Supreme Court Says Trump May Implement Mail Ballot Overhaul

"[T[he injunction meddles in 'the workings of ' the executive branch, preventing it from even trying to lawfully implement the order," the court said in a per curiam decision.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed the federal government to begin implementing President Donald Trump's executive order for an overhaul of mail voting systems ahead of the November midterm elections, finding it was too early for Democratic states to challenge the controversial policies.

The ruling clears the way, at least for now, for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Postal Service to take a more active role in the administration of mail voting pursuant to Trump's executive directive. Historically, the federal government has played little to no role in mail voting, which has been under the total purview of individual states.

The high court granted the Trump administration's request to lift an injunction against the president's order directing, among other things, the DHS to establish a master list of U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and for the U.S. Postal Service to adopt new rules for mail ballots.

A group of Democratic states say the executive order is unconstitutional and won an injunction from a Massachusetts federal judge barring its implementation.

In an unsigned, per curiam, opinion, the Supreme Court said it was too early for the states to challenge the executive order because any harm stemming from an internal federal directive is purely speculative.

"[T[he injunction meddles in 'the workings of ' the executive branch, preventing it from even trying to lawfully implement the order," the court said.

The three justices dissented.

The majority noted in its ruling that it "does not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell. But the order itself does not harm the states, so the district court lacked jurisdiction to bar the government from trying to implement it."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Justice Elena Kagan, wrote that the states face a "sufficiently concrete and imminent injury" to bring their challenge in federal court. Specifically, the executive order creates a "credible threat" that the Trump administration will prosecute state and local officials for refusing to use the citizenship lists compiled by DHS, which the states say are necessarily incomplete, Sotomayor added.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a more sharply worded dissent, said the order "violates well-established precedents concerning this court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections. It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges."

As the Supreme Court was deliberating the administration's request, the U.S. Postal Service finalized its rule implementing the executive order, setting new ballot design requirements and calling for states to transmit the identities of mail ballot recipients prior to federal elections. The new rule is likely to be challenged in court prior to the midterm elections, as several Democratic election officials wrote comments criticizing the proposed rulemaking.

Trump, who has himself voted by mail, has been waging a legal fight against mail voting in the run-up to the November midterms, which could determine the fate of the remainder of his second term agenda as president.

In his speeches and social media posts, the president has repeated the charge that mail voting is rife with fraud. At the end of June, however, the Supreme Court rejected a Trump-backed effort to stop the counting of mail ballots that arrive after Election Day in various states.

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