Judge blocks parts of Trump mail voting order

A federal judge in Boston on Thursday blocked key parts of President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting mail-in voting, halting a plan that could have denied mail ballots to states that refused to provide voter information to federal officials.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled against provisions of Trump’s March 31 order that sought to involve the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security in creating voter lists and verifying mail ballots. The order called for federal agencies to compile lists of adult U.S. citizens or eligible voters in each state and for USPS to deliver mail-in ballots only to people on those lists.

The ruling marks a legal setback for the administration’s broader effort to change voting rules ahead of November’s midterm elections. The legal fight is expected to continue, with the Trump administration expected to appeal Talwani’s decision, NPR reported.

Voting rights groups, 23 states and the District of Columbia sued to stop the proposed rule, arguing that the Constitution gives state legislatures and Congress — not the president — authority over the rules for federal elections.

Talwani found that parts of the executive order requiring the Postal Service to use a barcode tracking system for ballot envelopes tied to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data were unconstitutional, The Guardian reported.

The injunction does not stop the federal government from helping states verify voter citizenship or eligibility if states request that assistance and it is provided “within the framework provided by Congress,” the ruling said.

But the judge blocked the federal government from “taking any steps to create a new federal program to superintend and control Plaintiff States’ maintenance of their voter rolls,” or from starting investigations or prosecutions of those states, their officials, local officials or agents involved in administering federal elections.

USPS, which operates independently of a president’s administration, has proposed using information from state election officials to create voter lists. Postmaster General David Steiner told lawmakers Wednesday that under the proposal, the Postal Service would not deliver mail ballots from states that refuse to turn over their absentee voter lists to the federal government.

Postal officials also issued a public rule-making notice Wednesday outlining proposed changes. Under that plan, state election officials would have to submit a voter manifest with names, addresses and individual barcode identifiers to a new “USPS federal ballot mail portal” at least 30 days before an election. USPS would then physically verify outgoing mail-in ballots against the database. Ballots addressed to people not on the submitted lists, or envelopes lacking newly required federal serialization and barcode tracking, would be rejected and returned.

Democratic senators questioned Steiner about the legality of the proposal during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday.

“It is clear there is nowhere in the constitution and no federal law that the postal service is authorized to create these types of voter databases, verification systems or mandatory standards,” said Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the committee’s ranking Democrat. “It simply does not exist.”

Steiner defended the proposal, saying, “I would think that states would want the information to ensure that the ballots that they think they’re sending out are the ballots that are actually getting sent out.”

A similar set of lawsuits is moving forward in Washington, D.C. In late May, a federal judge there found it was too early to issue an emergency ruling blocking directives the administration had not yet carried out. Democrats are appealing that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.