Trump’s mail-in voting order faces new legal setback after Supreme Court ruling
President Donald Trump’s efforts to limit mail-in voting hit a legal setback Tuesday, just a day after the Supreme Court allowed part of his executive order to move forward for now.
The Trump administration wants the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Postal Service to play a greater role in determining who can vote by mail.
The latest ruling came in a separate case brought by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, in which Massachusetts U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani accused the Trump administration of violating a previous order barring it from moving forward with the president’s mail-in ballot plan. Specifically, the judge said the U.S. Postal Service should not have published a rule describing how it would carry out Trump’s plan, guidelines that were supposed to take effect Wednesday.
Talwani did not sanction the Trump administration for the violation.
The development came one day after the Supreme Court, in a separate lawsuit brought by 23 states and the District of Columbia, said the administration could for now continue efforts to change who qualifies to receive a mail-in ballot. The high court’s decision was based on a technicality and did not address whether the president’s order itself is legal.
“What the decision actually means is that the filings that have been made by 23 attorneys general, basically representing blue states, the court said that their filings against this executive order happened to be premature,” said Michele Goodwin, a professor at Georgetown Law.
Critics of the plan argue Trump’s executive order would give the Postal Service an improper role in election administration.
“This requirement for the post office to be able to come up with rules that determine who gets to participate in an election, who doesn’t in terms of mail-in ballots or anything else is ludicrous,” said Paul López, clerk and recorder for the City and County of Denver.
Neither ruling is expected to be the final word on the matter. The Trump administration argues the Supreme Court’s opinion earlier this week makes the federal judge’s latest ruling moot.
As the case moves through more legal wrangling, some states are concerned about whether the order could be implemented before the November midterm elections.
“I think it’s unlikely that the Postal Service rule goes into effect simply because of the significant logistical hurdles that have to be overcome by the beginning of September, when states start mailing out these ballots,” said Derek Muller, a professor at Notre Dame Law School.
Trump has repeatedly criticized mail-in voting while using it himself twice this year. He has claimed noncitizens use it to vote illegally, but studies have found the practice to be rare.