In late March, President Trump signed an executive order that would require anyone registering to vote in the United States to provide proof of citizenship, citing concern about election integrity. It would also require states to share voting data with the federal government and prohibit the counting of mail-in ballots received after election day.
This week, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell signed onto a suit with 18 other states against the Republican’s order — a move other prominent officials in the commonwealth are eagerly backing.
“We don't believe it's constitutional. We join a number of other states. I might add, some Republican secretaries as well are as concerned about this, whether they're part of the lawsuit or not. The reality is, this is an effort to interfere with the rights of voters throughout the country. Misguided, whatever motive [Trump] has, he has no authority to do that. While the federal government has some authority to regulate federal elections, that is for federal offices. That has to be done by an act of Congress, not by a presidential fiat,' said fellow Democrat and Secretary of State William Galvin. “While it's masked in his concerns about citizenship, it really isn't. It's in place to make it more difficult for people to register because they don't want people to register. So, for instance, one of the groups that's most adversely affected by this registration requirement would be people serving in the military. Of all the people to try to make it more difficult for them to register to vote, especially if they're on active duty, why would you choose them? But it is a lack of understanding and lack of care about the impact of these things. He obviously doesn't concern himself with that.”
Galvin says that over the 30 years he’s been in office, this is the most egregious attempt by a sitting president to interfere in the voting process he’s ever experienced.
“This is not about helping anybody," said the Democrat. "The fairy tale and the fiction that somehow there is fraud and all that simply isn't true. We've listened to this now from Trump for years. In fact, in his first term, he was claiming that New Hampshire was stolen from him by busloads of Massachusetts people going north to vote in New Hampshire. Well, both the New Hampshire authorities, both Democrats and Republicans, as well as Massachusetts made it clear that did not happen, and that has not happened.”
Galvin is also galled by Trump’s effort to curtail voting by mail.
“One other aspect of it that's particularly offensive to us in Massachusetts is that we have done, I think, a very good job of allowing people to vote by mail if they wish to," he explained. "And in particular, we've extended that right to people who are overseas, such as military personnel or other persons who live overseas. And under our law, for many years, they've had the right, as long as they actually vote their ballot by election day, if because of delays in the Postal Service either abroad or in the United States, it is allowed 10 days to be returned and included in the count. That would be prevented by this.”
Galvin is appalled by Trump’s efforts to have the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, helmed by multibillionaire Elon Musk, gain access to millions of Americans’ personal information.
“He's proposing to have DOGE, his little creature there, get access to all sorts of voting records from throughout the country," said the secretary. "He's demanded that it be turned over to DOGE. Well, first and foremost, it's the same effort he made previously when he had a commission set up in his first term. We didn't agree with that, and we encouraged other states not to- And in fact, again, states that are administered by Republicans also refused to provide this kind of personal information to this anonymous national committee. As a result, the committee fell apart and never existed. Similar efforts should be made now. Personal information of voters, whether it's not just dates of birth, but other information that could be used for nefarious purposes, should not be given over to a nameless, unidentifiable group of people for no specific purpose.”
Speaking with WAMC Friday, Galvin stresses that this is not a partisan issue.
“There are grave concerns amongst Republican administrators as well, because they're only interested in protecting their voters," he said. "Similarly in the previous effort, in [Trump’s] first term, I vividly remember the then Mississippi Secretary of State, basically, when he was asked to turn over the Mississippi voting records, he basically told the Trump people at the time, go jump in a lake.”
With Trump teasing the notion of serving a constitutionally illegal third term, Galvin says every legal effort to block his attempts to interfere with voting must be quashed quickly and definitively.
“The idea is to impede voter rights, to diminish voter rights, to reduce the ability of people to vote by mail, to reduce the ability of people to register to vote," he told WAMC. "They don't want people to vote. They don't. And so in that effort, they are trying to do anything they can to make it more difficult, to slow the effort down. That's what it's all about.”
