The Supreme Court’s Mail-In Ballot Ruling Is a Step Toward Chaos in the Midterms
Wired · LC · trust 62/100
Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story The US Supreme Court ruled on Monday that President Donald Trump’s executive order imposing severe restrictions on voting by mail ahead of November’s midterms can proceed. While a nationwide injunction preventing the US Postal Service from implementing the order remains in place, election officials and experts believe Monday’s ruling could still result in chaos and voters being disenfranchised.
The Supreme Court ruling, which split along ideological lines, paused an injunction by a federal judge in Boston that prevented the Trump administration from applying provisions of the executive order to 23 states, along with the District of Columbia.
The court didn’t rule on the legality of the order, which seeks to impose federal oversight on elections that are, under the Constitution, controlled by states. The conservative majority ruled, rather, that the states that brought the lawsuit did not have standing because they could not show actual damage caused by the order.
“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,” the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion. “On that score, time will tell.”
The executive order is predicated on the baseless allegations pushed by Trump and his allies that widespread mail-in voter fraud has altered the outcomes of recent elections. (To put the claims in perspective, a database of supposed voter fraud incidents, maintained by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and dating back to 1980, contains fewer than 100 proven examples of noncitizen voting of any sort.) Experts and election officials have long warned that if implemented in full, the executive order would disenfranchise millions of voters . In a blistering dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed, writing that the ruling could create a “Kafkaesque nightmare [that] needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”
Despite the possibly temporary nature of this victory , election denial groups cheered the result as a major victory for so-called election integrity efforts. And experts worry that even if Trump’s executive order is eventually blocked, the decision will still have a direct impact on voter turnout in November by sowing doubts about the legitimacy of mail-in voting.
“Voting rights organizations have experienced first-hand the significant confusion that President Trump’s executive order is causing right now,” the counsel and plaintiffs in a second lawsuit against Trump’s executive order wrote in a statement on Monday . “With the November election right around the corner, nonpartisan voting rights groups should be fully engaged in the vital work of educating all eligible voters to prepare to cast their ballots. Instead, plaintiffs and similar organizations are scrambling to understand how the rules may change while fielding inquiries from voters who rely on mail ballots and who are confused and fearful about how they will exercise their right to vote.”
Almost one third of US voters cast their ballots by mail, including around one in four Republican voters. (Trump himself voted by mail in this year’s GOP primary in Florida.) In eight states, more than 70 percent of ballots were cast by mail during the 2024 elections.
Despite years of false claims from Trump and his allies about widespread mail-in voter fraud, there is no evidence to back up those claims. But in March, Trump signed an executive order titled “ Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections .” The order contains three distinct provisions.
The first directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile a “State Citizenship List” of individuals confirmed to be US citizens and deemed eligible to vote in each state. The list would be compiled from Social Security Administration records, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) data, and federal citizenship and naturalization records. The list would need to be sent to states 60 days before the election. That date is Friday, September 4—just 11 days after the Supreme Court ruling.
“This would create a parallel federal eligibility infrastructure on top of existing state voter rolls,” Issue One, a nonprofit seeking to reduce the role of money in politics, wrote shortly after the order was issued.
The second provision targets election officials by demanding that the US attorney general “prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of State and local officials … who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election.”
The final provision in the order directs the USPS to create new rules for absentee and mail-in ballots. Under the rules, states would need to provide the USPS with a list of voters they intend to send ballots to. The order prevents the USPS from sending ballots to anyone not on the list. This rule would require the printing of millions of new ballot envelopes with trackable barcodes.
Last week, before the Supreme Court ruling was issued, the USPS issued a 95-page final rule explaining how it plans to enforce Trump’s proposed changes to mail-in voting in order to “reduce the risk of fraud, and help protect the integrity of federal elections.” The rule compares mail-in ballots to fake bombs or cremated animal remains . The New York Times reported on Monday that Trump is seeking to take control over the USPS board by stacking it with members who have questioned the outcome of the 2020 election.
The provisions of the executive order were mostly blocked by federal courts before the Trump administration appealed the rulings to the Supreme Court in July. Earlier this month, the administration pushed the court to issue a ruling quickly, claiming that failing to do so would cause “irreparable harm to the federal government, the…
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