How Trump Upended Biden’s Successful Push For Federal Agencies to Register Voters
In March, 2021, then-President Joe Biden became the first president to make it clear: Federal agencies should be registering voters.
An executive order issued by Biden that month led to unprecedented voter registration efforts by federal agencies that were lauded by voting rights advocates: The Department of the Interior worked with several states to make Tribal institutions voter registration centers. The Department of Veterans Affairs created a pilot voter registration program with Kentucky, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And the Small Business Administration started registering voters at local entrepreneur events in Michigan. That was just the start.
But Republicans went ballistic, filing lawsuits and launching congressional probes into the order. They described the move as federal overreach, and warned, without evidence, that it would lead to non-citizens getting on the rolls.
When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, his first action was to rescind it, along with dozens of other Biden executive orders.
“The revocations within this order will be the first of many steps the United States Federal Government will take to repair our institutions and our economy,” the White House said in a release announcing the rescission of Biden’s orders.
That didn’t just halt a flurry of novel federal voter registration efforts.It erased years of research that identified barriers to the ballot box among some of the most vulnerable communities, and how federal agencies could mitigate them.
Now voting rights advocates are worried all that work is lost.
“It took decades to get the agencies from the executive branch to understand that this is their responsibility,” Laura Williamson, a senior policy advisor for democracy and voting rights at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Democracy Docket. “And then it took a few years to get them to make some really good, thoughtful progress. And then all it took was a stroke of a pen to undo all of that.”
“I think the rescission of this executive order and other actions that the Trump administration has taken related to voting and democracy sort of signal a retrenchment from that duty, that responsibility the federal government has to protect and promote the fundamental right to vote,” Williamson added.
Biden’s EO outlined a multitude of ways for the federal government to expand access to voting. It required the government to study obstacles to voting for people with disabilities, directed the General Services Administration to modernize vote.gov and made federal workers and resources available to help staff polling locations.
But the EO’s crowning achievement was that it clarified the federal government’s roles in voter registration, as laid out in the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Passed by Congress in 1993, the NVRA — also known as the Motor Voter law — required states to give people the chance to register to vote not just at motor vehicle departments, but at all state agencies. But the NVRA didn’t stop there — Congress included a finding that “it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote” voter registration and offer resources to eligible voters.
Yet for decades federal agencies rarely, if ever, helped register voters. The NVRA was very specific in its mandate that state agencies need to do voter registration but “it was just less clear, and there was less of a forceful mandate, for federal agencies,” Williamson said.
“Biden’s order was important for being the first full-throated acknowledgement of that,” Williamson added. “And sending a strong signal to federal agencies that they have a role to play to promote the exercise of the fundamental right to vote.”
Progress on civic engagement and voter registration
Biden’s order was lauded by voting rights advocates as potentially transformative when it was issued. But it took a few years for progress to be made.
In April 2023, a report by a coalition of voting and civil rights groups examined 10 federal agencies and found that they had made only minimal progress in meeting the goals outlined in the order. The report was the motivation federal agencies needed to make progress on voter registration efforts.
“Several federal agencies rose to that challenge and did some meaningful things” with Biden’s EO, Williamson said.
The Department of Health and Human Services issued guidance to health care centers across the country on how they could conduct nonpartisan voter registration. The Small Business Administration (SBA) partnered with Michigan for a first-of-its-kind voter registration agreement, which allowed state officials to conduct voter registration at SBA outreach events throughout the state.
“I do think that President Biden’s executive order on voting was successful and making progress,” Sarah Brannon, deputy director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, told Democracy Docket. “It made clear that, in the plain language of the National Voter Registration Act, federal government agencies should also be offering voter registration opportunities to the public when they’re interacting with the public, just like state agencies do under the NVRA.”
Beyond these voter registration efforts, the order led to a number of federal studies, research, fact sheets and directives about voting rights and barriers to the ballot box among some of the most vulnerable communities. The Bureau of Prisons put out a fact sheet on the voting rights of incarcerated people. The Department of Education put out a toolkit for schools to teach students of all grades about voting and civic engagement.
In 2022, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released a report outlining barriers that voters with disabilities encounter when they go to vote — along with approaches to addressing them. The report outlined a number of recommendations — like improving poll worker training, making polling locations more accessible, expanding absentee voting and offering alternative communication options at polling locations — that some states implemented. Arizona, for example, passed a law in 2022 to expand voting options for anyone with a visual impairment. And a slew of pro-voting laws passed in Michigan in 2022, including one to make it easier for voters to request an absentee ballot online.
Williamson also pointed to a report released by the White House in 2022 that chronicled barriers Native voters faced, along with policy recommendations. The report led to a number of actions by the Department of the Interior to expand voting access for Native voters — like designating the Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico as federal voter registration agencies.
“I think it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure that there aren’t barriers in place that prevent those eligible people who want to exercise their fundamental right to vote,” Williamson said. “They have a responsibility to facilitate participation amongst eligible people wherever possible.”
With Trump’s rescission of Biden’s voting EO, the years of work put in by various federal agencies and voting rights advocates to break down barriers to the ballot box and promote better voting access is undone. After decades of federal agencies not knowing their role in promoting voter registration, the Biden administration made that role clear.
Brannon said she’s worried it could be years for federal agencies to be as involved in voter registration as it was at the end of Biden’s term.
“Biden’s executive order helped solidify the federal government’s role in facilitating opportunities of voter registration for U.S. citizens and qualified voters,” Brannon said. “In repealing the executive order, Trump has stopped all of those efforts. At some point in the future, if we want to talk again about voter registration efforts by the federal government, we will be going back to the starting point.”