Pa. Gov. Josh Shapiro is correct to join 23 other states in challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order that instructs the U.S. Postal Service to regulate mail-in voting across the 50 states. The states have the Constitution on their side.

It is particularly brazen for the president to attempt to use federal power to regulate elections when his administration is, at this moment, attempting to gut what’s left of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — using similar arguments as the 24 governors and attorneys general are using against his executive order.

The relevant constitutional provision is Article I, Section 4, Clause 1: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

The meaning of this clause is clear: State legislatures have the primary authority to organize elections for federal offices, but Congress can override state rules. The only exception, regarding the election of U.S. Senators, was rendered moot by the 17th Amendment, instituting the direct election of members of the upper chamber.

Nowhere does the Constitution give the executive branch or its leader, the president, any authority to regulate elections absent Congressional authorization. For the executive to declare that he has it is to attempt to usurp the states’ and Congress’s authority over the organization of elections.

Trump’s executive order, ostentatiously titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” purports to authorize the USPS to develop regulations for mail balloting. These include requiring that voters send official election mail in officially marked envelopes with individually identifiable barcodes. The order directs the government to create state citizens lists, as well as specific lists of state voters receiving mail-in ballots, so that the USPS can reject official election mail from anyone not on the lists.

People debate the wisdom and practicality of the system the president is trying to create. But that is irrelevant at this moment. The one question is the executive’s authority under the Constitution to create the regulations. Again, the clear meaning, taken from the plain reading of the Constitution’s elections clause, shows that the executive does not have the authority Trump is claiming.

Ironically, at the same time the administration is trying to take the states’ authority, elsewhere it is vigorously defending states’ rights with regard to elections against Congress. It is supporting a challenge to the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which broadly requires states to ensure adequate Congressional representation for racial minority groups. This provision, Section 2, is the genesis of so-called “majority-minority” districts.

Here, the Trump administration and its allies are effectively arguing for states’ constitutional rights to organize elections as they see fit, against federal interference — just as it challenges this principle where it sees fit elsewhere.

Among the important differences, of course, are that the VRA was passed by Congress and therefore clears the basic hurdle of valid authority, and that it responded to genuine, documented abuses of the principle of fair elections. That is, it was meant to protect citizens’ Constitutional rights some states were actively denying.

That is not the case here. There is no documented evidence of the abuse of state mail-in voting systems, or of widespread voting by non-citizens, which Trump’s executive order purports to redress.

We support, therefore, Shapiro’s participation in a lawsuit to defend states’, and Congress’s, constitutional role in organizing elections. Playing fast and loose with the Constitution is a far greater threat to fair elections, and to the Constitution itself, than phantom fraud.

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