President Donald Trump cleared one hurdle yesterday on his quest to impose sweeping new restrictions on mail-in voting. But with the first ballots for November’s midterm elections due to be sent in little more than a week, the administration is fighting a losing battle against undefeated opponent Father Time. The Supreme Court on Monday lifted an injunction that had blocked parts of Trump’s March executive order that sought to tighten federal oversight of mail-in voting, granting Trump a legal victory.
Except, it wasn’t really a legal victory. The conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled that Democratic-led states had simply challenged Trump’s executive order too early, and lifted the injunction related to their challenge. However, another injunction that concerns the legality of Trump’s mail-ballot provisions remains in place—a point the Court went out of its way to highlight in yesterday’s ruling.
"The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful," the statement read. The separate nationwide injunction blocks USPS from implementing Trump’s mail-ballot provisions for the November 3 election. With North Carolina set to distribute ballots to absentee voters from September 4, the administration may well win the legal war on mail-in voting, but the battle for the midterms might already be over.
Trump’s March 31 executive order set out a raft of changes to federal election administration. It directs the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration, to produce state-by-state lists of U.S. citizens who will be adults as of Election Day and provide them to each state’s chief election official. Separately, election officials would have to submit voter information to USPS through a federal system before outbound mail ballots are accepted.
The order also calls for tougher investigations into allegations of illegal voting practices, and seeks to standardize USPS-approved mail-ballot envelopes with unique tracking barcodes in an attempt to eliminate voter fraud. For Trump and his Republican lawmakers running in the midterms, this final provision is arguably the most important. District Court Judge Indira Talwani’s injunction remains in place, USPS cannot refuse to transmit existing mail ballots that fail to meet Trump’s standardization requirements.
According to USPS’s own rules, once an outbound ballot has been accepted into the mailstream, it cannot later be "intercepted, returned, or delayed." Meanwhile, the election countdown clock keeps ticking. States begin issuing their first ballots to military and overseas voters in a little over a week. If the injunction remains in place as states begin mailing ballots, an increasing share of the election will therefore proceed under the existing system.
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