Two Republican election officials told ABC's George Stephanopoulos on "This Week" that they expect legal challenges to President Donald Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting to succeed, a rare public break from members of the president's own party on one of his signature election-integrity initiatives.
Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt and former Maricopa County, Arizona Recorder Stephen Richer both said they believe lawsuits targeting the order will ultimately get it overturned, Just the News reported on April 5. Their comments came just days after 23 Democratic states, led by California, filed suit in U.S. district court in Massachusetts challenging the order.
The dispute matters because it pits the president's executive authority against the states' traditional control over how they run elections, and because it exposes a rift inside the Republican coalition over how far the White House should go in reshaping voting rules by decree.
Trump signed the order in late March 2026, framing it as a necessary step to restore public confidence in federal elections. The White House titled the directive "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections."
The order directs federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Justice, to help states compile citizenship-based voter eligibility lists using federal data. It instructs the U.S. Postal Service to create new safeguards for mail ballots, including barcode tracking and verification measures, and tells the Postal Service not to send absentee or mail-in ballots to people deemed ineligible. The attorney general is directed to prioritize related investigations, Fox News reported.
Each state would be called on to create a list of eligible voters, with absentee ballots sent only to those on the approved list. The order also requires secure ballot envelopes with barcodes for tracking, the New York Post reported.
Trump himself acknowledged the likelihood of litigation. "That's the only way that can be changed. And hopefully we'll win an appeal, if it is," he said, referring to a probable court challenge, Breitbart reported.
Schmidt, who serves as Pennsylvania's top election official under a Democratic governor, did not mince words about the practical consequences of the executive order. He told Stephanopoulos that certainty and clarity are essential for voters heading into any election cycle.
Schmidt stated:
"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. So confusion is never a positive thing unless you are seeking to sow distrust in the outcome of an election."
That last line carries a sharp edge. Schmidt appeared to suggest that the executive order, whatever its stated intent, could generate the kind of uncertainty that undermines faith in election results rather than bolstering it. For a Republican official to make that argument publicly, on national television, is notable.
The broader legal fight over mail-in ballot rules and federal election law has been building for years, with courts and legislatures wrestling over where state authority ends and federal power begins.
Richer, who served as recorder in Maricopa County, one of the most closely watched election jurisdictions in the country, likewise told Stephanopoulos he expects the lawsuits to prevail. The article did not include a direct quote from Richer beyond the paraphrased prediction.
On Friday, just days before the two Republicans went on air, 23 Democratic states led by California filed their legal challenge in the U.S. district court in Massachusetts. CBS News reported the filing, which represents the most organized state-level pushback against the order so far.
The specific legal claims in the lawsuit were not detailed in the reporting, and no case number or docket information has been made public yet. But the scale of the challenge, nearly half the states in the union, signals that Democratic attorneys general view the order as constitutionally vulnerable.
Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic election lawyer, called the order "a massive and unconstitutional voter suppression effort aimed at giving Trump the power to create a list of who is allowed to vote by mail." That characterization is predictable from Elias, who has been at the center of nearly every major Democratic election-law fight in recent years.
A federal judge has already blocked a related Trump election-integrity order in a separate proceeding, suggesting courts are willing to intervene when they see executive overreach into election administration.
Trump has long argued that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud. "The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary," he said when signing the order. He also framed the measure in broader terms: "It's about voter integrity; we want to have honest voting in our country, because if you don't have honest voting, you can't have, really, a nation if you want to know the truth."
Those are sentiments most conservative voters share. Polls consistently show Republicans are far more skeptical of mail-in voting than Democrats, and the expansion of mail voting during and after the COVID-19 pandemic remains a sore point on the right.
But wanting election integrity and having the constitutional authority to impose it by executive order are two different things. Elections in the United States are administered by states. The Constitution gives state legislatures broad power over the "Times, Places, and Manner" of holding elections. An executive order that effectively dictates who can receive a mail ballot, and enlists federal agencies to build eligibility lists, tests the boundaries of presidential power in ways that make even Republican officials uneasy.
The Supreme Court has been weighing related mail-ballot questions in other cases, and lower courts have shown little hesitation to block executive actions they view as overstepping.
Schmidt's concern about "confusion" is worth taking seriously. The 2026 midterms are months away. If the order survives initial legal challenges, states will scramble to comply with new federal requirements on top of their existing election codes. If it gets blocked, as Schmidt and Richer predict, the whole exercise may have accomplished nothing except generating headlines and feeding distrust.
Neither Schmidt nor Richer questioned the goal of election integrity. Their objection, as reported, was about the legal vehicle, an executive order that they believe courts will strike down. That distinction matters.
Conservative voters rightly want secure elections. They want citizenship verification. They want accountability for fraud. But the way to get those things on durable legal footing is through legislation, passed by Congress or by state legislatures, not through executive orders that invite immediate litigation and, if Schmidt and Richer are right, eventual defeat in court.
The Supreme Court's recent willingness to hear challenges to state mail-ballot rules suggests the judiciary is engaged on these questions. That is the arena where lasting precedent gets made.
Democrats, for their part, have been eager to cast every Republican election-integrity measure as "voter suppression." Nancy Pelosi recently accused Trump and Republicans of lacking commitment to the rule of law, a charge that rings hollow from a party that spent years resisting voter-ID requirements and defending ballot-harvesting practices that most Americans find troubling.
But the left's bad faith does not make a legally shaky executive order into good policy. If the order falls in court, the administration will have spent political capital and generated months of confusion, exactly the outcome Schmidt warned about, with nothing to show for it.
Several key details remain unclear. The specific provisions of the executive order that restrict mail voting have not been fully detailed in public reporting. The exact legal claims raised in the 23-state lawsuit are not yet known. And the timeline for any judicial ruling, whether a temporary restraining order, preliminary injunction, or full merits decision, could stretch well into the summer, leaving states in limbo as they prepare for November.
Trump himself seemed to anticipate this fight. He told reporters he hoped to win on appeal. That suggests the White House knows the district-court outlook is uncertain at best.
Election integrity is worth fighting for. But fights worth winning deserve strategies built to last, not executive orders that two of your own party's election officials predict will end up in the loss column.
