Trump’s March 2026 executive order on mail voting is best understood as constitutional hardball, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s sense, rather than as ordinary election-security policy. It is dangerous because it moves control over who may receive a ballot from the states to the executive branch using powers the Constitution never clearly assigned or denied. 

The order, signed in March, directs the administration to create lists of eligible voters and the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists. On August 24, the Supreme Court sided with the administration, but only on a procedural question: it held that the states that sued lacked the legal right to challenge the order and did not rule on its legality. The Court said its disposition does not mean any measure implementing the order will necessarily be lawful. Justice Jackson’s dissent warned that the ruling needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the midterms. The order’s legal status therefore remains unsettled weeks before ballots go out.

Levitsky and Ziblatt define institutional forbearance as avoiding actions that obey the letter of the law while violating its spirit (p. 106). They note that Article II is “virtually silent” on a president’s authority to act unilaterally by executive order, and the Constitution “does not prohibit such action” (pp. 127–128). Their central claim is that this silence has been filled by norms, not law. Twentieth-century presidents mostly stayed out of the other branches’ domain and, outside wartime, used executive orders sparingly (p. 130). Elections are the clearest case. The Constitution gives states the primary role in running them, and a president ordering a federal agency to decide whose ballots get delivered is reaching into that role.The Truman comparison is useful. Truman’s 1952 order to seize the steel mills was blocked by the Supreme Court, and he complied (p. 130). The forbearance there lay in treating a judicial loss as final. Here, the executive branch won on standing and proceeded to implement, while the merits are still undecided. That is not illegal, but it is a different posture: legal ambiguity is treated as permission rather than as a reason for restraint.

Ozan Varol’s concept of stealth authoritarianism explains why the justification matters. Would-be authoritarians, he argues, use legal tools that exist in democracies, particularly electoral laws “frequently enacted for the purported purpose of eliminating electoral fraud,” to give themselves systematic advantages (p. 1679). The order’s stated purpose is to keep non-citizens from voting. That aim appears to be legitimate, and it is the kind of justification Varol’s framework says to test against the evidence. Noncitizen voting is rare, and the President has blamed mail voting without credible evidence for his 2020 loss. He also voted by mail himself in Florida this year. A fraud rationale that outruns the evidence is not proof of bad faith, but it fits the pattern Varol describes better than it fits a response to a documented problem.

Schumpeter defines democracy as a competitive struggle for the people’s vote, and admits that this definition cannot exclude practices similar to unfair or fraudulent competition. Democratic government, he says, shades into autocratic government “by imperceptible steps” (p. 271). A ballot-delivery rule is such a step. No single rule abolishes competition, but each one changes who can compete on equal terms. Schumpeter also argues that ordinary voters have little “sense of reality” about distant political questions (pp. 261–262). That makes small procedural changes especially hard for the public to evaluate, since most people experience the rule only when it affects them directly, and by then it may be too late.

The order’s defenders could be right in at least one aspect. The Supreme Court did not endorse it, lower courts have split, and the Postal Service’s role is still disputed. Three observable outcomes would test my argument. First, if implementation turns out to be minimal, so that eligible voters lose no access, the “hardball” label overstates the practical effect, though the precedent would remain. Second, if the administration complies with later rulings, as Truman did, that points to forbearance surviving. Third, if state officials of both parties object, that would resemble the cross-party resistance that defeated FDR’s court-packing plan (pp. 119, 132). So far, the political lines look more partisan than that. If instead eligibility lists are used to remove eligible voters, or if the losing side in November rejects the results as illegitimate, the order will appear as an early step in the spiral Levitsky and Ziblatt describe, in which each side uses every legal power it has because the cost of losing seems too high (pp. 111–112).