On Monday, the Supreme Court approved the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to enact a nationwide crackdown on mail-in voting via an executive order. It’s still not clear how quickly this agenda could be implemented before the November midterm elections, but could put election administrators on a tight deadline to comply.
In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to restrict voting by mail. About two dozen states and Washington, D.C. sued. The Supreme Court’s decision overturned an injunction a judge placed on President Donald Trump’s order in June. The votes came down 6 to 3, “along the usual ideological lines,” as Politico put it. The court’s order says that “This internal directive does not regulate the States’ voter registration processes. Nor does it impinge on the States’ authority ‘to create and enforce a legal code’ for elections.’”
The order didn’t say whether or not Trump’s order is lawful but focused on the timing of the states’ lawsuit, “making their claimed injuries too speculative,” according to SCOTUS Wire.
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“What makes today’s ruling so off-base is the Court’s lack of situational awareness regarding this equitable judgment,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent. “It treats the Government’s stay application as if the whole point is merely to demonstrate that the Plaintiff States’ claims are not justiciable. Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”
Trump has falsely claimed mail-in voting is “cheating,” despite how often he has voted by mail himself.
