complaint contends.Jeffries argued that the order allows the administration to “unilaterally determine who is allowed to vote” and seeks to intimidate state election officials by subjecting them to “unnecessary” investigations. He also said it will make voting “unnecessarily difficult for women, communities of color, young people, individuals with disabilities and older Americans.” Trump has often claimed, without evidence, that mail-in ballots and instances of undocumented immigrants voting contributed to widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Cases of mail voting fraud are very rare, accounting for only .000043 percent of total mail ballots cast, or about four cases out of every 10 million mail votes, the Brookings Institute reported last year. And the practice is popular among Americans. In 2024, the U.S. Postal Service processed more than 99 million mail-in ballots, including more than a third of all ballots cast in the 2024 federal election. Jeffries also pointed out Trump’s own use of mail voting. “Donald Trump just voted by mail in the Florida special election where he was once again defeated. Now he wants to ban it for everyone else,” Jeffries wrote. “What a phony.”NAACP President Derrick Johnson called Trump’s action hypocritical and unconstitutional. “Shocking… the mail-in president restricts mail-in voting. A hypocrite, as always,” Johnson said. “Not only is his order unconstitutional, it’s unserious. This order will not stand. His attempts to silence us will only make us louder – with our voices and our votes.” The President’s attack on mail-in ballots is desperation plain and simple.It’s a panicked attempt to silence the people and salvage a failing presidency.It will not stand.— Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock (@SenatorWarnock) March 31, 2026 Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, called the move as an act of political desperation. “The President’s attack on mail-in ballots is desperation plain and simple,” Warnock wrote on X. “It’s a panicked attempt to silence the people and salvage a failing presidency. It will not stand.”Joanna Lydgate, CEO of the States United Democracy Center, said the order is another attempt by Trump to seize authority over elections that belong to the states. “Elections are run by the states. President Trump has once again signed an unconstitutional executive order trying to grab that power for himself,” Lydgate told Democracy Docket. “But it won’t work — states have successfully fought this type of illegal overreach once, and they’ll do it again.”Arizona, California and Oregon, states that widely offer mail-in voting, immediately pledged to sue the Trump administration, reported Fox News. We’re challenging it.See you in court. https://t.co/wPYfLyJOUy— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 31, 2026 “The President wants to limit which Americans can participate in our democracy,” California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X.“We’re challenging it,” he added. “See you in court.”New York Attorney General Letitia James vowed on X on Tuesday: “Millions of Americans rely on mail-in voting to participate in our democracy and make their voices heard. My office will fight back against any unlawful attacks on our free and fair elections.”Previous Trump executive orders attempting to impose nationwide election rules — including proof-of-citizenship requirements and federal control over voter registration processes — were blocked by federal courts, which ruled that the president cannot unilaterally rewrite election law. David Becker, an election law expert, told Democracy Docket that the order on mail-in voting exceeds presidential authority and is likely to fail a court challenge. “This is unconstitutional on its face. The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections,” Becker said. “I expect that this will be blocked by multiple federal courts in a very short period of time and have no legal effect whatsoever.”“See you in court. You will lose,” Senate Minority Leader Schumer, a New York Democrat, wrote Tuesday on X. Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers Committee On Civil Rights, called the executive order unlawful and “designed to make it harder for people to cast a ballot and to intimidate voters, all while sowing confusion in the process. That’s not a strategy for governance. That’s anti-democracy politics of the worst kind.” “Even though the executive order is patently illegal, it could still have devastating consequences. We anticipate a large number of Black voters and other people of color who were eligible to vote in many past elections will be wrongfully excluded from the so-called approved vote by mail lists.” Although Trump previously urged his supporters to vote using mail ballots prior to the 2024 election, Democrats have been significantly more likely to vote using mail-in ballots, compared to Republicans, since the 2020 election, NPR reported. That gap has widened in recent elections as GOP-led states have passed more restrictions on this method of voting. ‘Desperate’ and ‘Hypocritical’: Trump’s Latest Effort to Limit Voting By Mail Meets Instant Rebuke from Top Democratic Leaders — and a Federal Lawsuit ...read more read less