U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justices Samuel Alito (L) and Clarence Thomas wait for their opportunity to leave the stage at the conclusion of the inauguration ceremonies in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC.
President Donald Trump wants to ban mail-in balloting, and MS NOW analyst Jordan Rubin is concerned that the Supreme Court is prepared to help him do it, even if that means “injecting needless chaos” into American elections.
“The Supreme Court may be on the verge of injecting needless chaos and uncertainty into the midterm elections and beyond,” Rubin wrote for MS NOW. “That possibility was on display Monday, when the court heard a GOP-backed challenge to counting mail ballots that come in after Election Day, even if they’re postmarked by Election Day.”
Describing the efforts of Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart to fight Trump’s mail-in ballots policy, Rubin wrote that some of the judges instead seem to “endorse” Trump’s position “to disqualify later-arriving ballots.”
“There’d be no reason for those parties to advance that position if they thought it would hurt Republicans’ electoral prospects,” Rubin wrote. “President Donald Trump has railed against mail ballots. He has also made unproven voter fraud claims a centerpiece of his elections stance. That dynamic was at play at Monday’s hearing, during which Stewart noted that the federal government has ‘sounded the antifraud theme’ but still could not show ‘a single example of fraud from post-Election Day ballot receipt in this century.’”
Rubin noted that the more pro-Trump judges clamored for mail-in voting bans.
“Justice Samuel Alito, who sounded likely to side with the Republicans, seemed receptive to the ‘fraud’ narrative, as he cited arguments that ‘confidence in election outcomes can be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome’ of an election ‘is radically flipped by the acceptance later of a big stash’ of ballots,” Rubin wrote. “Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked about fraud, too, wondering, ‘Is that a real concern? Is that something we should be thinking about? Confidence in the election process?’
Ultimately Rubin predicted that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett will be the “pivotal votes in the relative center of the dispute.” Rubin’s nervous take was shared by Slate legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern, who argued that there have been “some very disturbing questions from the Republican-appointed justices in today's Supreme Court arguments — definitely several votes to strike down laws in 30 states which count mail ballots that arrive shortly after Election Day, as long as they're cast by Election Day. Not what I was hoping to hear."
He added, "Alito strongly implied that vote-by-mail, as practiced in most of the country today, is highly susceptible to fraud. [Neil] Gorsuch and [Clarence] Thomas leaned in that direction as well. [Amy Coney] Barrett and [Chief Justice John] Roberts are harder to read.” By contrast, Politico’s Josh Gerstein predicted that the Supreme Court seems “likely to deliver a defeat to Trump and rule states can count ballots received after Election Day, with Roberts, Barrett and maybe Kavanaugh joining the liberals.”
Trump has a long history of refusing to accept defeat when he loses at something. He accused the Emmy Awards of being rigged when he was not recognized for his reality TV show, “The Apprentice.” During the 2016 presidential election he falsely claimed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) stole the Iowa caucuses from him, and then declared he would only accept the result of the general election if he won. Despite winning in the Electoral College, Trump received fewer popular votes than Clinton, and so falsely blamed millions of illegal ballots. He created a voter fraud commission to find evidence of tampering but never produced any proof.
During the 2020 election, Trump preemptively attacked mail-in voting, declared victory despite losing and inaccurately claimed votes were being "dumped" on him. Biden won that election in both the popular and electoral vote, and in response Trump attempted a coup on January 6, 2021. Despite continuing to claim that the election was stolen, Republican columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post that Trump has had many days in court, and they all prove him to be stating untruths.
“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will said. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”
Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”