Supreme Court blocks Trump mail-in ballot plan
Por Josh Gerstein, Kyle Cheney — POLITICOPolitics » POLITICO
The Supreme Court has rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to enforce new mail-in ballot delivery rules that threatened to severely disrupt the looming midterm elections.
In a ruling Monday, the justices left in place a lower-court decision that blocked the Postal Service from implementing the new requirements in the coming weeks due to the potential that millions of voters could be disenfranchised by not having their ballots delivered.
Most of the high court’s majority did not offer a detailed rationale for their decision, which took place on the court’s emergency docket, saying simply that the Trump administration’s position was unlikely to succeed and that the legal factors at issue did not favor lifting the lower-court ruling.
In a brief concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in his view that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the election.”
Two members of the court dissented — Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
“Even assuming the rule here is a regulation of elections, Congress may create such rules under the Elections Clause. And, by statute, it may authorize the Postal Service to issue such rules,” Alito wrote, joined by Thomas.
In an eight-page dissent, Alito referred to the litigation three times as a “Hail Mary pass.”
The Trump administration said the new measures were needed to combat fraud, but many state and local election officials said the federal government was inviting chaos by trying to deploy a new ballot-matching system just as poll workers in many states began sending out ballots to voters in advance of the midterms.
The recent federal government actions to control mail-in voting are responses to an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March as he railed against what he has long claimed, without proof, is widespread fraud linked to voting conducted by mail.
“The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible what’s gone on,” Trump said during an Oval Office signing ceremony. “I think this will help a lot with elections.”
Trump’s order was quickly hit with lawsuits from voting rights advocates, Democratic Party groups and Democratic-led states. Two of those cases were assigned to U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, a Boston-based Obama appointee. In June, she blocked the administration from moving forward with key parts of Trump’s directive.
However, the justices voted last month, 6 to 3 along ideological lines, to lift Talwani’s injunction. The high court’s majority said her move was premature because it came before the administration took final action to implement the plan.
That action, the release of a final rule by the Postal Service, actually took place one business day before the Supreme Court issued its decision lifting Talwani’s initial ruling. The final rule triggered a new round of litigation, prompting the new injunction that the Supreme Court refused to lift Monday.
The final plan was similar to the Postal Service’s initial proposal, but dropped a provision that said postal workers would refuse to deliver voted ballots to election officials if the ballots didn’t match data in the service’s system.
On Sunday, a judge in Washington overseeing three lawsuits challenging the Postal Service’s actions issued his own preliminary injunction against enforcement of the mail-in ballot rule in the midterms.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols said postal authorities lacked authorization from Congress to implement the plan.
“Nothing in the Postal Reorganization Act authorizes the Postal Service to impose new election procedures on state election officials, to create a data collection system for mail-in and absentee voters, or to refuse the transmission of lawful mail because it fails to meet these data collection requirements,” wrote Nichols, a Trump appointee.
Fonte: POLITICOPolitics » POLITICO
