SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 34 AND 62 PERCENT of Massachusetts voters cast mail-in ballots in any given election, but a recent executive order from President Trump threatens to upend that system and prompted another legal clash over his attempts to wade into state election decisions via executive order.

Courts halted an order that attempted last year to introduce proof-of-citizenship requirements through the independent Election Assistance Commission.

The latest order, signed March 31, directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile a state-by-state citizenship list and orders the US Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to voters who appear on it. States that don’t comply face the loss of federal funding and the threat of criminal prosecution of their election officials. Within days, at least four separate lawsuits had been filed to block it.

“What this would do, at a very high level, is insert the federal government – in a completely unprecedented way – between states and voters,” said Davin Rosborough of the ACLU Voting Rights Project. “The president has no powers related to” mail voting, he said.

Rosborough and Celia Canavan of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts joined The Codcast this week to discuss one of the suits, filed in the US District Court for Massachusetts by a coalition of voting rights organizations represented by the ACLU and the Brennan Center for Justice. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell co-led a separate 24-state lawsuit also filed the first week of April, before the same judge. A preliminary injunction hearing is scheduled for June 2 in Boston, where both cases will be heard together.

The constitutional argument cuts across both Massachusetts-based suits: the president has no authority over elections. The Constitution reserves that power to the states and Congress, and Rosborough said the administration is “grasping at straws” by drafting independent agencies – first the Election Assistance Commission in last year’s executive order, now the Postal Service – into service as enforcement tools. Even if the president had some authority here, he argued, he can’t direct USPS to violate the federal statutes that require it to operate as a neutral, non-discriminatory mail carrier.

Beyond that, both suits argue, the data the order relies on aren’t reliable. The primary database DHS would use – the SAVE system, originally built to check benefits eligibility – has already flagged eligible citizens as non-citizens when states have tried to use it. Social Security Administration records before 1981 didn’t reliably track citizenship, Rosborough said, meaning older voters and naturalized citizens are disproportionately at risk of being wrongly excluded.

Trump has described mail-in voting fraud as “legendary” – an unfounded charge for which there is no evidence. According to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s own election fraud database, Canavan notes, Massachusetts has had four documented cases.

Despite recapturing the White House in 2024, Trump continues harp on the false claim of widespread voter fraud, particularly in the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden. “This continues to be a dog whistle,” Canavan said, “that our president is holding onto, especially with an election he lost six years ago.”

In the episode, Rosborough and Canavan discuss the new rules created by the executive order (1:30), what the coalition learned from halting last year’s executive order on elections (16:00), and the pile-up of legal fights including 12 red states seeking to intervene in support of the order (27:00).