Trump tries to take control of Iowa’s ‘secure’ mail-in voting system

Trump’s new executive order would require Iowa to submit its mail voter list for federal approval before each election — a move election experts say is unconstitutional and courts are likely to block.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday targeting mail-in voting nationwide, creating new federal oversight over a system Iowa election officials have long defended as already secure.

The order directs the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to compile a federal list of verified eligible voters in each state. If states like Iowa wish to continue to use mail-in voting, they will need to submit to the federal government a list of eligible mail voters 60 days before the election for approval. The order also directs the US Postal Service to only deliver mail ballots to voters on the pre-approved list. All mail ballot envelopes will be required to carry a unique USPS barcode for automated tracking.

States that don’t comply are at risk of losing federal funding.

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate has repeatedly touted the state’s absentee ballot system as secure and well-administered. The executive order would effectively require Iowa to submit its mail-in voter list for federal approval before each election. That is a significant shift in how the state has traditionally run its own elections.

States have already vowed to sue over the order and election law experts believe it is unlikely to survive court scrutiny. The US Constitution gives states and Congress—not the president—authority over how they administer elections. A similar executive order Trump signed in March 2025 was largely blocked by federal judges on those same grounds.

“The president has no power to direct the creation of any of these lists or to restrict the delivery of mail ballots to any given list,” Danielle Lang, the vice president for voting rights at Campaign Legal Center, told VoteBeat.

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed voter fraud is widespread, citing the Heritage Foundation’s database of instances of voter fraud as evidence. However, reviews of that very database have found the number of real instances of fraud is remarkably small.

A 2025 Brookings Institution analysis found mail voting fraud occurs in roughly 0.000043% of ballots cast. The Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database contains just 41 cases of non-citizens voting across more than four decades of American elections.

Pate did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether he would be among those suing the Trump administration. 

This year, Pate settled a lawsuit involving more than 2,000 people—some of whom were citizens—that he flagged for additional scrutiny at their voting locations. Pate said this was necessary under the Biden administration. But now, Pate’s office is now using the US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to verify these individuals’ citizenship status. 

Courts are widely expected to block the order before Iowa’s November elections—and experts say even without a legal challenge, it may be too complicated to implement in time.