A Massachusetts federal judge has effectively nullified President Trump's endeavor to unilaterally restructure U.S. elections, siding with a cohort of Democratic state attorneys general who successfully argued the executive action represented an unconstitutional overreach of presidential power; Trump's executive order, promulgated in March, had sought to mandate documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, enforce an absolute deadline of Election Day for the receipt of mailed ballots, and tie federal election grant funding to states' adherence to this newly imposed temporal constraint, an initiative the White House disingenuously defended as a necessary safeguard for "free, fair and honest elections"; however, Judge Denise J. Casper, in her judicious assessment, concluded that the states were likely to prevail in their legal challenges, asserting that the Constitution does not explicitly vest the President with such expansive, plenary powers over electoral processes, and further enjoined the enforcement of the provision requiring states to summarily reject any mail-in or absentee ballots arriving post-Election Day; this represents the second juridical rebuke to Trump’s election directive, following a prior ruling by a Washington D.C. judge that similarly curtailed portions of the disputed presidential instrument.