Facing setbacks and resistance, Trump presses bid to reshape elections on multiple fronts

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Set us as preferred WASHINGTON — President Trump has spent months waging an unusually aggressive campaign to reshape how states run elections, leveraging federal agencies in ways no previous president has attempted.He has pushed the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of citizens in each state to help determine voter eligibility.He is seeking to give the Postal Service a role in deciding who can receive mail ballots.

He has threatened to withhold federal funding from states unless they phase out electronic voting machines.And he is pressuring Republican lawmakers to overhaul voting laws, claiming without evidence that elections are being rigged.The efforts have run into resistance in court and within his own party.

They have also left postal workers and local election officials bracing for an election cycle marked by deepening doubts about election integrity, and uncertainty about how the federal government may challenge the post-election results.“It’s an unprecedented power grab to reshape how our elections work so that he and his allies can maintain and expand power,” said Eric Kashdan, director of federal advocacy at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government ethics organization.The White House defends the effort as fulfilling a campaign promise, and argues the administration is “lawfully enacting the agenda President Trump was elected to enact.”One of Trump’s defining efforts to assert some federal control over state elections has been his insistence on passing the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when they register, require Americans to show identification when casting a ballot and require states to send voter data to the Department of Homeland Security.His relentless push for the measure has prompted him to derail a bipartisan housing bi...