DOJ Asks SCOTUS to Allow Trump’s Mail Vote Suppression Scheme to Proceed

The Department of Justice on Sunday again petitioned the Supreme Court to lift an injunction that prohibits the United States Postal Service (USPS) from implementing a scheme that will give it a say over which voters should be allowed to vote by mail.

But time is running out for the Trump administration to try to insert itself in the administration of the midterms and suppress votes in this way because the first ballots have already been sent out in North Carolina, and other states will follow soon.

While the Supreme Court has previously ruled in the president’s favor in this case, that was on procedural grounds, and it would be highly irregular for the court to give the green light so close to an election to a plan that would necessarily lead to confusion among the tens of millions of American voters who, like Trump himself, want to vote by mail.

At the start of this week, a whistleblower report made clear why implementation of the rule would cause chaos. It stated that the administration was rushing the implementation of a shoddy and untested verification system that could easily lead to the disenfranchisement of massive numbers of eligible voters.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the court’s right-wing majority won’t allow the administration to forge ahead anyways.

After all, this Supreme Court has a well-established history of siding with the GOP on democracy-related cases, which has already led to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act this year that paved the way for racial gerrymanders throughout the South.

In its latest filing, the Trump administration once again misrepresents the sweeping impact of implementing a USPS rule that has the potential to deny millions of Americans who want to vote by mail the opportunity to do so.

Instead of being honest about it, US Solicitor General John Sauer claims that the regulations would impose “only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via US Mail.”

The administration does acknowledge that the rule requires states to upload the information of voters to a portal (which does not yet exist and is completely untested), making clear to those reading between the lines that this is just another part of Trump’s efforts to compile voter lists.

So far, the president has completely failed in that endeavor, having struck out in more than 20 cases in which he sought to obtain these dossiers.

More than anything, his crusade to “nationalize elections” highlights why it was so important for the Founding Fathers to entrust the states and Congress with the task of administering elections and to not give the executive branch a role in this process.

In response to the filing, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is responsible for handling emergency matters from the 1st Circuit, which is where the underlying case is being heard, gave the states and voting rights groups trying to protect the right to mail-in voting until Wednesday to respond. That also happens to be the day when Alabama begins to send out its ballot, showing once again that it would be impracticable and irresponsible to allow Trump’s scheme to proceed for the midterms.