# ANALYSIS: Trump Sabotages Mail-In Voting — Democratic Dismantlement Before the 2026 Midterms

> On March 31, 2026, Donald Trump signed an executive order that immediately sent a shockwave through the entire American electoral system. The

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Analysis
- Published: 2026-06-23
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/analyse-trump-sabote-le-vote-par-correspondance-le-demantelement-democratique-av

## Introduction: Democracy by Executive Order

### An Executive Order With Dubious Constitutional Contours

On **March 31, 2026**, Donald Trump signed an executive order that immediately sent a shockwave through the entire American electoral system. The stated objective: drastically restrict **mail-in voting**, a practice used by approximately **30 percent of American voters** during the 2024 presidential election — nearly **48 million people**. The chosen mechanism is as ingenious as it is controversial: hand the federal postal service — the USPS — the role of ultimate arbiter in deciding who has the right to receive a mail-in ballot. Those whose names do not appear on a newly created federal list would simply be denied their ballot.

In the wake of the executive order, **23 Democratic-led states**, including California and Washington state, filed legal challenges. Washington's attorney general, Nick Brown, co-led a lawsuit calling it unconstitutional. "Mail-in voting is safe and legal in Washington," he said. "We will take every necessary measure to protect it." The legal battle quickly expanded: on **June 2, 2026**, a federal hearing was held in Boston before Judge U.S. Indira Talwani to hear arguments from civil rights groups and a coalition of about twenty states. The case became the symbol of a major constitutional crisis.

### A Break With a Century of Electoral Practice

Mail-in voting is not a fragile novelty — it has existed in the United States **since the Civil War**. Today, all 50 states offer some form of absentee or mail voting. Eight states conduct **their entire elections by mail**, including Oregon, Washington, and Colorado, with fraud rates documented near zero over decades. Restricting this practice is therefore not a technical adjustment — it is a brutal break with a well-established democratic tradition.

What makes the matter worse is that **Trump himself votes by mail**. He did so in special elections in Florida, and again in March 2026 — while his teams were drafting this very executive order. This glaring contradiction between the official discourse ("mail-in voting is cheating") and the president's personal practice gives the measure of the political cynicism at work. This is not a question of electoral integrity. It is a question of partisan calculation.

*I am not naive about Trump. There are domains where his firmness — against China, Iran, Russia — seems to me, if not admirable, at least functional for the West. But this is not governance. This is open-air electoral manipulation. And it revolts me as much as Putin's manipulations of his own elections do, even if the mechanisms differ. Democracy is not defended by sabotaging it.*

## The March 31 Order: Anatomy of an Explosive Document

### Three Pillars of a Control Architecture

The executive order signed on March 31, 2026 rests on three main axes. **First axis**: it directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to collaborate with the Social Security Administration to create a **national list of eligible American voters**, to be provided to each state's election officials. **Second axis**: it instructs the USPS — an independent entity — to launch a regulatory process obliging states to submit registered voter lists before sending out mail ballots. Any voter absent from the federal list would automatically be excluded. **Third axis**: it establishes potential criminal penalties for election officials, mail carriers, and any person who sent a ballot to an individual deemed ineligible by the administration.

According to **David Becker**, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, "There is not a single element in this executive order that would survive judicial scrutiny. It is a completely unconstitutional executive order." The U.S. Constitution does not grant the president the power to govern elections — that power explicitly belongs to the states and Congress. Yet Trump signed this document less than a week after Congress failed to pass electoral legislation he had supported. When the legislative path closes, the presidential path takes over, constitutionality optional.

### The USPS Transformed Into an Electoral Gatekeeper

One of the most striking aspects of the order is the role it assigns to the **U.S. Postal Service**. The USPS, which is not an electoral oversight body, is suddenly thrust into the heart of the apparatus: it must maintain a "mail voting participation list," refuse to send ballots to voters absent from that federal list, and, according to court documents, potentially hand its lists to DHS for "investigations" into mail ballot flows. The postal workers' union protested vigorously. The ACLU described this transformation of the USPS into an "arbiter of who can vote by mail" — a description that is both precise and alarming.

Despite its status as an independent entity, the USPS published in June 2026 a proposed rule in the Federal Register aligned with the order — a submission that contrasts sharply with its claimed independence. Judge Talwani raised crucial questions during the Boston hearing: what happens if a federal list omits legitimate voters? Women who changed their name after marriage, people who moved from one state to another? "**Is there not a reasonable fear that voters will be excluded?**" she asked the Trump administration's representative, without receiving a satisfactory answer.

*Turning mail carriers into electoral arbiters is absurd both logistically and constitutionally. I struggle not to see it as a deliberate provocation — a way of creating so much chaos that voting becomes an obstacle course. And for whom? For elderly people who vote by mail, for troops deployed abroad, for rural voters far from polling places. They are the ones who will pay the price of this political engineering.*

## The Ghost of Fraud — The Numbers Against the Myth

### 0.000043 Percent: The Real Fraud Rate

Donald Trump has been repeating since 2020 that mail-in voting is "riddled with fraud." But what does the actual data say? A study by the **Brookings Institution** published in November 2025, analyzing four general elections (2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022), calculated an average mail-in voting fraud rate of **0.000043 percent** — approximately **four cases per 10 million ballots**. To put that figure in perspective: according to the American Postal Workers Union, "a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to cast a fraudulent mail-in ballot."

An analysis by the **Associated Press**, conducted after the 2020 election in six key states where Trump had contested the results, identified **fewer than 475 potential cases of fraud** — a number that, according to the AP itself, was "too infinitesimal to have had any impact on the results." The American Statistical Association additionally concluded, in a separate study, that there is "no evidence that mail-in voting increases the risk of electoral fraud." Those conclusions do not come from Democratic institutions. They come from researchers, auditors, and judges — including Republican ones.

### The Fraud of the Fraud Myth

Between **2000 and 2020**, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated **455 cases of electoral fraud**, securing **171 convictions**. Against the backdrop of the billions of ballots cast during that period, that figure is statistically negligible. In 2022, 23 states reported **347 alleged cases** of electoral fraud across all categories — of which 18 percent involved mail ballots. Even more revealing: the **Heritage Foundation**, a conservative think tank that has maintained a database on electoral fraud for decades, records a few thousand cases over forty years of elections — fewer than one case per two million voters in a presidential election.

In the states that conduct **100 percent of their elections by mail** — Oregon, Washington, Colorado — comparative studies find no increase in fraud after the transition to universal mail voting. Oregon has voted exclusively by mail since **1998**. Colorado since **2014**. No electoral disaster. No systemic fraud. Higher turnout rates. Certified, recounted, verified, uncontestable elections. The conclusion of George Mason University researchers is blunt: "If mail-in voting creates more opportunities for fraud, those opportunities have not materialized in any data."

*I understand the electoral integrity argument in theory. Every democracy must be concerned about it. But when the data — all the data, regardless of its source — unanimously contradicts the thesis of massive fraud, continuing to assert it is no longer democratic vigilance. It is propaganda. And propaganda, I recognize it regardless of who produces it.*

## The Contested Legal Basis — Anatomy of a Constitutional Overreach

### Who Actually Has Power Over Elections?

The U.S. Constitution is unusually clear on this point: federal elections are administered by the states. Article I, Section 4 provides that states have the power to set the rules regarding the "time, place, and manner" of holding elections, with the only caveat being that Congress may "at any time" modify those rules by law — not the president by decree. As **Richard Pildes**, a New York University law professor specializing in democracy issues, stated: "The president has no constitutional power to dictate how national elections are run."

The precedent is clear. As early as 2025, Trump had signed a first executive order attempting to impose citizenship verification for voter registration and new restrictions on mail-in voting. That order was **blocked and then struck down** by the federal courts. The judges found that the administration was overstepping its constitutional powers. The administration appealed, but the jurisprudence that accumulated was systematically unfavorable to the thesis of presidential authority over elections. The DOJ filed **30 lawsuits** against states and the District of Columbia to force them to share their voter rolls. The score to date: defeated on **all eight decisions rendered**.

### The Courts as Last Bulwark

The judicial reaction was massive. The **23 Democratic states** grouped in coalition argued before the federal court in Boston that the order constitutes "an extraordinary and abusive attempt to exercise executive power over the administration of federal elections" — those are the exact terms of the ACLU's complaint. Attorney Michael Cohen, representing the states, warned: "This is going to represent a radical change in the way some states administer their elections. It would be difficult to overstate the disruption this is going to cause."

On **June 22, 2026** — the day before this article's publication — Judge U.S. Sooknanan issued a **75-page ruling** declaring illegal the SAVE system, the data verification tool the administration had used to run through **more than 60 million voter records**. The judge concluded: "The federal government has knowingly violated the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that jeopardizes the fundamental right to vote. This court cannot stand idle while this occurs." The system had flagged **21,000 individuals** as potentially non-citizens — a significant proportion of them Americans born abroad who had been wrongly flagged.

*When a federal judge says the government has "knowingly violated the privacy rights" of tens of millions of citizens to influence a vote, we step outside the realm of ordinary political debate. We enter territory I would not have thought possible in a consolidated Western democracy. That deserves to be named clearly: it is an attempt at institutional manipulation of the electoral process.*

## The Impact on Turnout — The Numbers That Matter

### 48 Million Voters in the Crosshairs

In 2024, according to the **Election Assistance Commission**, roughly **30 percent of American voters** cast their ballots by mail — approximately **48 million people**. This group is not monolithically Democratic — far from it. It includes massively the **population aged 65 and older**, who are proportionally the heaviest users of mail voting. It includes troops deployed abroad, rural voters, people with limited mobility, and workers who cannot take a day off on a November Tuesday. Any significant restriction of this mechanism would affect a very diverse population.

The partisan reality is nonetheless inescapable: in the 2024 elections, **Democrats voted by mail in significantly higher proportions than Republicans**. A Pew Research Center survey cited by the Brennan Center indicates that more than one in three voters cast their ballot by mail in 2024. In key states like Pennsylvania, mail ballots arrive after those cast on election day — creating what is called the "red mirage": Trump appears to be winning on election night, then mail ballots close the gap. Trump transformed that statistical phenomenon into proof of fraud. It is no such thing. It is simply the mechanics of the count.

### States Yielding to Federal Pressure

The executive order does not strike in a vacuum — it has already produced effects in state legislatures. According to the **Brennan Center for Justice**, between 2020 and 2025, **27 states** adopted laws restricting mail-in voting. Among the most recent measures: **North Dakota** eliminated its postal grace period in April 2026, just three weeks after the March executive order, explicitly amending an election bill to "respond to the new executive order." **Ohio** had already eliminated its grace period in December 2025. **Mississippi** adopted a trigger law: if the Supreme Court invalidates its current grace period, ballots must be received the day before election day — a constraint that is logistically near-impossible for many rural voters.

This cascade effect — a presidential decree encouraging state legislatures to act, which themselves fuel legal challenges carried all the way to the Supreme Court — creates a formidable **systemic effect**. A favorable ruling for the administration in the case Watson v. Republican National Committee, currently pending before the Supreme Court, could invalidate the laws of **30 states** providing grace periods for mail ballots. That would be a silent revolution in electoral law, without any Congressional vote.

*I think of rural voters in North Dakota or Ohio — often Republican voters, for that matter — who drop their ballots into mailboxes sometimes dozens of miles from the nearest post office. These people are not fraudsters. They are citizens who trust a postal system their taxes have funded for generations. Denying them that right in the name of a phantom fraud is a betrayal.*

## The Stakes of the November 2026 Midterms

### Trump and the Fear of Losing the House

To understand the urgency of these restrictions, one must look at the political calendar. The **November 2026 midterm elections** put all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate up for grabs. Polls and historical precedents suggest that the sitting president's party loses an average of about twenty seats in midterms. If Republicans lose control of the House, Trump loses his ability to block investigations and push his legislative agenda. And as he himself declared at a Republican retreat meeting in January 2026: "We need to win the midterms, because if we don't win them [...] they'll find a reason to impeach me."

It is in that context that the order's timeline makes complete sense. Signed on **March 31, 2026**, exactly **seven months before the November elections**, the order creates massive uncertainty around mail voting mechanisms just in time to disrupt voter registrations, training for election officials, and state logistics. The goal is not necessarily to ban mail voting — it is to add enough chaos and intimidation that voters — especially those trending Democratic — give up trying it.

### Intimidation as Strategy

One of the most troubling mechanisms in the order is the **establishment of criminal penalties** for election officials who send ballots to people deemed ineligible by the federal list — even if those people are legitimately registered voters in their state. Eileen O'Connor, a former head of the DOJ's election section and now a senior advisor at the Brennan Center, was direct: the order "could sow fear among election officials," pushing them to be hyper-cautious and exclude valid voters for fear of prosecution. Former officials cited by The Guardian stated that Trump was seeking to "intimidate election officials and voters in swing states."

The overall picture is coherent: Kash Patel's FBI seized electoral records from Fulton County, Georgia on the basis of long-debunked conspiracy theories. The federal judicial machinery is mobilized to pursue non-compliant states. The USPS is being reoriented as an electoral filtering tool. Election officials are placed under threat of criminal prosecution. None of these elements in isolation closes a democracy. Together, they create a **systemic environment of intimidation**.

*I have covered elections in semi-authoritarian regimes where intimidation mechanisms do not need to be crude to be effective. Subtlety is often more formidable than brutality. An election official who hesitates to send a ballot out of fear of criminal charges — even if those charges would never materialize — has already fulfilled the function of a repressive system. Intimidation does not need to materialize to work.*

## State Responses — A United Front With Cracks in the Armor

### The Coalition of 23 States

The judicial resistance organized quickly and at massive scale. As early as **April 3, 2026**, just days after the executive order was signed, Washington's attorney general Nick Brown was co-leading a class action joined by **about 20 states**. That front has since expanded its ranks to a coalition of **23 states**. The central argument is constitutional: the president is encroaching on the prerogatives of the states and Congress. "The president has no constitutional power to dictate the administration of national elections," Charlie Black declared, summarizing the position of many electoral law specialists.

The geographic and political diversity of this coalition deserves to be highlighted. It includes liberal coastal states, but also Midwest and Southern states with well-established mail voting systems. Mail voting is not a progressive invention — it is a bipartisan electoral infrastructure. Even Republican-led states like **Florida** had, before Trumpist pressures, defended absentee voting as a convenient and secure mechanism for expanding participation. That pre-existing consensus was fractured by the politics of electoral identity.

### The States That Capitulate

Against this resistance, several Republican states have not only followed the executive order but have used it as a pretext to go further in restrictions. Missouri, whose solicitor general Lou Capozzi supported the Trump administration before the federal court in Boston, declared it was not "exactly sure how we would use" the federal list — while insisting the process not be "strangled in the cradle." That calculated ambiguity says it all: states are positioning themselves to use the federal list for as-yet-undefined political purposes, while resisting any preemptive judicial oversight.

The fracture within the Republican camp itself is interesting to analyze. States like Florida, where absentee voting is a deeply embedded tradition among retirees and snowbirds, find themselves in an uncomfortable position: officially supporting Trump while knowing that his restrictions could alienate a significant share of their older electoral base. This is the internal contradiction of a policy designed to harm Democrats that risks, through sheer clumsiness, turning on its own instigators.

*What worries me most about this state resistance is that it is fundamentally defensive. States win before courts today, but every judicial victory can be circumvented by a new decree, a new interpretation, a new administrative procedure. And meanwhile, the uncertainty itself accomplishes the work of electoral demobilization. That is the real long-term danger.*

## The 2025 Precedent — Lessons From a First Failure

### The March 2025 Executive Order Struck Down

The March 2026 executive order is not the first of its kind. In **March 2025**, Trump had already signed an executive order imposing citizenship verification for voter registration and restrictions on mail-in voting. That order was **blocked and then struck down** by the federal courts. The judges found that the administration was overstepping its constitutional powers. The administration appealed, but the accumulated jurisprudence was systematically unfavorable to the thesis of presidential authority over elections.

That precedent illuminates the 2026 strategy: the Trump administration learned from its 2025 judicial defeats. The new order avoids directly addressing voter registration rules — ground on which courts had clearly ruled in favor of the states. Instead, it acts through the USPS and DHS, federal agencies over which the president holds broader authority. It is a sophisticated constitutional workaround — but Judge Talwani and the Sooknanan ruling of June 22, 2026 suggest that the courts are not fooled by the change of packaging.

### Congress: Door Closed, Decree Open

The timeline is telling. Trump had supported the **Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act**, a bill that would have modified federal electoral law to impose citizenship checks. That bill **stalled in Congress**, unable to obtain the 60 votes necessary in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. Rather than accepting that legislative verdict, Trump signed the executive order a week later. This is precisely the type of behavior the doctrine of separation of powers is designed to prevent: using presidential decree to short-circuit a legislative process that did not yield the desired result.

As the Associated Press noted, "the Constitution stipulates that elections are run by the states, and only Congress can 'alter' procedures — and only for federal races." The irony is biting: Trump invokes the democratic mandate of his re-election to justify measures that the democratically representative body — Congress — explicitly refused to adopt. That is not direct democracy. That is democracy bypassed.

*If a Republican-majority Congress did not want to vote on this electoral legislation, it is because Republican senators judged it went too far — or was constitutionally untenable. Transforming that democratic refusal into an executive decree is not only unconstitutional, it is anti-democratic in the most basic sense of the word. I can support Trump when he defends NATO or pressures China. I cannot support him when he short-circuits his own institutions.*

## The SAVE System and the Data Breach — 60 Million Records at Stake

### A Database Out of Control

One of the most controversial instruments in the executive order is the enhanced use of the **SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements)** system, a federal tool originally designed to verify immigration status within social programs. The Trump administration reconfigured it to verify electoral eligibility — a reorientation that the courts have now ruled illegal. By April 2026, according to court documents cited by NPR, **more than 60 million voter records** had already been processed through this expanded system. Of that number, **21,000 individuals** — fewer than 1 percent — were flagged as "potentially non-citizens." That is a false positive rate that, applied to elections, could eliminate tens of thousands of legitimate voters.

The problem identified by Judge Sooknanan in her June 22, 2026 ruling is precise: the expanded SAVE system "recklessly merged or repurposed the private data of millions of Americans, including unreliable citizenship data." Americans born abroad — a category that includes millions of legitimate naturalized citizens — were particularly targeted by flagging errors. The judge concluded that the federal agencies lacked the legal authority to modify SAVE, and that the expanded version violated the **Privacy Act** and the **Social Security Act**. The system must be halted, she ordered, until Congress explicitly authorizes it.

### Voters' Personal Data Serving Political Ends

Even more troubling: according to the DHS court document cited by Governing, the administration planned to "integrate" the lists provided to the USPS to "monitor mail ballot flows, identify anomalies that may signal electoral fraud [...] and generate authorized investigative leads." In plain terms: the names and addresses of voters who cast mail ballots would be collected and scrutinized by the Department of Homeland Security in a logic of preventive criminal investigation. That targeted surveillance of mail voters — on the basis of their chosen voting method — raises civil liberties questions that neither the Privacy Act nor the Constitution authorize.

Eileen O'Connor of the Brennan Center was categorical: "The DOJ has no authority to collect voter rolls, which contain sensitive information such as driver's license and Social Security numbers, from every state." The state resistance on that point was massive: the vast majority of states asked to submit their complete databases **refused**. Only Indiana and Wyoming submitted their full lists. The rest either partially anonymized the data or refused outright.

*Surveilling voters based on their method of voting is a line that democracies should never cross. This is not a partisan question — it is a question of principle. When a government knows who votes by mail and treats them as a suspect category worthy of DHS investigation, we are no longer talking about electoral integrity. We are talking about the preventive repression of civic behavior. That is a boundary I had hoped never to see crossed in a Western democracy.*

## The Supreme Court — The Final Arbiter Lying in Wait

### Watson v. Republican National Committee — A Ticking Time Bomb

Beyond the battles in the lower federal courts, the most consequential case is playing out at the **Supreme Court**. In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the Court must decide whether federal laws on "Election Day" preempt state policies that grant grace periods for mail ballots received after election day, provided they were postmarked in time. A ruling favorable to the RNC would invalidate the laws of **30 states** and the District of Columbia. Hundreds of thousands of ballots that would have been counted under current rules would no longer be.

The New York Times notes that in the 2020 election, **73 percent of mail ballots arriving after election day** in some states came from Harris voters (2024 data), compared to 23 percent for Trump. Statistically, a ban on grace periods would be a net electoral boon for Republicans. The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, is expected to rule on this case in the coming weeks. If it rules in favor of the RNC, the November 2026 midterms will take place under an electoral framework fundamentally different from anything American voters have known in decades.

### The Danger of Normalization

Beyond the verdict, the process itself is alarming. Legal theories described as "fraudulent" by the Brennan Center — notably the idea that federal Election Day laws implicitly prohibit grace periods — were **recently invented**, carried to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which endorsed them in a ruling experts found deeply flawed, before the Supreme Court agreed to take them up. The speed with which those dubious theories climbed the judicial ladder illustrates the fragility of institutional protections against a deliberate and coordinated strategy.

The Brennan Center warns that this trajectory leaves a lasting legacy: even if courts ultimately invalidate the executive order, the **27 states that restricted mail voting between 2020 and 2025** will not spontaneously reverse course. The laws adopted remain. Eliminated grace periods do not come back automatically. The ratchet effect of electoral policy almost always works in the direction of restriction, never toward expansion. The damage, even partial, tends to be permanent.

*I am deeply troubled by the speed at which the American electoral landscape has transformed since 2020. Not through revolution, but through an accumulation of small decisions, decrees, court rulings, state laws — each with its own technical justification, but whose combined effect points in one direction: less participation, more control. That is not democracy. That is its methodical erosion.*

## The International Comparison — When the Model Falters

### American Exceptionalism Under Question

The United States has long presented itself as the democratic model par excellence — notably against the authoritarian regimes it seeks to contain, from Moscow to Beijing. Yet the electoral practices now at the center of the American controversy — mail voting, postal grace periods, the decentralization of electoral administration — are standards that exist in virtually all Western liberal democracies. In **France**, proxy voting is a common practice. In **Switzerland**, postal voting is the norm. In **Germany**, absentee ballots represent a growing share of the vote. None of those countries is consumed by endemic electoral fraud.

The question posed by the current American crisis is therefore also a question of **geopolitical positioning**. How can Washington defend electoral democracy in Eastern Europe, fund electoral observers in Georgia or Moldova, denounce Putin's manipulation of Russian elections, while simultaneously pursuing a domestic policy that reduces voting access for millions of its own citizens? The signal sent to allies — and adversaries — is catastrophic. Putin does not need to hack American elections when American institutions seem capable of weakening themselves.

### The Signal to Authoritarian Regimes

The symbolic impact is not negligible. China, Russia, Iran, and their respective propaganda machines have been quick to highlight American contradictions on electoral democracy. Every restrictive decree, every judicial battle over voting rights, every unsubstantiated fraud allegation feeds a convenient narrative for regimes that want to show that liberal democracy is a facade. It is not true — the resistance of the courts, the states, and American civil society proves as much. But Trump's rhetoric gives his geopolitical adversaries propaganda material they could not have manufactured themselves.

The vigor of American institutional resistance is real and deserves to be emphasized: courts function, states resist, the press documents, civil rights organizations plead. This is not Belarus. But the trajectory is worrying, and the comparison with stable Western European democracies reveals just how much the protections Americans took for granted are not as solid as they believed. Democracy is not a permanent state. It is a daily practice.

*I am pro-Western in my gut, not through abstract ideology. The West, with all its flaws, remains the only political space in the world where dissent is protected, where courts can contradict the executive, where journalists can write what I am writing here without risking their lives. But that space is not indestructible. It deteriorates when its own leaders attack it. And right now, that is exactly what is happening.*

## The Voices of Resistance — Experts, Judges, and Unions

### An Unprecedented Defending Coalition

Resistance to Trump's mail voting executive order has mobilized a remarkably diverse coalition. The **ACLU** (American Civil Liberties Union) represents the League of Women Voters in one of the main lawsuits. The **Brennan Center for Justice** at New York University has multiplied its legal analyses and amicus briefs. Postal workers' unions — including the **American Postal Workers Union** — have opposed the idea of transforming their members into electoral enforcement agents. Conservative Republican legal scholars, like Charlie Black, have publicly declared these measures unconstitutional.

This coalition transcends the usual partisan divides. It unites conservatives attached to federalism and the limits of executive power, progressives defending civil rights, bipartisan election officials who have managed mail voting systems for decades without significant incidents, and academic experts whose work all converges on the same conclusion: mail voting is safe, secure, and systemic fraud is nonexistent. That broad front is both the strength of the resistance and its best guarantee of credibility.

### Judges as the Front Line

In this battle, federal judges have played a central role. The June 22, 2026 ruling by Judge Sooknanan, declaring the expanded SAVE system illegal, is the most recent in a series of rulings that have, each time, contained the administration's offensive. Out of the **eight decisions** rendered in DOJ lawsuits against states seeking their voter rolls, the administration lost all eight. Judge Talwani in Boston expressed serious doubts about the reliability of the federal list, pointing to gaps that could exclude legitimate citizens.

This judicial engagement — or rather this constitutional vigilance — illustrates the functioning of American checks and balances mechanisms. But one should not be too complacent about it: the Supreme Court, whose current composition is favorable to the administration on certain constitutional questions, could rewrite the rules of the game in the Watson case. Victories in lower courts do not constitute a definitive guarantee. And recent history has shown that conservative majorities on the Supreme Court could hand down decisions that had seemed inconceivable a few years earlier.

*I want to believe in institutions. I must believe in institutions — because without them, only brute force remains. But I will be honest: my confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court as the last bulwark of electoral democracy has been limited since the Dobbs decision. Institutions hold until the moment they no longer hold. And that is precisely why this legal and political battle seems existential to me, not procedural.*

## The Long-Term Legacy — Democracy as Contested Territory

### When Voting Becomes a Fortress

The accumulation of restrictions — executive orders, state laws, administrative procedures, judicial pressures — produces an overall effect that exceeds the sum of its parts. According to an analysis cited by the Brennan Center, more than **one-third of American voters** had cast their ballot by mail in 2024. Among them, **people aged 65 and older** are, by far, the category most dependent on mail voting. These are citizens who, often, cannot physically go to a polling place, or who live in rural areas far from any voting infrastructure.

If Trump's executive order restrictions applied fully to the November 2026 midterms, the impact on turnout would be measurable. Electoral models project that millions of voters could find themselves unable to vote — not because they are not citizens, not because they are not registered, but because their name does not appear on a federal list built from imperfect data, merged without legal authorization. Judge Talwani asked the question in its simplest form: "Is there not a reasonable fear that legitimate voters will be excluded?" The honest answer is: yes, absolutely.

### Democracy Is Not a Given

There is a profound tension at the heart of current American electoral politics. On one side, remarkably resilient institutional mechanisms: independent courts, combative state attorneys general, well-funded civil society organizations, a free press that documents and analyzes. On the other, sustained, sophisticated, and coordinated pressure from a presidential administration willing to use every available executive lever to modify, at the margins but systematically, the electoral rules in its favor before a crucial vote.

History teaches us that democracies do not always collapse brutally. They erode. Through an accumulation of small decisions, each defensible in isolation, whose combined effect progressively transforms the rules of the game. The restriction of mail voting on the basis of a fraud that does not statistically exist — a fraud rate of 0.000043 percent presented as an epidemic — is precisely that type of process. It is not a revolution. It is erosion. And erosion, by definition, is difficult to stop once it has begun.

*I am writing this article with a feeling that resembles urgency. Not panic — American institutions are holding, for now. But the urgency of naming clearly, without rhetorical softening, what is happening. Trump's offensive against mail voting is not an electoral security policy. It is the engineering of universal suffrage in service of partisan interests. And for someone who believes that Western liberal democracy is the greatest political invention in human history, watching it being sabotaged from within is unbearable.*

## Conclusion: A Democracy Defending Itself Against Itself

### The Balance Sheet of an Electoral Offensive

Signed on March 31, 2026, Trump's offensive against mail-in voting has already produced concrete and measurable effects: **27 states** have restricted mail voting since 2020, a judge has declared illegal the SAVE system that ran 60 million voter records, 23 states are in litigation against the federal administration, and the Supreme Court is about to render a decision that could invalidate the electoral laws of 30 states. All of this on the basis of a fraud whose actual rate, documented and verified by the Brookings Institution, the Associated Press, the American Statistical Association, and dozens of academic studies, is **0.000043 percent** — four cases per ten million ballots.

This is not electoral integrity. It is electoral manipulation. The distinction is crucial: electoral integrity consists of protecting elections against real, documented, proportionate threats. What the Trump administration is doing consists of invoking phantom threats to justify restrictions that, by a remarkable coincidence, disproportionately affect voters who vote overwhelmingly for the opposition. Anyone acting in good faith, regardless of their partisan affiliation, must be able to see the difference.

### What the Midterms Will Reveal

The November 2026 elections will be an institutional stress test without precedent in recent American electoral history. If the courts hold — and recent signals are encouraging — turnout will remain robust and results will authentically reflect the will of voters. If the Supreme Court invalidates postal grace periods, if the administrative chaos created by the executive order discourages millions of voters, if election officials self-censor out of fear of criminal prosecution, then something will have broken in the American democratic compact that decades of reforms and civil rights struggles had built.

The West — of which the United States remains, despite everything, the central power — cannot defend democracy in the world while eroding it at home. That simple, obvious, fundamental principle is what this electoral battle is putting to the test. Trump may be a necessary evil in other domains of foreign policy. But on the right to vote, on access to the ballot, on the protection of mail voting for tens of millions of Americans who have done nothing wrong except want to participate in their democracy — on that, there is no acceptable nuance. There is only the law, and its sabotage.

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary Sources

- [The Guardian — Experts alarmed as Trump launches broad-front attack on US voting rights — June 16, 2026](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/16/trump-voting-rights-elections)

- [Associated Press — Federal court hears arguments over efforts to halt Trump's mail-in executive order — June 2, 2026](https://apnews.com/article/trump-mailin-voting-lawsuit-0605d78112c6a1cb8685ca0f053a79b8)

- [NPR — A federal judge finds a Trump data system to verify voters is unlawful — June 22, 2026](https://www.npr.org/2026/06/22/nx-s1-5866719/save-voter-data-trump-judge-unlawful)

### Secondary Sources

- [The Guardian — Trump signs order to restrict mail-in ballots in probably unconstitutional move — March 31, 2026](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/31/trump-executive-order-restrict-mail-in-ballots)

- [Axios — Washington sues Trump over vote-by-mail restrictions — April 3, 2026](https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2026/04/03/wa-lawsuit-trump-executive-order-mail-voting-usps-ballots-voter-list)

- [Brennan Center for Justice — Using Unproven Fraud Claims to Make Voting by Mail Harder — June 22, 2026](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/using-unproven-fraud-claims-make-voting-mail-harder)

- [Brookings Institution — Mail voting fraud: data points to low risk and high benefits — November 2025](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/mail-voting-in-the-us-data-points-to-very-low-fraud-and-significant-benefits-to-voters/)

- [Governing — States Brace for New Federal Limits on Mail Voting — June 9, 2026](https://www.governing.com/politics/states-brace-for-new-federal-limits-on-mail-voting)

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Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/analyse-trump-sabote-le-vote-par-correspondance-le-demantelement-democratique-av