President Donald Trump has long pushed for sweeping reforms to federal voting laws. He hasn’t gotten all of them yet, but allies at the state level have ensured that his agenda will progress anyway.
Election reform is a fixation for the president. He regularly posts on social media about elections, from conspiracies about Venezuela’s role in the 2020 election to allegations of voter fraud in California, where he says an investigation has begun. Trump habitually claims the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“Our elections are crooked as hell,” Trump told House Republicans earlier this week.
Many of the election reforms on the Republican Party’s wishlist — like nationwide proof-of-citizenship requirements and paper ballots — have yet to come to fruition. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which Trump on Monday encouraged members of Congress to pass, has no path forward in the Senate. In 2025, Trump signed an executive order making changes to the federal elections process. The most significant changes it attempted to make have been blocked by the courts.
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For example, the League of Women Voters sued the Trump administration over part of that executive order which sought to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Due to the lawsuit, the directive never went into effect.
But for every win opponents of these measures secure, Trump’s election agenda is still being implemented in other ways at the state level, through either the courts or legislatures, Caren Short, the director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters, told NOTUS. Short described it as intentionally “overwhelming.”
“There aren’t enough attorneys to challenge every single restrictive law in every single state. There’s so many of them,” she said. “And so, some of these are going into place.”
In a statement to NOTUS, the White House acknowledged that sweeping nationwide reform has been difficult. “This process takes time, especially given strong opposition from blue states, with notoriously bad voter roll maintenance,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
But both the White House and the Republican National Committee pointed to successes at the state level.
At the RNC, efforts have been ongoing for years. The committee has challenged election laws in New York and other states, and backed states in their fights to maintain Republican-aligned voting laws.
The RNC joined the Mississippi Republican Party in suing the state over its absentee ballot receipt deadline, arguing that only ballots received by Election Day should be counted. It has led to a pending Supreme Court hearing, with a decision expected as early as this summer. If the RNC is successful, absentee ballots will have to be received on or before Election Day, a deviation from rules in as many as 30 states and the District of Columbia.
It’s one of 115 election-related lawsuits the RNC said it filed last year.
“While Democrats block commonsense reforms, Republicans are strengthening voter ID, enforcing citizenship requirements, protecting mail-in ballot safeguards, and cleaning voter rolls to ensure secure, fair midterm elections,” RNC spokesperson Kiersten Pels said in a statement.
The Trump administration has used the Department of Justice to compel blue states to cooperate with efforts to purge voter rolls. Dozens of states have been hit with lawsuits over confidential voter information, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive law and public policy institute.
States willing to work with the Trump administration have used U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ SAVE database to verify that voters are citizens. In Texas, 2,700 registered voters were flagged as “potential noncitizens” and removed. A 2024 ProPublica investigation found that Gov. Greg Abbott’s claims about noncitizens on Texas voter rolls appeared inflated and, in some cases, wrong.
Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative nonprofit that has worked with state legislatures on election reform, says the Trump administration has improved the accessibility of federal records for states that want to cross-reference them with their voter rolls.
“That’s one of the areas where the Trump administration has really done incredible work, making that a tool that states can and are using to identify noncitizens on the rolls, and I give them a lot of credit for making that an early priority of the Trump administration,” he told NOTUS.
The progress made by Republicans and the Trump administration means that elections, especially in red states where change has been more swift, will look different this year. In addition to potential legal changes due to Supreme Court rulings and changes to how mail is postmarked, state legislatures have passed reforms too.
And even without the SAVE Act, some state legislatures have passed laws this year requiring voters to present proof of citizenship.
While Republicans say elections are more secure for it, voter-access advocates worry Trump and Republicans are fast-tracking efforts to make elections even more difficult to access for people who have been historically disenfranchised.
“Our legislators and our leaders should be thinking about how they can make voting more accessible, expanding to more voters, and instead, they’re focused on: How do we restrict the electorate even more than it is now? How do we add burdens?” Short said. “I would argue that they are achieving a lot of what they are setting out to do.”
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