There are a lot of things the U.S. military will put up with.
Bad chow. Worse housing. Deployments announced on short notice. Orders that make no sense until six months later—if ever.
What they should never have to fight for is the right to vote.
That’s the quiet but crucial point behind a ruling this week by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who blocked parts of a presidential executive order that would have forced the Pentagon to demand documentary proof of citizenship before service members could register to vote or request a ballot.
The judge got it right. And not for partisan reasons—this is about civilian control of the military, separation of powers, and a lesson the country learned the hard way after Vietnam: don’t turn the armed forces into a political proving ground.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly didn’t mince words. In her opinion, she wrote:
“Our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.”
She went further, reminding everyone that while states—and in some cases Congress—have authority over election rules, “they assigned no role at all to the President.”
That’s not judicial activism. That’s Civics 101.
Let’s start with a reality check.
Every American in uniform is already vetted harder than just about anyone else in the country. They raise their right hand. They sign federal contracts. They’re tracked from boot camp to discharge. They carry government IDs, security clearances, and—when deployed—often more paperwork than ammunition.
The idea that the military needs a new, ad-hoc citizenship screening regime bolted onto the voting process isn’t about security. It’s about control.
And control over elections doesn’t belong to the President.
Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act decades ago, setting a uniform federal system that allows voters—including service members—to attest to citizenship under penalty of perjury. The executive order tried to rewrite that law by fiat. Judge Kollar-Kotelly called that out plainly: the President doesn’t get to “assess citizenship” where Congress deliberately chose not to.
Nowhere was that overreach more dangerous than at the Pentagon.
The judge specifically blocked the provision directing the Secretary of Defense to impose new documentation requirements on military voters. That mattered. Because anyone who’s ever tried to get an absentee ballot from a combat zone knows the system already runs on duct tape and goodwill.
Mail delays. Unit moves. APO addresses that change mid-deployment. Ballots that arrive late—or not at all.
Add another bureaucratic hurdle and what happens?
Votes don’t get cast. Not because soldiers aren’t citizens—but because bureaucracy doesn’t move at the speed of war.
And here’s the part the “election security” crowd never seems to mention: the military vote has historically leaned conservative. Not always, not monolithically—but enough that no serious strategist believes overseas troops are some secret pipeline for voter fraud.
What they are is a tempting political prop.
Once you let one administration use the military’s administrative machinery to shape access to the ballot, you’ve crossed a line. Today it’s citizenship documents. Tomorrow it’s residency definitions, timing rules, or eligibility checks that conveniently collide with deployment schedules.
That’s how you politicize the force.
Old-school commanders understood this. The uniform stays out of politics—or politics eventually gets into the uniform.
There’s also a deeper constitutional problem here that should make anyone with a passing respect for civilian control uneasy. The President attempted to direct the Defense Department to enforce election rules Congress never passed. That flips the chain of authority on its head.
Congress writes the law.
The military executes missions.
The President commands—but within those bounds.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling didn’t break new ground. It defended old ground. The kind that keeps a standing army from becoming a tool of faction.
Yes, Congress can debate proof-of-citizenship laws. States can argue over election integrity. That’s the proper arena. Pass a statute. Take the votes. Face the voters.
But don’t jam it through the Pentagon and pretend it’s “common sense.”
The ruling wasn’t liberal or conservative. It was conservative in the original meaning of the word: conserving constitutional structure, protecting the integrity of the force, and keeping election law where it belongs.
The military asks its people to risk their lives for the country.
The least the country can do is not make voting harder for them while they’re doing it.
If we can’t manage that, the problem isn’t election security.
It’s us.