Trump Scores Second Major Win In Mail-In Voting Fight

A Boston federal judge on Wednesday lifted her remaining block on key portions of President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to tighten mail-in voting rules ahead of the midterm elections.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s decision comes two days after a divided Supreme Court stayed a previous ruling from Talwani that blocked the Trump administration from implementing portions of the order.

In her nine-page order, Talwani, an Obama appointee, expressed frustration with the Supreme Court’s intervention and cited Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent but said she was “compelled” to lift the injunction in light of the high court’s ruling.

The development allows the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to move forward for now with new requirements for mail ballots in federal elections, even as Democratic-led states challenge the new rule in a separate lawsuit.

“This is a major win for the security of American elections,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told The Daily Wire. “These are commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans are electing American leaders. This Administration will continue to lawfully enact the agenda President Trump was elected on — which includes the safety and security of our elections.”

The Supreme Court’s unsigned 6-3 decision Monday marked an interim victory for Trump but did not resolve the order’s underlying legality.

The justices found that the Trump administration was likely to prevail on its argument that the states challenging the order lacked standing because they had not demonstrated the concrete and imminent injuries necessary to bring their claims at this stage.

“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell,” the court wrote. “But the Order itself does not harm the States, so the District Court lacked jurisdiction to bar the Government from trying to implement it.”

In March, Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to create and distribute “State Citizenship Lists” identifying residents who are U.S. citizens and will be at least 18 years old by the next federal election.

A separate provision directed the U.S. Postal Service to establish new procedures for mail-in and absentee ballots in federal elections.

Last Friday, the USPS issued a final rule establishing new standards for mail-in ballots in federal elections. Under the rule, election officials would have to submit voters’ names, addresses, and unique ballot-envelope barcodes through a federal portal before handing ballots over to the Postal Service. Ballots in violation would be rejected and returned to the authorized ballot mailer.

All three liberal justices dissented from Monday’s Supreme Court decision. Justice Jackson wrote a solo dissent to blast the court’s order.

“This is not a close call. The Government suffers no harm from an injunction limiting unlawful actions, much less ‘hypothetical’ and ‘speculative’ acts that the Government says it was not even sure it would take,” Jackson wrote. 

“When the Government’s obvious goal is to interfere with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a manner that the Constitution does not authorize, it is both a serious legal error and a grave misuse of our equitable emergency powers to let the Executive proceed even one step further,” Jackson added.