Trump admin renews Supreme Court ask to let mail ballot rule to take effect ahead of midterms

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday again asked the Supreme Court to allow the US Postal Service plan for mail ballots to take effect immediately, a mostly procedural move that nonetheless underscores the president’s desire to restrict mail voting during the critical midterm elections.

In its emergency appeal, the Postal Service noted that mail ballots for the November midterms are already being sent in one state, North Carolina, and that other states will soon follow. The USPS asked the high court to quickly allow it to implement its rule, setting up one of the most significant election cases on the court’s quick-turn docket in years.

The Supreme Court was already considering an emergency appeal filed by the USPS on Sept. 3 that urged the justices to allow the agency to implement the new ballot rule ahead of the November elections that will determine which party controls Congress. In that appeal, the USPS asked the Supreme Court to stay a temporary restraining order from US District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts that barred the agency from moving forward for two weeks.

On Friday, a day after the Justice Department filed that appeal, Talwani ruled again, handing down a preliminary injunction. That subsequent order blocked the USPS plan indefinitely. It is that second, indefinite block on the plan that the administration appealed to the Supreme Court on Sunday. Shortly after filing the second appeal on Sunday, the administration withdrew the first case.

In a letter to the court on Sunday, the Justice Department said it had filed the new appeal out of “an abundance of caution” and that it withdrew the first case “to simplify proceedings.”

For voters and states, the difference between the cases will make little or no difference.

The high court is being asked to rule with an extraordinarily quick timeline on an effort by the administration to give the USPS an unprecedented role in elections. North Carolina has already begun mailing out ballots. Alabama will begin doing so on Sept. 9. At least five additional states will begin mailing ballots on September 13, according to the Justice Department.

“Once those ballot envelopes enter the mailstream, there is no retrieving them,” the Justice Department told the Supreme Court in its filing on Sunday. “And while the injunction allows the Postal Service and the states to continue taking steps to ensure that their envelopes satisfy the rule’s requirements, each day the injunction is in place risks sowing confusion and chaos because the injunction makes those preparatory steps voluntary, rather than mandatory.”

The USPS rule would require state and local election officials to upload lists of their mail voters to a portal. It would also require election officials to use special barcodes on the envelopes to ease tracking of that mail. Many election officials have argued that it’s already too late to implement those requirements.

The administration has argued that the changes are needed to secure the ballots and ensure that only eligible voters receive one. But a coalition of 23 Democratic-led states and voting groups have described the effort as a power grab by a president who has long falsely alleged widespread voter fraud in mail ballot systems, even as he has frequently voted by mail himself.

“With fewer than 60 days to go before the November election, there is not a shred of evidence that states could comply with it without disenfranchising voters who rely on mail ballots,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU, part of the legal team challenging the USPS proposal.

In the appeal on Sunday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that, “Contrary to the claims of the district court and respondents that the Postal Service is trying to federalize the rules for mail-in voting, the Postal Service’s final rule imposes only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via US mail.”

The Constitution empowers states and Congress to set the rules for elections, not the president nor the Postal Service. That was a point that Talwani stressed in her latest decision on Friday.

“The Constitution’s elections clause tasks the States with the role of election administration, subject only to Congress’s superseding legislation, and the executive has no inherent authority in this joint endeavor,” she wrote.

The new appeal is unlikely to change the timeline of the high-profile case very much. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency appeals rising from the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals, had required the states to respond to the first appeal on Tuesday. On Sunday, Jackson ordered the states and voting rights groups challenging the USPS to respond to the new appeal on Wednesday, instead.

This story has been updated to include new details.

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