Donald Trump’s latest decree takes his power-grabbing to a new level. He has commanded the states to alter their laws to require proof of citizenship for voting. He has no legal authority at all to do this. The Constitution lets the states run elections; Congress has a limited ability to set requirements, and the president has no authority without an act of Congress. He is relying on intimidation of state officials and federal judges to get his way. Claiming the personal authority to decide who can vote is the action of a dictator or would-be dictator.

The number of non-citizens who have been found voting is extremely small. If a measure to keep them from voting also excludes just one citizen in a thousand, it will disenfranchise far more eligible voters than it will block illegal ones.

I’ve been answered with the claim that absolutely every citizen in the United States has access to documentation proving their citizenship. Usually the claim is that there’s no one without a birth certificate. This is plain nonsense. Naturalized citizens don’t have US birth certificates, and in some cases their documentation may be hard to obtain. Other people were born in the USA but orphaned under circumstances where no one knows their original parentage. People born outside the USA to American citizens with an established US residence are citizens but might have trouble documenting their status. Remember, it takes only a tiny number of disqualifications for them to exceed the number of improperly authorized voters. A study found that in the cases it examined, 0.0001% of the votes cast in the 2016 general election were improperly cast by non-citizens. That’s one in a million. Any qualification process that keeps even one voter in a hundred thousand from casting a ballot will do harm exceeding the benefit.

New Hampshire has a law requiring documentation of citizenship for new voter registrations. WMUR reports that 96 people were turned away in the March 2025 local elections. This far exceeds any estimate (leaving aside Trump’s fantasies of buses of imported voters that no one else saw) of the number of non-citizens that tried to vote.

The decree wouldn’t greatly affect the outcome of elections; the number of people disqualified, citizens or not, would be a tiny fraction of the body of voters. Trump’s aim is to establish that he can set requirements for voting. If he can do it once, he can do it again with a greater impact, perhaps eventually disqualifying whole blocks of votes by his decree.

This is tyranny.