Keeping Voters on the Rolls -- and Presidents in Bounds

Austin Weatherford

Much like an iceberg, some wins can appear small on the surface while enormous underneath. This is one of those.

Last Friday, our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC) won a federal court ruling that permanently blocks the administration from forcing a documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement onto voter registration forms nationwide — a requirement the president tried to jam through by executive order back in March.

The judge said, in plain constitutional English: The president doesn’t get to run elections; that power sits with Congress and the states. It’s Separation of Powers 101.

Why does this matter? Because DPOC (or “documentary proof of citizenship”) rules sound harmless if you already have your paperwork in a neat file drawer. But at scale they block millions of perfectly eligible voters — military families who move a lot, students, naturalized citizens whose documents are in a safe-deposit box three states away, older voters who don’t have easy access to records. The court understood that you can’t let the executive branch invent new registration hurdles and call it “security.” The Constitution just doesn’t allow it.

https://www.brightamerica.org/p/keeping-voters-on-the-rolls-and-presidents