A second federal judge late last week issued a preliminary injunction blocking major provisions of President Trump’s executive order (EO) on elections issued in March. Kathy Boockvar was proud to be part of a bipartisan group of former secretaries of state, represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), who filed two amicus briefs challenging the executive order’s attempt to expand presidential control over elections and infringe upon the authority granted by the U.S. Constitution only to states and Congress. These EO provisions had already been blocked last month by an additional federal judge in Washington, D.C.
The MA Federal Court cited our amicus brief several times, and stated “As amici, bipartisan former secretaries of state, explain, “[a]llowing the President to change election rules and procedures on [his] whim whenever [he] see[s] fit, without any input from election administrators charged with executing those rules and without the checks and balances provided by Congress, would be equivalent to dropping an anvil onto the carefully balanced scales of justice.”
The Court halted provisions that would have required the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to mandate documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, such as passports or birth certificates, contrary to law, in order to register by the federal voter registration form. The Court also blocked another provision of the EO that purported to order the EAC to withhold federal funding for any states that accept ballots that were cast before election day but arrive after election day, a practice which is legally utilized by over a dozen states, red, blue, and purple.
Read the MA Court decision here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.282905/gov.uscourts.mad.282905.107.0.pdf
Read our amicus brief here: https://www.citizensforethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/2025.05.28-As-Filed-Election-EO-Amicus-D.Mass_.pdf