The Democratic Party on Monday urged a US court to block President Donald Trump’s executive order overhauling the election system, arguing that the changes risked denying eligible US citizens the right to vote.
The Democratic National Committee, in a lawsuit against the Trump administration filed in Washington, DC federal court, said Trump exceeded his authority in the March 25 order by requiring voters to prove they are US citizens, preventing states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day, and threatening to take federal funding away from states that do not comply.
According to the lawsuit, filed by longtime Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias and other lawyers at his firm, the Executive Order seeks to impose radical changes on how Americans register to vote, cast a ballot, and participate in our democracy, all of which threaten to disenfranchise lawful voters and none of which is legal.
It was gathered that US Senator Chuck Schumer and US Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the leaders of the Democratic minorities in the US Senate and House of Representatives, respectively, are also plaintiffs in the case.
At the time of filing this report, the White House has not commented on the development.
The Trump administration has previously argued that the order would prevent foreign nationals from interfering in US elections.
Trump has long questioned the US electoral system and continues to falsely claim that his 2020 loss to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud.
The president and his Republican allies have also made baseless claims about widespread voting by non-citizens, which is illegal and rarely occurs.
In their lawsuit, the Democrats said the US Constitution empowers individual states and Congress, not the president, to control how federal elections are conducted.
“The Framers of our federal Constitution foresaw that self-interested and self-aggrandizing leaders might seek to corrupt our democratic system of government to expand and preserve their own power,” the lawsuit read.
Earlier on Monday, voting rights groups, including the Campaign Legal Center and State Democracy Defenders Fund, brought a separate legal challenge to the executive order.
