An unfortunate reality now confronts Americans who value the rule of law: The court system has limited capability to act as a guardrail against Trumpist authoritarianism. And so elections matter—vitally. The final and most powerful check on Donald Trump has always been, and will always be, the ballot box.

The president knows this, and that is why he has now turned his attention to the election system. His recent executive order on election “integrity” is nothing less than an attempt to disenfranchise his opponents and forestall electoral defeat.

Some of that effort is rather technical in nature, but the fundamentals of Trump’s challenge to free and fair elections are easy to understand. This is an attempt to completely rework the constitutional rules that structure the American election system.

The Constitution established a decentralized election system that was intended to be difficult, if not impossible, for a single actor to subvert. To that end, the Constitution gives the states most of the authority over the conduct of elections. Article I, Section 4 provides that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof”—creating 50 independent and separate election systems.

But not completely independent. The Constitution gives Congress supplemental authority to set broad federal standards for federal elections—and those standards can override states’ preferences. The text continues, “But the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” This is the authority Congress has used to mandate certain changes to state practices under the Civil Rights Act, for example.

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But the one person who has no constitutional authority over federal elections is the president. The chief executive of the country (whose unilateral authority the Founders most feared) has, quite literally, no role at all in the federal election system. None.

Trump’s executive order on elections ignores that design entirely. He is asserting an executive-branch role in governing the mechanics of a federal election that has never before been claimed by a president. The legal theory undergirding this assertion—that the president’s authority to enforce federal law enables him to control state election activity—is as capacious as it is frightening.

The president’s order is about federal authority over the mechanics of elections—what types of identification are required to register or when ballots may be counted, for example. The details of these instructions are bad enough. But nothing in the legal logic behind the order would limit federal authority to election mechanics. The same logic would, in theory, authorize a president to interfere directly with the casting and counting of ballots during the course of an election. The same vision of presidential power that enables authority over mechanics also enables authority to defend the “integrity” of an election in real time. Under the theory of Trump’s order, he could (pretextually, of course) order the executive branch—say, the Department of Justice or of Homeland Security—to act in the middle of an election to “prevent ongoing fraud” by, for example, questioning the integrity of ballots in Democratic-leaning districts.

In short, the theoretical legal underpinnings of Trump’s executive order portend a near-limitless authority to use federal resources to ensure that Trump and other MAGA Republicans never lose another election.

The details of Trump’s order are, on their own terms, extraordinary.

First, it directs the Election Assistance Commission—a federal agency that sets nationwide technical standards for voting machines, subsidizes the purchase of those machines, and also provides advice to states and counties on best election practices—to mandate that eligible voters provide documentary proof of their citizenship when registering through a federal registration form. Though exact numbers are not known, many Americans do not have access to the documentation, such as a passport or a REAL ID, that the order requires. Notably, the one document that every American might have access to—a birth certificate—is not on the list of options. If implemented, this draconian identification requirement would have the inevitable result of disenfranchising many voters.

Next, the order also purports to interpret federal law setting Election Day as the second Tuesday in November to require that all mail-in ballots be received by that date. Currently, a number of states have different rules that allow, for example, counting ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received afterward. Up until a few years ago, the legality of these rules was unquestioned. As Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained during the 2020 election in a concurring opinion in Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, allowing absentee ballots to “be mailed by election day” and received by some state-law deadline thereafter is a long-standing “policy choice” reserved for the states. Trump’s order seeks to overturn that settled understanding, with, again, the inevitable effect of reducing the number of ballots counted in the election.

Third, the order also directs the EAC to “recertify” all of the election equipment—vote-counting and ballot-marking machines—it has already certified, making sure that each piece is compliant with a new set of standards. For example, the order demands that the EAC ban the use of barcodes and quick-response codes on ballots, on the grounds that they can be manipulated. There is no evidence that they are. And, moreover, this requirement is incoherent, at least insofar as it bans only these two types of codes and not Snapcodes, Data Matrix codes, or BeeTagg codes, which are, theoretically, equally vulnerable to manipulation.

But this is not really about accuracy. Rather, it is a nod to “Stop the Steal” claims of election-machine tampering—claims that were rejected by every court that considered them after the 2020 election. Whatever the merits of these changes (and they are debatable), they would wreak havoc on the national election system. Although the order gives the commission 180 days to review and recertify voting systems under the new standards and rescind certifications under the old standards, the actual work would likely take years.

There are a number of problems with this order. The first and most obvious is that Trump has little, if any, formal authority to order the Election Assistance Commission to do anything. By statute, the EAC is “independent” from the executive branch. It has four members (two from each party), and three commissioners are needed to approve anything. The EAC, like the Federal Election Commission, is designed to be insulated from partisanship. An executive order cannot supplant a statutory requirement.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped Trump yet. He might, for example, purport to fire the Democratic members of the EAC and appoint replacements who will do his bidding. Or he might direct the DOJ to enforce the law as he deems it, rather than as it is. But the bottom line is that the EAC is an assistance commission—it has almost no authority to require states to take specific actions, and thus much of Trump’s executive order is (or ought to be) a legal nullity.

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Equally problematic is the way that the order attempts to short-circuit the legislative process, substituting executive fiat for legislative compromise. Using its constitutional authority, Congress might, if it chooses, pass the SAVE Act. The act is a controversial piece of pending legislation that would impose identification requirements on some voters at their polling places, and prohibit states from accepting and processing an application to register to vote in a federal election unless the applicant presents documentary proof of U.S. citizenship.

In other words, the SAVE Act would do legislatively exactly what the Trump order attempts to do by the might of the executive branch. But the bill likely doesn’t have enough support to pass. When proposed in the last Congress, it died in the Senate, and it again awaits Senate consideration this year, having just passed the House. That’s how this is supposed to work. The executive can’t then come in and do what Congress has declined to do.

The fate of the president’s effort to control elections is uncertain. The Democratic Party has already filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the executive order’s provisions. And even were the Election Assistance Commission inclined to act on Trump’s demands, it has limited coercive authority.

The bigger news is that this executive order is just the first shot in Trump’s war on the next election, and the one after that. Styled as an effort to protect electoral integrity, the order is anything but. Rather, it is an extreme assertion of nonexistent authority over elections. This effort may fail; I think it will. But even if it fails, it has laid the groundwork for more aggressive action later. America does not need Donald Trump, of all people, to have such power.