Nevada helps stop Trump’s election orders in back-to-back court rulings

For the second time in two days, a federal judge told President Donald Trump the same thing: The Constitution does not give the president the power to run elections. Nevada helped make it happen — twice.

Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Attorney General Aaron Ford hailed the rulings Thursday, saying the decisions affirmed states' constitutional authority to run their own elections free from federal interference. Nevada co-led both multistate lawsuits, alongside California, Massachusetts and Washington.

"Nevada proves time and time again that we run some of the most secure elections in the country — and I will continue to stand up against anyone who tries to interfere with that," Aguilar said. "I'm grateful to the courts for affirming states' constitutional right to run elections and blocking the Trump administration from illegally changing the rules before the November election."

"This is the second case in two days in which the courts have overturned the Trump administration's efforts to interfere with our secure and lawful election processes," Ford said. "As long as I am attorney general, Nevada's elections will be run by Nevada, free from unlawful federal overreach."

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, a nominee of former President Barack Obama, halted Trump's March 31 executive order that sought to create a federal voter list and restrict who could receive a mail ballot — the second such order Trump has signed targeting elections in his second term. Talwani ruled the provisions unconstitutional, finding that the president lacks the authority to regulate state elections.

"The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections," Talwani wrote in a 37-page opinion.

The ruling applies to the Nov. 3 midterm election and any earlier federal elections in the plaintiff states — a coalition of nearly two dozen Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia that filed suit in federal court in Boston.

The decision came one day after U.S. District Judge Denise Casper, also sitting in Boston, permanently blocked key provisions of Trump's first election executive order, issued in March 2025, which had sought to require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, restrict mail ballot counting and withhold federal funding from noncompliant states. That ruling converted a preliminary injunction Casper had previously issued into a permanent ban, declaring the challenged provisions "unconstitutional and void" and exceeding the president's authority.

Trump's March 31 executive order directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to build a nationwide list of adult U.S. citizens and share it with state election officials. It also directed the U.S. Postal Service — an independent federal agency — to deliver mail ballots only to voters on government-approved lists, and threatened election officials with criminal prosecution and the loss of federal funding if they did not comply.

In Thursday's ruling, Talwani found that the order's directives to USPS and DHS exceeded the president's constitutional authority. The Constitution gives state legislatures and Congress, not the executive branch, the power to set election rules. "No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS," Talwani wrote.

Talwani's ruling came one day after Postmaster General David Steiner told lawmakers that USPS would refuse to deliver mail ballots to voters not on the government-approved lists — a step that critics warned could disenfranchise millions of voters ahead of the November midterms.

Trump issued the second executive order in March after a bill he supported to overhaul voting stalled in Congress. He has repeatedly, and without evidence, claimed mail voting is rife with fraud. Repeated audits and investigations, including those conducted by Republicans, have found no evidence of widespread fraud in mail voting.

Nevada is one of eight universal mail ballot states, automatically sending ballots to every active registered voter. The MIT Election Data and Science Lab ranked Nevada second in the nation for election administration performance in its 2024 index, up from 13th in 2020. State law allows mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted up to four days afterward.

The plaintiff coalition in the Thursday ruling includes attorneys general from Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the governor of Pennsylvania. The coalition said it will submit a proposed judgment to the court within seven days.

The Trump administration is expected to appeal Talwani's ruling. A separate set of lawsuits filed in Washington, D.C., challenging the second executive order has proceeded on a different track: A Trump-appointed judge there declined to immediately block the order, finding the challenge premature. Democrats are appealing that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.