A federal judge in Boston has blocked key aspects of President Donald Trump’s 2025 election integrity Executive Order from taking effect.
The new ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper of Boston effectively served to convert a preliminary injunction issued last year into a more permanent ban.
President Trump’s Executive Order sought to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote and require that only mail-in ballot received by election day be counted.
In April of last year, a group of state Attorneys General, including Maine’s, filed a lawsuit against the Trump Administration seeking to block this order from taking effect.
The judge has now declared the Order to be in violation of several federal laws, including the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA).
“While the Constitution vests the President with ‘executive Power’ and commands him to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,’ it does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Judge Casper wrote in her ruling.
“There is no evidence in this record of widespread ‘illegal voting, discrimination, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error’ within American elections, which the Executive Order purports to safeguard against,” she wrote.
Click Here to Read the Full Ruling
Requests for comment sent by PBS News to the White House and Department of Justice (DOJ) were reportedly not immediately returned.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows shared a statement on Wednesday reacting to the decision.
“Donald Trump continues to stack up loss after loss in court, and as we are now just days away from the 250th anniversary of the birth of our nation, states continue to show that when we stand united, we can successfully defend the rule of law and our rights to administer elections,” said Bellows.
“The judge could not have stated it more plainly – the U.S. Constitution assigns control over elections to the States and does not grant the president any powers over elections,” she said. “We will continue to fight Donald Trump and the DOJ’s every attempt to interfere with free and fair elections.”
Click Here to Read Shenna Bellows’ Full Statement
This comes as another federal judge ruled to block use of the Trump Administration’s recently overhauled Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system for verifying voters’ eligibility.
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, D.C. found that the federal government’s new system, which includes citizenship data, is in violation of several key laws.
“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” the Biden-appointed judge wrote in her 75-page opinion.
[RELATED: Federal Judge Blocks Use of SAVE System for Verifying Voters’ Citizenship Status]
According to Judge Sooknanan, the system violates protections afforded by the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act, as well as the Administration Procedure Act.
Sooknanan wrote that by overhauling the SAVE system, federal agencies “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”
As a result of this ruling, the SAVE system can no longer be used, but a timely appeal of the decision to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is expected from the defendants.
