Trump vote challenge stopped
One day after the U.S. Postal Service put into effect President Trump’s new limits on mail-in voting, a federal judge in Boston temporarily blocked the rules late Thursday night, finding that they are probably unconstitutional. The two-week delay will allow that judge to consider adopting a more lasting order.
With only 68 days remaining before the midterm election on November 3, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani found that state election officials won’t have time to satisfy the complex new rules that the U.S. Postal Service has just implemented.
The judge also decided that the new rules, if allowed, would likely result in the denial of voting rights of many who are eligible to cast ballots but need to vote by mail, will disrupt voter education programs run by organizations like the League of Women Voters, and will interfere with state officials’ management of the November balloting.
She acted in response to new challenges by several voter-support groups like the League, and by 23 state governments. The judge temporarily decided that the new rules have not been authorized by Congress. Her ruling is not a final decision on the rules’ legality, but is a strong indication that she is likely soon to issue a more binding order against them.
The Boston jurist is the same one who earlier had issued two orders that attempted to bar the Postal Service from completing its planned new controls. Those orders were overturned in a narrow ruling by a divided Supreme Court last Monday.
By a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court gave the Postal Service and the Trump Administration permission to write a final set of the new rules. That decision, however, drew no conclusions about the legality of any of the planned changes and did not bar any federal judge from considering a fresh challenge. That is what the Boston judge did last night.
The Postal Service wrote the new rules, and said it was putting them into effect on Wednesday, to carry out an Executive Order that President Trump issued in March. Trump has for years opposed mail-in voting, although he uses the method himself as he did again in a Florida election this year.
He claims that voting by mail leads to election fraud, and especially to voting by persons who are not U.S. citizens and have no voting rights. The evidence of such fraud is sparse, state officials and voting rights groups contend.
Under the new postal controls, states must identify exactly who is a citizen in their state, compare their own voter rolls to a new federal list for each state of persons the government thinks are eligible to vote, and assign each mail-in voters an identifying number to allow the Postal Service to track voting patterns. States must also use specially-designed envelopes for delivering and returning mailed votes.
If states do not obey the new rules, the Post Office simply will not deliver mail-in ballot cast in each state that does not comply. There is also a risk of federal prosecution of election officials who do not cooperate with the Postal Service demands.
The Justice Department tried unsuccessfully to persuade Judge Talwani not to issue a new order against the final rules, contending that those controls will not harm voting rights or impose burdens on states’ management of the November balloting. The Department is expected to appeal the judge’s new order.
