President Donald Trump has lost more than 20 cases in lower courts in his attempt to force states to share sensitive voter data with him, which experts overwhelmingly agree he plans on using to stop Democrats from voting against him in the upcoming midterm elections. Now Trump has taken his desire to do this to the Supreme Court, arguing for a second time that he should be allowed to order the Postal Service to not deliver mail-in ballots in states that do not share this information with him.
"The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to step in for a second time to allow new mail-in voting rules to be implemented ahead of the midterms," reported Politico's Josh Gerstein on Thursday. "The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal Thursday seeking an immediate block on a temporary restraining order a federal judge in Boston issued last week against a regulation that would require states to submit lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service, which will be able to refuse delivery of ballots to voters not in the database."
Gerstein added, "Last week, the justices voted, 6-3, to overturn a broader injunction the same judge issued against key provisions in an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March."
Speaking on MS NOW on Thursday, Democracy Docket founder and lawyer Marc Elias argued that Trump plans on doing this to stop thousands of people from voting.
"They want to target populations that are Democrats," Elias said. "But in order to do that, they need to... So then Donald Trump issued an executive order saying, "All right, I'm going to condition the ability of states to send out mail-in ballots to voters on these states doing a couple of things." Number one, they need to [unclear — possibly "actually verify" or "cross-check"] these ballots. But second, if a state seeks to send a ballot to someone who's not on that list, not only does that ballot not go out, but none of the other ballots in that same batch will go out either."
Speaking to AlterNet in June, another voting expert argued that Trump's attempts to federalize elections could be illegal.
“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”
