Trump Ordered Mail-Ballot Restrictions; His FBI Seized More Than 600 Boxes of Georgia Election Records

The Justice Department's Lists and Their Victims

Anthony Nel is a U.S. citizen. His Texas voter registration was canceled after a federal database failed to confirm his citizenship, a federal judge found.¹ She cited his case on October 9, 2026, when she vacated a Justice Department policy that checked state voter lists against federal citizenship data.¹ The department launched it to carry out an election order President Donald Trump signed in 2025.¹ The policy posed an obvious risk that citizens would be wrongly removed from the rolls, the judge wrote, and "that risk is not hypothetical."¹

That order was one of two Trump signed directing federal citizenship lists, postal restrictions and funding pressure over which ballots states count.²³ His FBI also seized more than 600 boxes of Fulton County, Georgia's 2020 election records.⁴ The charge is abuse of office: using presidential orders and federal enforcement to reach for control over voting rules the Constitution assigns to states and Congress.⁵³² Courts stopped major parts of that campaign. The Georgia seizure survived the county's challenge.⁶⁷¹⁴

The Justice Department requested unredacted registration lists from forty-nine states and the District of Columbia, including names, birth dates, addresses and identification numbers, according to the opinion of U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan.¹ At least eighteen states supplied them.¹ The department shared the data with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for checks against SAVE, the federal database that failed to confirm Nel's citizenship.¹ It also secured agreements under which participating states would remove voters it deemed ineligible within forty-five days of notification.¹ Separately, Attorney General Bondi demanded Minnesota's voter database during an immigration deployment; Democracy Defenders Fund alleged coercion, and the secretary of state refused.⁸

Nel, a U.S. citizen through derived citizenship, was not the only one.¹ Bailey Doe, a naturalized U.S. citizen, also had a Texas voter registration canceled after SAVE failed to confirm citizenship, the court found.¹ Alex Doe had to provide documentary proof of citizenship after another erroneous result.¹

The department knew that the citizenship data could misidentify U.S. citizens, yet entirely failed to consider the risk of wrongful removals and took no steps to ensure the accuracy of its Central Index File, the court found.¹ Social Security records did not consistently track citizenship before 1981 and did not automatically update every person's later naturalization, the court explained.¹ The department's Civil Rights Division, Sooknanan wrote, "chose to look the other way."¹

The department argued that federal voter-protection laws authorized the policy and that the Privacy Act did not require perfect records.¹ The government also had a separate Supreme Court victory: on September 25, the Court stayed a ruling against modifications to SAVE, finding the government likely to prevail on its statutory-authority argument.¹ Neither party argued that the stay resolved the legality of the voter-list policy.¹

Sooknanan held that the policy exceeded the department's statutory authority, was arbitrary and capricious, and violated the Paperwork Reduction Act.¹ She found that collecting, examining and disclosing the individual plaintiffs' voter-registration data had injured their privacy, and held that the department's disclosure of voter rolls to contractors and other federal agencies violated the Privacy Act.¹ She rejected its justification for sharing entire voter lists with ICE and held that the policy unlawfully maintained records of protected First Amendment activity.¹

She vacated the policy on statutory grounds without deciding the constitutional claims, and she expressly preserved lawful federal support for state list maintenance and states' authority to maintain their own rolls.¹ Her opinion counted at least twenty-five district courts that had dismissed the department's suits to obtain state voter lists, and one appeals court that had affirmed a dismissal.¹

In a separate North Carolina case, DOJ announced on September 9, 2025 that a federal court had entered a consent order addressing missing identifying information in the state's voter rolls; the department described that result as implementing Trump's 2025 election order.⁹

More Than 600 Boxes From Fulton County

In Georgia, federal agents took the ballots themselves.⁴ On January 28, 2026, the FBI seized more than 600 boxes of Fulton County's election records under a warrant signed by a federal magistrate judge.⁴ The warrant sought physical ballots, ballot images, tabulator tapes and voter rolls from the 2020 election, including records held under a county court's seal.¹⁰ The seizure transferred the originals from county custody to federal investigators.⁴

The investigation originated with a January 5 referral from Kurt Olsen, Trump's presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.⁴ Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified on March 18 that Trump asked her, on the day of the raid, to help oversee execution of the warrant and thank the agents.¹¹ She said she oversaw portions of the search and did not handle ballots or other election materials.¹¹

Earlier reviews had found administrative failures, not fraud.⁴ A nonpartisan monitor and the state-appointed Fulton County Performance Review Board identified serious disorganization and chain-of-custody problems but no indications of fraud, dishonesty or intentional malfeasance by election officials, the court recounted, and the FBI affidavit itself disclosed those findings.⁴ Judge Jean-Paul Boulee found the affidavit defective in some respects, including a misleading statement about recount totals that omitted a scanner programming error.⁴

The government's defense was that the records were evidence in a criminal investigation, lawfully seized under a warrant, and it opposed returning them.¹² It won. On May 6, Boulee denied the county's return-of-property motion and closed the case.⁴ The county had not shown callous disregard of its rights, a sufficient need for the originals or irreparable harm, he held, especially because the government had supplied copies.⁴ He also found that the seizure had not interfered with conducting or certifying the 2020 election, and that the county had not shown it would hinder future elections or that the materials had been manipulated, misused or publicly disclosed.⁴ The ruling settled custody, not whether election fraud occurred.⁴

Trump has said what he thinks of seizing election materials. In a January 2026 New York Times interview, David Sanger reminded him that he had once threatened to use the National Guard to seize election boxes in 2020 and had not done it.¹³ Trump answered, "Well, I should have."¹³ Asked whether it would be an option, he questioned the Guard's ability to detect what he described as Democratic cheating.¹³

The Cost of Changing Ballot Mail Before an Election

In the same interview, asked about stopping mail-in ballots in the coming election, Trump said, "Well, I'd love to stop mail-in ballots."¹³ He had also excepted very sick voters and military voters away from home from his criticism.¹³

On March 31, 2026, Trump signed Executive Order 14399 at a meeting he said had to do with "stopping the massive cheating that's gone on."³¹⁴ It directed DHS to compile state-by-state lists of confirmed citizens of voting age.³ Separately, it directed the Postal Service to propose restrictions on ballot delivery tied to a different list for each state, a Mail-In and Absentee Participation List of people enrolled with the Postal Service.³ The proposed rule had to include this provision:³

Executive Order 14399, 'Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections' (Federal Register)³

the USPS shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual unless those individuals have been enrolled on a State-specific list

Trump also directed the attorney general to prioritize investigating and, where appropriate, prosecuting election officials who issue federal ballots to ineligible people.³

The order became a Postal Service rule. Published August 26, 2026, it required election officials to enroll ballot recipients in a federal portal and use approved envelopes with voter-specific barcodes.¹⁵ Outgoing mailings that did not comply would be returned to the ballot mailer for correction; the verification requirement did not apply to voters' return ballots.¹⁵

On September 10, the First Circuit refused to lift an injunction against parts of the rule.¹⁶ It agreed that the rule likely violated the Elections Clause by regulating congressional elections without congressional authorization; it rejected the government's claim that general postal powers supplied the necessary authority.¹⁶ Election officials would have to replace envelopes they had already bought and upload voter information to a portal that was not yet operational, the court explained.¹⁶ As for the cheating Trump cited, the court found no evidence before it of past fraud or likely impending fraud connected to the November 3 election, and said immediate implementation would likely disenfranchise millions while producing minimal, if any, gains against fraud.¹⁴¹⁶

The government's strongest defense was that it was regulating the mail and enforcing existing law, while leaving states to decide voter eligibility, which the rule expressly preserved.¹⁵³ The Postal Service said the rule would improve ballot tracking and federal law enforcement.¹⁵ The government won an important first round: on August 24 the Supreme Court stayed an injunction against the executive order, finding the states unlikely to have standing because the order was an internal instruction to federal officials.¹⁷ Twelve states supported the postal rule and said compliance was practicable, Justice Alito noted in a September dissent joined by Justice Thomas.⁶

That did not save the rule. On September 14, the Supreme Court refused to lift the injunction against it, finding the government unlikely to win its challenge to the preliminary injunction and that the considerations governing emergency relief did not favor lifting the block.⁶ Justice Brett Kavanaugh saw a fair prospect that the rule fell within postal statutory authority, yet concluded that applying it in 2026 would violate the Administrative Procedure Act because election officials lacked sufficient time.⁶ As of October 10, that was the latest order on the Supreme Court's docket.¹⁸ The compulsory postal restrictions remained blocked for the upcoming election, though the injunction permitted voluntary state compliance and preparations for elections after November 2026.¹⁸¹⁶

Election Money as Pressure on Ballot Counting

His earlier order, the one behind the voter-list policy, used money.²¹ Signed on March 25, 2025, it instructed the Election Assistance Commission to condition available funding on states' adoption of an Election Day ballot-receipt deadline, with an exception for ballots covered by the military and overseas voting law.² It also directed the attorney general to enforce that deadline against states counting mail ballots received after Election Day.² This used election-administration money to press states to discard ballots their own laws allowed them to count.²⁷

On June 24, 2026, a federal district court in Massachusetts declared the funding condition and its companion enforcement provision "unconstitutional and void" and permanently barred their enforcement against thirteen plaintiff states whose ballot-receipt or ballot-curing laws they threatened.⁷ The government won summary judgment on standing grounds on Wisconsin's claims and on all but one challenge to those provisions by the other plaintiff states outside that group.⁷

Ending post-Election Day opportunities to correct minor ballot errors risked disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters, the court found, and rejecting timely mailed ballots that arrived later would disproportionately harm military, elderly, disabled and rural voters.⁷ Its record contained no evidence of the widespread voting wrongdoing the order claimed to address.⁷

The same judgment permanently barred the defendants other than Trump himself from requiring documentary proof of citizenship on the federal mail-in registration form, or citizenship or state-eligibility proof on the military and overseas federal post card form.⁷ It also barred conditioning the plaintiff states' formula grants on the citizenship-document requirement, except as to Wisconsin.⁷

On June 29, the Supreme Court ruled five to four that the federal election-day statutes do not require ballots to arrive by Election Day, reversing the appeals-court decision Trump's order had cited.¹⁹²

The commission's three remaining commissioners were effectively removed on July 9, the Congressional Research Service reported; citing media reports and commissioner interviews, it said the Executive Office of the President emailed dismissals to two, while the third was permitted to resign.²⁰ The White House defended the departures as an exercise of presidential removal authority to secure elections and ensure every legal vote was counted, citing the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter.²⁰ Staff could continue delegated tasks, but without commissioners the commission could not adopt voting-system guidelines or develop the federal registration form.²⁰

The Charge Is the Use of Office Against the Vote

The Constitution assigns congressional election rules to the states, subject to Congress's power to alter them, and the Elections Clause gives the President no comparable rulemaking power.⁵ The Supreme Court gives him absolute criminal immunity for acts within his exclusive constitutional authority and presumptive immunity for other official acts; courts cannot use his motives to distinguish official from unofficial conduct.²¹ Those protections do not give him election lawmaking power or eliminate Congress's power of impeachment.⁵²¹

Hamilton wrote that impeachable offenses "proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust."²² The charge is abuse of office: a campaign to put federal power between voters and their votes. Trump signed the orders over ballot delivery and ballot counting.³² His Justice Department built a policy on one of them, and U.S. citizens lost their voter registrations after the citizenship check it relied on failed to confirm them, a court found.¹ The same department demanded changes to four Texas congressional districts based on their multiracial coalitions, a legal premise the district court and Justice Kagan's dissent rejected.²³²⁴ The Supreme Court still reversed the injunction against the resulting map.²⁵ A search that began with his appointee's referral took Fulton County's original ballots on an affidavit the judge found defective in some respects, after reviews found no indications of intentional fraud.⁴ Courts blocked major parts of the campaign, but constitutional checks that worked do not excuse the use of office that made them necessary.⁶⁷¹⁵