GOP officials: Trump’s anti-voting order will probably be ‘enjoined very quickly’

President Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to dial back mail-in voting likely doesn’t stand a chance in court, according to Republican official Al Schmidt, the current Pennsylvania Secretary of State, and Stephen Richer, the former recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona.

Schmidt, whose state is one of nearly two dozen currently suing to overturn the order, said on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that he was “confident of an outcome” in the states’ favor.

Richer, a legal scholar for the libertarian Cato Institute, agreed. “This is probably going to be enjoined very quickly,” he said.

Both also shared concerns that Trump is sowing distrust and confusion through constant meddling in the upcoming midterms elections and unrelenting probes into whether the 2020 election was rigged.

The dissent from these Republican officials is just the latest example that not everyone in the GOP is down with Trump’s attempts to undermine election security.

“My biggest concerns are twofold,” Schmidt said on the show. “One, that things like this cause some degree of confusion. We want voters to know that the election is going to be free, fair, safe and secure, and that everyone knows what the rules are prior to going into this. So, confusion is never a positive thing, unless you are seeking to sow distrust in the outcome of an election.”

Asked about the latest federal probe into Maricopa County’s 2020 election results for voter fraud, Richer — who led the county’s elections from 2021 to 2025 — said, “I don’t think that’s going anywhere,” and that Trump “has not produced a single scintilla of evidence” to suggest the election was stolen despite multiple investigations already conducted.

“[Election] 2020 has been investigated up the wazoo,” Richer said. “In Arizona alone, we’ve had 11 different independent investigations and audits. The attorney general of Arizona previously spent over 10,000 man-hours investigating, but this seems to be a trend, and I don’t know what to end, other than to sow further confusion, sow further doubt in the election process.”

Richer also said that Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting was unnecessary for Arizona because the state already has “some of the underlying features” of that order, such as documentary proof of citizenship, an absentee voter ballot list, and barcodes that allow voters to track their ballots. 

Most states already have one or some combination of these features in their registration processes. However, the larger issue is that the constitution has authorized the states — not the president — to determine how elections should be conducted and secured, as every one of the five lawsuits against Trump’s executive order has pointed out. 

Richer said that as Trump continues to poke around for fraud, he hoped more “people will eventually see that there is no there there,” and that the president’s maneuvers are “more about ego.”