California and nearly two dozen other states warned the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday that allowing the U.S. Postal Service to move forward with President Trump’s new rules for mail ballots in the November election would cause “chaos” and could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.
The states’ arguments were in response to the Trump administration over the weekend filing an emergency appeal to the high court, asking it to overturn a lower-court ruling halting the plan from being implemented for the Nov. 3 election. The new rules — developed in response to a March executive order from Trump — require states to submit their complete voter lists to the Postal Service, and to adopt new ballot envelopes with individualized voter bar codes designed by the Postal Service. They require the Postal Service to then reject any mail ballots that don’t match those lists.
Trump’s order also directed the Department of Homeland Security to develop its own list of eligible citizen voters, ostensibly to be compared against the state lists. Trump and other supporters of the changes — including top officials from a dozen Republican-led states — argue they are necessary to prevent widespread voter fraud, including by non-citizens. Elections experts say there is no evidence of such widespread fraud, despite robust audits and other searches for it.
The Democrat-led states sued to block the changes on multiple grounds, including that neither Trump nor the Postal Service have any authority to regulate state-run elections, that the changes would illegally prevent eligible voters from casting ballots, and that the timeline imposed by the new rule — formally issued by the Postal Service on Aug. 21 — made compliance by November impossible. Independent voting rights groups also sued, alleging the new rules threatened to disenfranchise voters and make their work educating voters on their options for casting a ballot impossible to carry out. A Postal Service whistleblower recently added skepticism to the agency’s ability to implement the new rules on its end, alleging in a statement published by congressional Democrats that the agency’s online portal for verifying ballots was built in a “slapdash” manner, is “fundamentally flawed” and threatens as built to reject thousands of ballots if just a single one cannot be properly read.
District Judge Indira Talwani granted requests from the states and the independent groups to halt the plans from being implemented nationwide, issuing a preliminary injunction requiring the Postal Service to cease all work on them. The Trump administration then bypassed the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to ask the Supreme Court for relief from Talwani’s order. John Sauer, the administration’s top litigator, argued that the warnings from states that the changes are unworkable, represent an overreach of federal authority or would cause chaos in November are all baseless.
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, joined three other election experts to argue to the lower court that the Trump administration’s claims of injury were “speculative and weak.” They noted that the administration had “offered no evidence” in court that the new rules would “stop any appreciable amount of voter fraud or even that voter fraud through the mails is a widespread problem that USPS should address.” Meanwhile, they wrote, there was “undisputed evidence” presented to the lower court that the Postal Service is “still not prepared to implement its new rule or do so accurately and efficiently, even as states have begun mailing out their ballots,” and that the “harm to the states and to voters is enormous, as the rule threatens to disenfranchise millions of elderly voters, disabled voters, military voters and all others including the most vulnerable who depend on mail voting, in both red and blue states.” The Democrat-led states also noted that the Trump administration hadn’t proven that widespread voter fraud is a legitimate threat, but had shown it i
Extract — continue reading at the source.
