Hi everyone. Travis Crum here. Long-time guest blogger. Newly minted contributor. Looking forward to participating in the conversation more. Thanks to Rick for having me.

Last week, President Trump issued an Executive Order that risks disenfranchising countless citizens who lack readily available proof of citizenship. Like his other Executive Orders, the Voting EO raises separation-of-powers questions, and there’s been a lot of commentary over potential legal challenges.

Here, I want to flag an option that is not on the table: Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The reason is straightforward: Section 2 does not apply to the federal government. Without Section 2, there are potential Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment claims for intentional discrimination, but that is a fact and resource intensive standard for plaintiffs to satisfy and courts are notoriously reluctant to label official actions as racist. By contrast, if a State were to enact a proof of citizenship law as onerous as the Voting EO, Section 2’s discriminatory results standard—even as interpreted in Brnovich—would provide a potential avenue to challenge it. The specter of Section 2 litigation might even motivate States to sheer off the roughest edges of such a law.

Back in 2020 and amid concerns about the first Trump Administration’s attacks on mail-in voting, I proposed amending Section 2 to apply to the federal government. Unfortunately, that proposal has not been included in the various voting bills that have circulated in Congress and died in the Senate. As the second Trump administration is quickly demonstrating, more checks are needed on presidential authority over voting rights. My hope is that future versions of the VRAA and the For the People Act incorporate this needed reform.