The Leadership Conference Condemns Executive Order: “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections”

Maya Wiley, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, issued the following statement:

Today’s executive order on federal elections is a recipe for chaos, disenfranchisement, and constitutional crisis, wrapped in disingenuous narratives about access to the ballot. There are numerous serious issues with this order:

• The order demands that the United States Postal Service finalize sweeping new rulemaking within 120 days and that states comply with a parallel federal voter eligibility infrastructure on similarly compressed deadlines.
• This order directs the creation of federal “State Citizenship Lists” drawn from SSA records, DHS databases, and SAVE program data — the very same federal databases that this administration has repeatedly characterized as riddled with errors, misidentifications, and records that conflate the living with the dead.
• And the costs — financial, administrative, and constitutional — fall squarely on the states. States are already absorbing the consequences of this administration’s abandonment of its obligations to the American people: cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, housing support, and education.

The Leadership Conference calls on state attorneys general and election officials to challenge the legality and constitutionality of this order without delay, and on every American who believes in free and fair elections to recognize this moment for what it is: an attempt to centralize control over the ballot under the guise of security, using tools that don’t work, data that isn’t trustworthy, and deadlines designed to guarantee failure and invite federal punishment.

This executive order is not happening in isolation. It is part of a broader, coordinated effort to decide who counts and who does not — from pushing legislation like the SAVE Act, to advancing extreme legal theories that threaten birthright citizenship, to ongoing attacks on voter access at the state level. Taken together, these actions reveal a clear strategy: instead of earning the trust and votes of the American people, this administration is trying to hand pick the electorate itself. It is an attempt to take your voice, take your vote, and predetermine outcomes by placing new barriers between people and the ballot — particularly for Black communities and other historically marginalized voters.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights is a coalition charged by its diverse membership of more than 240 national organizations to promote and protect the rights of all persons in the United States. The Leadership Conference works toward an America as good as its ideals. For more information on The Leadership Conference and its member organizations, visit www.civilrights.org.

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