Trump asks Supreme Court to OK sweeping changes for mail ballots

By John Fritze, Tierney Sneed, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to give the US Postal Service sweeping power to withhold delivery of mail ballots, setting up an extraordinary showdown over voting at the high court less than two months before the November midterm election.

The emergency appeal, which leapfrogged lower courts still considering the case, is the culmination of a monthslong legal fight over an executive order the president signed in March that gave federal agencies an unprecedented role in elections. Voter advocacy groups and a coalition of 23 Democratic-led states challenged that order in federal court, arguing that neither the president nor the post office should have a role in choosing which mail ballots reach voters.

With the midterm elections nearing, and the first ballots entering the mail this week, the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court will be under enormous pressure to decide the case on an unusually speedy timeline. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to step in immediately with a short-term order that would allow the Postal Service to implement its new regulations.

The administration described its rules as “only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements.” Throughout its appeal, the administration framed its effort as having more to do with its power to regulate the mail than anything to do with elections.

“The rule thus plainly does not seize control of states’ administration of elections,” the administration told the high court. “It simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”

Since the justices last reviewed the issue in August — siding with the Trump administration — USPS has provided more detail about how it intends to implement Trump’s order. Many election officials have warned that it’s already too late to upend their mail ballot systems. And a whistleblower report asserted that the USPS is rushing to complete a complicated plan that could potentially disenfranchise millions of Americans.

“USPS’s mail ballot rule is an unconstitutional attempt to upend mail voting on the eve of an election,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, part of the legal team representing the voting rights groups. “The district court temporarily blocked the rule’s key provision while it decides the request for preliminary relief through an order set to expire within days. Yet President Trump’s administration is running to the Supreme Court anyway. The only emergency here is the one the administration created.”

The road ahead as states prepare for midterms

The court requested a response in the case by Tuesday morning, a sign that it is unlikely to decide the administration’s request immediately.

The Trump administration will need to clear a procedural hurdle before it can get the court to look at the USPS regulation closely. A lower court had blocked the USPS rule with a temporary order that is not normally appealable. However, the high court has sometimes allowed such appeals in the past, and Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the top appellate attorney for the administration, said it should do so in this case.

Trump, and several Republican states that support him, have framed the executive order as a minimal series of changes in postal rules to ensure a more secure election. In its appeal Thursday, the administration leaned into the idea that the changes are necessary to prevent fraud, echoing the president’s long stated false assertions of widespread voter fraud.

Without intervention, the Justice Department wrote, the lower court order blocking the administration “partially nullifies the Postal Service’s efforts to address the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud — a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters.”

But critics describe the order as a power grab over state-run mail ballots, which the president has repeatedly and baselessly blamed for his loss to former President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Under the regulations, states must submit lists of their eligible mail voters to USPS via an online portal in order to send ballots through the mail. If a name doesn’t appear on that list, the Postal Service would decline to deliver a mail ballot to them. The USPS rule would also require that election mail envelopes carry unique bar codes for each voter. States fear that adopting an entirely new mail ballot system weeks before the election could lead to systemic breakdowns in ballots reaching voters.

North Carolina is set to begin sending out its mail ballots on Friday.

It was a point the administration repeatedly stressed in its appeal as it attempted to arouse a sense of urgency from the court. It warned that as lower courts continued to work on the case, more and more states would begin sending ballots for this year’s election.

The emergency appeal requires the Supreme Court to resolve one of the most significant election-related questions it has been asked to take up in years. Last month, a divided court allowed the administration to continue working to implement its executive order, though it did so on technical grounds that offered little insight into how the conservative majority views the legality of Trump’s underlying order. The court’s three liberal justices dissented from that decision.

Days later, a federal court in Boston temporarily blocked the administration from carrying out the plan.

Democratic state officials and voting rights groups challenging the order note that the Constitution gives the power to run elections to the states, not the president, and they argue that Congress has given USPS no authority to police state mail ballot programs. But the Justice Department has countered that USPS has broad authority to change protocols for the mail. It has called attention to two examples where it has done so in the past: the delivery of cremated remains and replica explosives, such as dummy grenades.

The recent whistleblower report alleged that the agency was preparing to reject entire batches of ballots — which in some jurisdictions would delay the sending of tens of thousands ballots — if USPS found that just a single envelope in the batch did not align with the information within the portal.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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