When a president issues an executive order telling the Postal Service which voters may receive mail ballots — using lists built by DHS and the Social Security Administration — what do the founding documents and religious traditions say about who actually gets to set the rules of an election?
The argument over this executive order is not, at bottom, about mail voting — it is about who writes the rules of an election the rule-writer is in. The Constitution settles that question deliberately: state legislatures, and Congress, set federal election rules. The president is not on that list, and the founders chose not to put him there. Religious traditions add the older form of the same point: a rule made by someone with a personal stake in the outcome carries a heavier burden of justification than one made through the process the law contemplates. After Judge Nichols declined to block the order in May without reaching the merits, Judge Talwani in Boston did reach them on June 25 — and in a 37-page opinion built around the line "The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections," she blocked the order's central provisions. The Elections Clause, in other words, means what it says; the appeal will test whether a higher court agrees.
Religious perspectives
Religious traditions are unusually direct about a single underlying point: a person who stands to benefit from a rule should not be the one writing it.
Judaism: The Torah's instruction to judges is blunt about partiality: "You shall not pervert justice; you shall not show partiality; you shall not accept a bribe... Justice, justice you shall pursue" (Deuteronomy 16:19-20). Rabbinic tradition extended this into a structural principle — a judge with a personal stake in the outcome must recuse — because impartial process is what makes a verdict justice rather than power. The same logic applies to writing the rules of a contest in which one is a contestant.
Christianity: Jesus taught that authority is to be exercised in trust, not seized: "You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them... not so with you" (Mark 10:42-43). The Christian tradition has long warned about leaders who concentrate the power to make and apply the rules in their own hands. The early church's governance through councils, and the careful Pauline insistence on "good order" (1 Corinthians 14:40), assumed rules made openly and applied evenly — not improvised by whoever happened to hold the gavel.
Islam: The Quranic principle of shura (consultation) and the insistence on adl (justice) together establish that rule-making in matters that affect a community is a community process — not the unilateral act of a ruler who may benefit from the rules he sets. "When you judge between people, judge with justice" (4:58).
The shared insight: Religious traditions disagree about many things, but they agree on this: the legitimacy of a decision depends in part on the legitimacy of the process that produced it. A rule that may seem reasonable in substance can still be illegitimate in form if it was made by someone who lacked the authority to make it — or who had too much at stake in the result.
Constitutional & legal framework
The Constitution's answer to "who sets the rules of federal elections" is one of its oldest and most specific allocations of power — and it is not "the president."
The Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4): "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations." Two actors are named: state legislatures and Congress. The president is not. The founders considered including the executive in this allocation and chose not to — a deliberate decision to keep election rules out of the hands of the official who would later run in those elections.
The order (2025-2026): Executive Order 14248, "Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections," issued March 25, 2025, directs the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration to build lists of adult U.S. citizens in each state and to provide those lists to state election officials. It also instructs the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots only to people who appear on those lists. Twenty-four state attorneys general and the District of Columbia, plus voting-rights organizations, filed lawsuits arguing that the order "violates bedrock principles of federalism and separation of powers" by exercising a rule-making power Article I assigns to state legislatures and Congress.
The May 28 ruling: U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, declined to block the order at this stage, allowing it to remain in effect while litigation continues. The ruling did not endorse the order's constitutionality on the merits; the substantive Elections Clause challenge — the question of whether the president, by executive order, can set the rules for who receives a mail ballot — remained unresolved at that stage.
The June 25, 2026 Boston ruling: In a parallel suit, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a 37-page opinion blocking key parts of the order — including the DHS/SSA voter-list provision and the directive that the Postal Service deliver mail ballots only to people on a federally prepared list. The opinion's pivotal sentence was as plain as the constitutional text it interpreted: "The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections." The court also held that USPS has no legal authority to police mail-in voting. The administration has indicated it will appeal.
The honest other side: Concerns about election integrity are not invented, and Congress has legislated extensively on federal election administration (the Help America Vote Act, the National Voter Registration Act). A president may legitimately propose election-administration reforms, and the executive branch routinely runs federal agencies (DHS, SSA, USPS) whose actions touch on election logistics. The constitutional question is narrower: whether the underlying rule-making power — the authority to decide which voters may use which means of voting — sits with the president or with the actors Article I names.
See: Elections Clause (Article I, §4) → | Tenth Amendment →
Update (September 2026): On August 24, 2026, the Supreme Court in Trump v. California (No. 26A124) lifted the district court's injunction and allowed the executive order to proceed for the 2026 midterms, on the narrow ground that the challenge was premature because the Postal Service had not yet issued a final rule. Justice Jackson's dissent noted that the district court had held the order unlawful, that the government did not defend the order's lawfulness before the Court, and that no judge or Justice had held that it comports with the Constitution — yet the Court allowed implementation anyway. The Postal Service has since issued final rules, and the states and voting-rights groups have returned to court to challenge them. Trump v. California (Aug. 24, 2026) →
Sources cited:BibleConstitutionSupreme Court