In response to Congress’s failure to pass the election integrity-focused SAVE Act, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”

“The right to vote in Federal elections is reserved exclusively for citizens of the United States under the Constitution and Federal law,” the order reads. “Federal statutes explicitly prohibit non-citizens from registering to vote or voting in Federal elections and impose criminal penalties for violations.”

Focusing on protecting American citizens’ votes from disenfranchisement by illegal voting by noncitizens, Trump’s order directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of U.S. citizens from every state using Social Security data.

These lists will help identify whether noncitizen-based voter fraud is occurring by comparing the overall number of eligible American citizens to the voting totals.

The order also directs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to U.S. citizens approved by each state’s list. As Trump asserted when signing the order, “The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary.”

As the 2005 Jimmy Carter and James Baker-led Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded, mail-in ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Indeed, this is why few countries worldwide permit mass mail-in voting. They know it is a massive recipe for election fraud — ask one-fifth of 2020 mail-in voters. And if the citizenry can’t trust the election results, then whatever government comes to power will automatically be viewed with distrust, suspicion, and a sense of illegitimacy.

Protecting election integrity should be an absolute nonpartisan issue. And yet there are Democrats, the party that created the original Jim Crow laws, ridiculously and falsely smearing the SAVE Act as “Jim Crow 2.0.”

As noted above, the Senate Republicans’ inability to pass the SAVE Act has motivated Trump’s action. The question is, how much of this order will actually be accomplished?

The order threatens to withhold federal funding if state governments fail to get on board with the program, though Democrats are confident that little will come of this. Democrat election lawyer Marc Elias opined on X, “If Trump signs an unconstitutional Executive Order to take over voting, we will sue. I don’t bluff and I usually win.”

Arizona Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes dubiously framed Trump’s order as “nothing more than a push to weaponize the sensitive personal information of voters in this country,” and he promised to “not let this order stand without a fight and will meet the federal government in court.”

But Democrat opposition was to be expected, and from Trump’s perspective, his order is entirely within constitutional bounds. “You may find a rogue judge, you have a lot of rogue judges — very bad, bad, people, very bad judges,” he stated. “But that’s the only way that can be changed, and hopefully we’ll win on appeal if it is. I don’t see how anybody can challenge it.”

The spirit and intent of Trump’s order are, frankly, common sense: only U.S. citizens have a right to vote, and ensuring that only U.S. citizens cast votes means identifying who those Americans are.

With the SAVE Act bogged down by the Senate, Trump is taking action to keep the issue of protecting federal elections front and center for the American people. He’s pressing Democrats over their ridiculous and nonsensical excuses for opposing the safeguarding of the nation’s elections, and at a time in American history when nefarious foreign influence in our elections has never been higher.

Trump is also pushing to make these commonsense election protections, like voter ID and citizenship verification, a campaign issue that Republicans can wield against their Democrat opponents in the midterms. In fact, the tagline should be: “Republicans are trying to safeguard and protect America’s elections from abuse and fraud; why are Democrats stopping them?”