Two Republican election officials told ABC News they expect President Donald Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting to be struck down in court, even as a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general filed suit in federal court in Boston to challenge it.
Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt and former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer both said they believe the litigation to block the order is likely to succeed. Their comments arrived alongside a growing number of legal challenges from Democrat attorneys general, House Democrats, and left-leaning advocacy groups, all racing to block the order before it reshapes how states conduct elections.
The White House has defended the order as intended to strengthen election integrity and ensure only eligible citizens vote. That goal is not controversial among Republicans. But the messengers lining up against it, and the legal terrain they're choosing, tell a more complicated story.
Trump's executive order directs his administration to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and to use federal data to help state election officials verify eligibility. It requires the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on each state's approved mail-in ballot list. States must also preserve election-related records for five years.
None of those provisions sound radical. Verifying citizenship, maintaining voter rolls, preserving records: these are the basic hygiene of election administration that conservatives have demanded for years. The question isn't whether those goals are worthy. It's whether an executive order is the right vehicle to achieve them.
Schmidt, appearing on ABC News' "This Week," framed his concern around voter confidence rather than partisan loyalty. He said:
"We want voters to know that the election is going to be free, fair, safe, and secure, and that everyone knows what the rules are prior to going into this."
His worry is confusion, not the underlying policy. When rules change mid-cycle or get tangled in litigation, voters lose clarity about how to cast their ballots. That uncertainty, Schmidt argued, cuts against the very trust the order is meant to build.
"So confusion is never a positive thing unless you are seeking to sow distrust in the outcome of an election."
According to Newsweek, Richer, who ran Maricopa County elections from 2021 to 2025, struck a similar note. He acknowledged agreeing with "some of the elements in the executive order and some of the aspirations" but called the order unnecessary, noting that Arizona already has many of the features Trump wants applied nationally. His core objection was procedural:
"While I agree with some of the elements in the executive order and some of the aspirations, the form does matter."
This is a familiar fault line on the right. Conservative election officials who have spent years building integrity measures at the state level often bristle when Washington attempts to dictate process from the top down. It's the same federalism instinct that drove Republican resistance to federal election mandates under the Obama administration. The principle doesn't change because the president signing the order has an R next to his name.
A coalition of Democrat state attorneys general announced Friday they were filing a lawsuit challenging the executive order in federal court in Boston. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who filed one of the separate lawsuits, offered predictably breathless commentary on "This Week":
"That executive order is unlawful and unconstitutional. We've already filed litigation, and we expect that it will be declared so in short order by the courts."
Jeffries also declared his side would "work as hard as we can to make sure that this is a free and fair election." Which is interesting language from a party that has spent the last several years arguing that any attempt to verify voter eligibility is voter suppression. Democrats have fought voter ID laws, resisted citizenship verification on registration forms, and sued states for cleaning outdated names from voter rolls. Now they invoke "free and fair elections" as their rallying cry against an order that asks the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to approved voters.
The contradiction is loud. When Republicans propose verifying who votes, Democrats call it disenfranchisement. When Democrats sue to block those verification measures, they call it protecting democracy. The principle bends to serve the outcome they want.
Additional cases are being pursued by what the source material describes as "arms of the Democratic Party and voting rights advocates," a coalition that functions as the legal infantry of the progressive movement whenever election rules shift rightward.
The honest conservative conversation here isn't about whether election integrity matters. It does. It isn't about whether mail-in voting has vulnerabilities. It does. The conversation is about strategy.
Executive orders are inherently fragile instruments. They can be reversed by the next president, enjoined by a single federal judge, and litigated into irrelevance before they ever take effect. The legal challenges already piling up in Boston and elsewhere suggest this order may spend more time in courtrooms than in practice.
State-level election reform, by contrast, has proven durable. Georgia's Election Integrity Act survived a corporate boycott, media hysteria, and DOJ scrutiny. Florida tightened its mail-in voting rules and saw smooth elections with broad public confidence. Arizona, as Richer himself noted, already has many of the features the executive order seeks to impose nationally. These reforms succeeded because they were built through legislatures, survived legal challenges on their own constitutional footing, and earned democratic legitimacy in the process.
The goals embedded in Trump's executive order, citizen verification, ballot delivery controls, record preservation, are goals that belong in state law. Codified through legislation, they become far harder for the next Democrat administration to unwind. Issued by executive pen, they become lawsuit magnets that hand Democrats a sympathetic narrative about overreach.
The legal trajectory is predictable. A federal judge, likely in a blue-leaning jurisdiction, will issue an injunction. The administration will appeal. The case will grind through the courts while Democrats fundraise off every hearing. Meanwhile, the actual policy goals remain unimplemented.
None of this means the underlying impulse is wrong. Americans deserve to know that only eligible citizens are voting. The Postal Service should not be delivering ballots to addresses with no verified voter. Election records should be preserved long enough to audit.
But achieving those goals requires building them on ground that courts cannot easily wash away. Two Republican officials who share the president's priorities are saying, plainly, that this particular foundation won't hold.
That's not opposition. It's advice worth hearing.
