By Dietrich Knauth
NEW YORK (Reuters) -A federal judge on Friday permanently blocked part of an executive order from Republican U.S. President Donald Trump, ruling that the president cannot require voters to show passports or similar documents as proof of citizenship before voting.
Several lawsuits have challenged the president's March 25 executive order, a sweeping order aimed at overhauling federal elections, and courts had already temporarily blocked it from going into effect. U.S. District Judge
Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington, D.C., was the first to reach a final ruling against the executive order.
Kollar-Kotelly permanently blocked the part of the executive order that would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. The judge had previously declined to block the part of the executive order that would bar states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day.
The ruling came in response to lawsuits by groups including the Democratic National Committee, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the League of Women Voters Education Fund.
The executive order had called on a non-partisan federal election body to modify a standardized national voter registration form to require a document such as a passport proving citizenship, and federal officials to "assess" the citizenship of people on public assistance before offering them voter registration forms.
Plaintiffs have claimed that these measures could discourage or prevent eligible citizens from registering.
Kollar-Kotelly found that those parts of the order were illegal because the U.S. Constitution gives states, not the president, the power to oversee elections.
Trump has long questioned the U.S. electoral system and continues to falsely claim that his 2020 loss to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud. Trump and his Republican allies also have made baseless claims about widespread voting by non-citizens, which is illegal and rarely occurs.
(Reporting by Dietrich Knauth; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Rosalba O'Brien)
