Yesterday, Downmarket Mussolini signed an almost certainly unlawful executive order to restrict voting access in a made up quest to combat nonexistent "voter fraud." Although the order will definitely be challenged in court, its existence is an ominous portent for US elections whether Trump succeeds in enacting it or not.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/26/trump-signs-new-executive-order-to-change-election-rules-what-we-know

Trump signs new executive order to change election rules: What we know

"Trump’s order is likely to face legal challenges, given that the Constitution gives authority over elections to the states.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said he and state Attorney General Kris Mayes are already in discussions about a possible lawsuit, describing the executive order as “an attempt to federalise elections”.

Fontes said that the order appears aimed at creating the illusion of misconduct in the electoral process, potentially to justify “cancelling the election later”.

“It’s very methodical, and very, very dangerous,” he said in an interview with Votebeat , a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom focused specifically on US elections, on Tuesday. “You have to pay attention not to what the executive order says, but what the end game may be. I believe the end game may be that Donald Trump wants to stay in office in perpetuity.”

Much like a lot of Der Führer's executive orders, this is a brazen attempt by Trump to usurp powers from other governing bodies (Congress, and individual state governments), based on false accusations he's trying to sign into existence, through the end-around mechanism of federal funding - except this time he's trying to effectively rig elections for the fascist Republican Party. While many experts have opined that the order is unlikely to survive legal challenges, it's still important to look at what Trump is trying to do here, to understand why many observers believe there's a darker long-term strategy to justify preventing an election to remove Trump at all.

First he wants voters to submit proof of US citizenship to cast a ballot. This demand is part of a longstanding GOP crusade to rig elections through voter suppression because as the article notes, it would disqualify millions of US citizens who legally have the right to vote, simply because they don't have acceptable documents; as one observer noted, roughly 146 million Americans do not have a passport, and advocacy groups have estimated that millions of poor, marginalized, and underserved Americans struggle to maintain documentation, particularly if they've experienced periods of homelessness. Furthermore, this order opens up the possibility of married women being denied the right to vote (intentionally, or otherwise) because their names no longer match their identity on a birth certificate. Would you care to guess whether or not poor people, marginalized people, and women are more important parts of the Republican, or Democratic base? Right.

“This would prevent only a tiny amount of noncitizen voter registration but stop millions of eligible voters, who do not have easy access to documents such as passports, from registering to vote,” Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a blog post."

Trump's order would also restrict mail in voters by requiring ballots to be *received* by election day to be counted; currently 18 states allow mail in ballots to be counted so long as they're postmarked on or before election day. Want to guess which party traditionally wins in most of those states? Would you like to guess whether or not by mail absentee voting traditionally favors Democrat or GOP candidates? Right.

Finally, and most importantly for the rest of our discussion, Trump's order empowers the Department of Homeland Security and the Elon Musk-led DOGE, to "review state voter registration lists – and, if needed, use subpoenas – to ensure compliance with federal standards." Can you think of any *good* reasons why two of the departments most loyal to Trump and most enthusiastic about the regime's fascist agenda, would be put in charge of investigating voter registration rolls to solve a "voter fraud" problem that doesn't exist? Yeah me neither; unless you wanted to lie about non-existent voter fraud schemes to generate support for say, cancelling a Presidential Election entirely.

Of course, it's entirely possible that none of this survives legal challenges, but I think leaving it at that might miss the point of Trump's strategy here. He's going to use states fighting back against his attempts to rig elections, to argue that they're the ones who want to rig elections in a type of fascist jujitsu. For what purpose is as of yet unclear, but this is a man who is already talking about ignoring the constitution to serve a 3rd term, has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to potentially suspend elections in the past, and behaves as if he sees himself as the King of America; so what exactly can we rule out?