The Executive Order to End Voting – Joyce Vance – April 24, 2025 – Substack

By Joyce Vance, Apr 24, 2025

Apparently, Trump wasn’t kidding when he told people 2024 was the last election they’d ever have to vote in if he won.

On March 25, 2025, he issued an executive order—“PRESERVING AND PROTECTING THE INTEGRITY OF AMERICAN ELECTIONS”—that is a vehicle for making it more difficult for people the Republican Party apparently thinks won’t vote for them to vote. It’s the culmination of decades of voter suppression work, a wish list of measures designed to make it harder to vote, signed off on in the Oval Office, the same place where the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed. Trump’s EO went beyond even the Save Act.

Today, a federal judge put substantial portions of that executive order on pause in League of Women Voters et.al. v. Trump. The rationale: presidents don’t have the authority to regulate federal elections. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a senior judge in the District of Columbia, issued a preliminary injunction that will prevent key parts of the executive order from going into effect while the litigation moves forward. Her opinion, 120 pages of it, is a careful exposition of the flaws in the EO.

As we’ve discussed in other cases, district judges frequently write detailed opinions like this one when they want to make sure there is a solid basis for the courts of appeals to affirm their decisions and as little room as possible for them to reverse. This is a detailed, well justified explanation that will not be easy for an appellate court to dismiss, and it’s not one-sided; it denies some of the relief the plaintiffs requested on technical legal grounds.

If you’re so inclined, there’s a master class on what the Framers of the Constitution intended and how our voting infrastructure developed beginning on page 9 that you may enjoy reading. And, Judge Kollar-Kotelly starts with the basics, explaining what executive orders can and cannot be used for. A president, she writes, “cannot make new law or devise new authority for himself—by executive order or otherwise. He may only wield those powers granted to him by Congress or by the Constitution.”

Source Links: https://joycevance.substack.com/p/the-executive-order-to-end-voting