Trump Administration Appeals to Supreme Court in USPS Mail-In Voting Fight
Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani issued a 14-day temporary restraining order blocking mandatory enforcement of the USPS’s mail-in voting rule, which laid out how the agency would implement Donald Trump’s executive order restricting the use of mail-in ballots. Per PBS News, “[U]nder Trump’s executive order, the U.S. Postal Service could refuse to deliver ballots from states that do not follow a uniform envelope style and submit lists of eligible voters to an online portal.” At a hearing on Thursday, the government was unable to assure Judge Talwani that the USPS could actually implement Trump’s plan in time for November’s elections. Meanwhile, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court to lift the restraining order. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson set a Sept. 8 deadline for the administration to file its arguments in the new appeal, even as North Carolina is set to send out mail ballots to voters today.
The legal battle continued the same week Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) sent a letter to David Steiner, the USPS Postmaster, reporting an anonymous whistleblower complaint. It warned that the system the USPS had developed to implement the administration’s new mail-in voting system was, according to the federal official, “a rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process.” Blumenthal slammed Trump in a call with reporters on Monday, saying, “This administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework of casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons. It is unconstitutional, as is argued in the courts…but this disclosure indicates that it is also blatantly incompetent and incapable of actually delivering ballots that are lawful in this midterm election.” Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, fired back. “The process of building software to carry out this new verification check is neither complex nor unique for USPS since the Postal Service regularly uses bulk mailing and intelligent mail barcodes for a wide variety of large customers.”
Democrats Notch Wins in Redistricting Wars
On Thursday, The Missouri Supreme Court unanimously blocked the state’s new congressional maps from being used this November.
