Supreme Court Rules On Trump’s Mail-In Ballot Rule
The Pro Patriot News homepage has 60 new headlines every 24 hours - click here to see it.
The Supreme Court left in place a ruling blocking Trump’s mail-in ballot rule.
The Supreme Court ruled 7-2, with Alito and Thomas dissenting.
Kavanaugh wrote, “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the election.”
The Supreme Court has rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to enforce new mail-in ballot delivery rules that threatened to severely disrupt the looming midterm elections.
In a ruling Monday, the justices left in place a lower-court decision that blocked the Postal Service from implementing the new requirements in the coming weeks due to the potential that millions of voters could be disenfranchised by not having their ballots delivered.
Most of the high court’s majority did not offer a detailed rationale for their decision, which took place on the court’s emergency docket, saying simply that the Trump administration’s position was unlikely to succeed and that the legal factors at issue did not favor lifting the lower-court ruling.
In a brief concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in his view that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the election.”
The rule would have required states to submit a list of eligible voters to the Postal Service, which would then verify who the ballots were being sent to the right people before delivering them.
Alito partly blamed the Supreme Court for it being decided so close to the election.
He said the Supreme Court took too long to rule on it.
Under the new rule, states would have to submit lists of eligible voters to the Postal Service, which would then verify that ballots were being sent to people on that list before it delivered them. States would also have to comply with directions about envelope design.
Trump’s initial order envisioned the federal government’s creating and sending the Postal Service lists of citizens and forcing it to send ballots to those people, but the final Postal Service proposal did not include that provision.
In a dissenting opinion, Alito said the federal government had the better of the argument. Concerns raised by states about the difficulties of implementing the rule gave him pause, he added, “but it is not enough to convince me.”
Alito also complained that courts, including the Supreme Court itself, were partly to blame for the case’s being decided so close to the election, saying they had taken too long to decide it.
