Trump's executive order on elections is far-reaching. But will it actually stick?

President Donald Trump's executive order seeking broad changes to how elections are run in the U.S. is vast in scope and holds the potential to reorder the voting landscape across the country, even as it faces almost certain litigation.

He wants to require voters to show proof that they are U.S. citizens before they can register for federal elections, count only mail or absentee ballots received by Election Day, set new rules for voting equipment and prohibit non-U.S. citizens from being able to donate in certain elections.

A basic question underlying the sweeping actions he signed Tuesday: Can he do it, given that the Constitution gives wide leeway to the states to develop their own election procedures? Here are some of the main points of the executive order and questions it raises.

Trump’s order calls for the federal voter registration form to be amended so prospective voters must provide documentary proof of citizenship, such as a U.S. passport or a birth certificate.

It also says states should turn over their voter lists and records of voter list maintenance to the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Government Efficiency for review, and directs federal agencies to share data with states to help them identify noncitizens on their rolls.

If states refuse to collaborate with federal law enforcement to prosecute election crimes, they could potentially lose out on federal grants, the order says.

Noncitizen voting, which is already a felony in federal elections that can lead to prison time and deportation, is exceedingly rare. Still, Trump falsely claimed in 2024 that it might happen in large enough numbers to sway the outcome of the presidential race, and it has been a top conservative priority in recent months.

Republicans have been trying to get a documentary proof of citizenship requirement through Congress, a goal this order seeks to accomplish. Voting rights groups have expressed concern about such a requirement, saying it could disenfranchise the millions of Americans who do not have proof of citizenship readily available.

The order requires votes to be “cast and received” by Election Day and says federal funding should be conditional on state compliance with that deadline. Currently, 18 states and Puerto Rico accept mailed ballots received after Election Day as long they are postmarked on or before that date, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Perhaps no state is more notorious for drawn-out vote counts than California, the nation’s most populous. It allows ballots to be counted if they are received up to seven days following the election as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

Most California voters cast ballots they receive in the mail, and in the pursuit of accuracy, thoroughness and counting every vote, the state has gained a reputation for tallies that can drag on for weeks or even a month or more. In one Northern California U.S. House primary last year, a recount settled the outcome nearly two months after the election. At the time, Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who oversees elections, said in a statement: “I understand that people want finality, but accuracy is of utmost importance.”

But the extended tallies have raised fears that they could undercut, rather than bolster, voter confidence. In 2018, then-Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan described California’s election system as “bizarre” in a year when Democrats picked off a string of GOP-held House seats.

In a statement, California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla said Trump’s order “does nothing to improve the safety of our federal elections — what it would do is disenfranchise millions of eligible American voters.”

Padilla, who formerly served as California’s chief elections officer, said Trump “lacks the authority to implement many of the changes laid out in this illegal executive order.”

The executive order instructs the Election Assistance Commission to amend its guidelines for voting systems to protect election integrity. That would include guidance that voting systems should not rely on ballots that use barcodes or QR codes in the vote-counting process.

Trump instructed the commission to “take appropriate action to review and, if appropriate, re-certify voting systems” under those new standards within six months of the order.

In Georgia, an important presidential battleground, virtually all in-person voters use voting machines with a large touchscreen to record their votes. The machines then print a paper ballot with a human-readable summary of the voter’s selections and a QR code, a type of barcode that is read by a scanner to count the votes.

It is not entirely clear how the executive order would affect Georgia and other jurisdictions throughout the country that use these machines.

Representatives for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger did not immediately respond Tuesday evening to messages seeking comment. The Georgia Legislature last year passed a law requiring that QR codes be removed from ballots by July 2026.

The order cracks down on foreign nationals contributing or donating in U.S. elections. It’s an issue that’s been bubbling in recent years in the states, as Republicans seek to dampen the influence of Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss.

Wyss, who lives in Wyoming, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to 501(c) nonprofit organizations that support liberal causes. One of those groups, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, donated a combined $3.9 million to enshrine abortion protections in the Ohio Constitution. It also helped thwart a proposed constitutional amendment advanced by Ohio Republicans the previous summer that would have made passing future constitutional amendments harder.

During the run-up to last year’s presidential election, legislative Republicans linked then-President Joe Biden’s appearance on Ohio’s fall ballot to passing a ban on contributions from foreign individuals, companies, governments or political parties to campaigns for or against proposed amendments to the state constitution.

Other states have followed suit, most recently Kansas — which passed a nearly identical bill earlier this month after hearing testimony from Ohio’s secretary of state. Like the Ohio bill, it appears partly a response to a successful campaign to protect abortion rights in Kansas, which received money from the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly has not said publicly whether she’ll sign it.

In a statement Wednesday, Wyss' philanthropic arm and an affiliated fund that steers money toward political and policy goals said, “The Wyss Foundation and Berger Action Fund comply with rules and laws governing their activities and prohibit grants from being used to support or oppose political candidates or parties, or otherwise engage in electoral activities.”

The federal government plays a fairly limited role in American elections. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states the authority to determine the “times, places and manner” of how elections are run. The so-called “Elections Clause” doesn’t get into the specifics of voting or ballot-counting procedures -– those details are left to the states – but it does give Congress the power to “make or alter” election regulations, at least for federal office.

It does not mention any role for the president or the executive branch in regulating elections. Biden issued an executive order in 2021 directing federal agencies to take steps to promote voting access, but Republicans at the time argued that the order was unconstitutional and exceeded the president’s authority. Trump rescinded the Biden order earlier this year.

Voting rights advocates have begun to make similar arguments against Trump’s order.

“A president does not set election law and never will,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of Common Cause, a grassroots advocacy organization that supports expanded voter access.

Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, called core parts of the executive order “a blatant overreach that threatens to disenfranchise tens of millions of eligible voters.”

Given the nation’s long history of decentralized, state-run elections, any attempt to change state election laws by executive order is likely to face challenges in court. Marc Elias, a leading Democratic election and voting rights attorney, promised exactly that.

“Moments ago, Donald Trump signed a massive voter suppression executive order," he said in a social media post. "This will not stand. We will sue.”

Ultimately, the courts will decide how far Trump can go in overhauling election procedures.

Associated Press writers Michael R. Blood in Los Angeles, Kate Brumback in Atlanta, Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, Ali Swenson in New York and Robert Yoon in Washington contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump delivers remarks in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, Monday, March 24, 2025. (Pool via AP)

A man places his ballot in a box during early voting in Waukesha, Wis Tuesday, March 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps)

WASHINGTON (AP) — A judge challenging the outcome of his North Carolina Supreme Court race was photographed wearing Confederate military garb and posing before a Confederate battle flag when he was a member of a college fraternity that glorified the pre-Civil War South.

The emergence of the photographs comes at a delicate time for Jefferson Griffin, a Republican appellate judge who is seeking a spot on North Carolina's highest court. Griffin, 44, is facing mounting criticism – including from some Republicans – as he seeks to invalidate over 60,000 votes cast in last November’s election, a still undecided contest in which he is trailing the Democratic incumbent by over 700 votes.

The photographs, which were obtained by The Associated Press, are from when Griffin was a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1999-2003 and a member of the Kappa Alpha Order, one of the oldest and largest fraternities in the U.S., with tens of thousands of alumni.

Griffin said he regretted donning the Confederate uniform, which was customary during the fraternity's annual “Old South” ball.

“I attended a college fraternity event that, in hindsight, was inappropriate and does not reflect the person I am today,” Griffin said in a statement. “At that time, like many college students, I did not fully grasp such participation’s broader historical and social implications. Since then, I have grown, learned, and dedicated myself to values that promote unity, inclusivity, and respect for all people.”

One of the pictures, taken during the 2001 ball, shows Griffin and roughly two-dozen other fraternity members clad in Confederate uniforms. Another photograph from the spring of 2000 shows Griffin and other Kappa Alpha brothers in front of a large Confederate flag. He served in 2002 as his chapter’s president.

Kappa Alpha has proven to be a lightning rod for controversy over the decades, often due to the racist or insensitive actions of some of its members. A number of politicians have been forced to apologize for having worn Confederate costumes at the fraternity's functions or for being photographed in front of a Confederate flag.

Griffin said Friday he voted in favor of a resolution prohibiting Kappa Alpha members from displaying the rebel battle flag at the group’s national convention in 2001. The fraternity didn’t ban the wearing of the Confederate uniforms until nearly a decade later, long after Griffin graduated.

“We believe in cultural humility, we respect the best parts of our organization’s history, and through education we challenge our members to work for a better future. These things are not mutually exclusive,” said Jesse Lyons, a spokesman for Kappa Alpha’s national office in Lexington, Virginia.

The fraternity claims Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder” and long championed the Southern “Lost Cause," a revisionist view of history that romanticizes the Confederacy and portrays the Civil War as a valiant struggle for “states’ rights” unrelated to the enslavement of Black people. In decades past, some Kappa Alpha chapters referred to themselves as a “klan,” a term that many viewed as an unsubtle wink to the Ku Klux Klan.

The photographs featuring Griffin were taken at a time when many other Kappa Alpha chapters were reevaluating their celebration of the Confederacy.

During Griffin’s time in the fraternity, some in his chapter questioned the appropriateness of dressing up in Confederate uniforms for the ball. Griffin opposed abandoning the tradition, according to a person familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. The uniforms stayed.

Griffin said he would “not respond to unsubstantiated comments based on memories of 20-plus years past.”

In high school Griffin also expressed an affinity for Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who led southern forces during the Civil War. In a 1998 feature on high school “scholars of the week” in The News & Observer of Raleigh newspaper, Griffin said Lee was his No. 1 choice to include on an “ideal guest list” for a party.

The Kappa Alpha Order was founded in 1865, not long after Lee surrendered to the Union Army, at a Virginia college where Lee served as president. At least one of the first members was a former rebel soldier who had served under Lee, who is revered by the fraternity as the ideal of gentlemanly Southern chivalry.

For more than a century, Kappa Alpha threw “Old South” parties. They were formal affairs where the Confederate battle flag was flown and fraternity brothers dressed in replica Confederate gray uniforms and their dates wore antebellum-style hoop skirts. Sometimes they would ride through campus on horseback.

Some Kappa Alpha chapters, particularly in the South, clung to their traditions, including the wearing of blackface, even as they drew protests and public sentiment shifted.

A Kappa Alpha “Old South” parade at Alabama’s Auburn University in 1992 drew supporters waving Confederate battle flags, as well as counter protesters who burned them. In 1995, a group of Kappa Alpha members at the University of Memphis hurled racial slurs while beating a Black student who caused a disturbance outside a frat party, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported at the time.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was no exception to the turmoil. Under pressure from student groups, the school's Kappa Alpha chapter in 1985 canceled its annual “Sharecropper’s Ball," which some attended in blackface. Fraternity members said blackface was worn because the event needed both Black and white attendees, but promised to discontinue the practice, according to a news story in the Daily Tar Heel student newspaper.

The Kappa Alpha chapter at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University stopped allowing members to wear Confederate uniform and display the Confederate flag in 1987.

But other chapters held on longer. It wasn't until Kappa Alpha members at the University of Alabama wore Confederate uniforms during a parade that paused in front of a Black sorority, which elicited intense blowback, that the national headquarters forbade them. It’s unclear if the chapter at UNC banned the uniforms before the national organization did.

Griffin is not the first public official to draw unwanted attention for their college-age embrace of symbols drawn from the darker chapters of the South's past.

Virginia's then-governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, came under intense criticism in 2019 over a racist photo that appeared on his yearbook page of his medical school. The incident led reporters to scour the college histories of other Southern leaders, forcing a number of politicians to publicly address their time as Kappa Alpha brothers.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, then the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, dodged questions in 2019 about photos showing him wearing a Confederate uniform while he was a Kappa Alpha member at Millsaps College in the early 1990s. While Reeves was enrolled there in October 1994, other members of the fraternity were disciplined for wearing afro wigs and Confederate battle flags and shouting racial slurs at Black students, the AP reported at the time.

Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster declined to comment after yearbooks listed him as the leader of the fraternity's chapter at the University of South Carolina in 1969, along with photos of members wearing Confederate uniforms and posing with a rebel flag.

And Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, also a Republican, expressed regret for participating in “Old South” parties as a student at Auburn University in the 1970s.

Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

FILE - Judge Jefferson Griffin, the Republican candidate for the N.C. Supreme Court listens to testimony in Wake County Superior Court on Friday, February 7, 2025 in Raleigh, N.C. (Robert Willett/The News & Observer via AP, File)