US President Donald Trump has lashed out at the Supreme Court for rejecting his push to curb mail-in voting, raising fears that the US president might use federal powers to meddle in November’s midterm elections. The justices “are merely a shell of their original selves, a court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings”. The ruling means states can continue administering mail-in voting under their existing procedures.
Mail-in and absentee ballots have been used in the United States for decades and now account for roughly a third of votes cast nationwide. Despite the ruling, political analysts and some officials fear that Trump may not let the electoral process proceed as planned, and might pull some other strings to tilt the election in his favour. So what voting rules exactly has Trump tried to change – and what other powers could his administration seek to use in the run-up to the midterms?
Election officials across the country are concerned about the prospects of interference, from the potential for ballot seizures to voter-fraud investigations. A investigation based on interviews with dozens of state and local election officials showed that they are adopting new strategies to prepare for political interference, misinformation, cyberattacks and intimidation tactics. According to the report, more than a dozen local and state election officials said they are hiring outside lawyers or seeking legal training for themselves and their staff to prepare for potential demands by the administration for access to sensitive voting records or election equipment.
Nearly twice that many said they are expanding public outreach and social media campaigns to counter misinformation, including the false claims made by Trump and Republican allies that voting machines are unreliable and mail-in voting is inherently corrupt. Campaigners have fiercely resisted Trump’s executive actions attempting to dictate federal voting procedures. Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Brennan Center for Justice have sued the administration, arguing that the Constitution gives authority over federal elections primarily to states and Congress, rather than the president.
The pushback has also come from Capitol Hill. A bipartisan group of 261 current and former members of Congress filed a brief with the Supreme Court challenging Trump’s executive order and the subsequent Postal Service rule. They argued that the measures violated the separation of powers by taking authority over federal elections that the Constitution grants to states and Congress.
As per the US Constitution, elections are conducted by local authorities working under the states. Raskin described Trump’s attempt to use the US Postal Service to regulate mailed ballots as “a naked power grab”, accusing the president of seeking “to inject confusion and chaos into our elections in a last-ditch effort to keep his party in power”. Senator Alex Padilla, the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, similarly argued that neither the president nor the Postal Service had the authority to determine how states administer elections.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
