A federal judge issued a restraining order Thursday night forbidding the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out President Trump’s plans to police which mailed ballots can be delivered for November’s election, saying the agency overstepped its boundaries.
Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee to the court in Massachusetts — and a frequent stumbling block for Mr. Trump — said the president’s plans are likely “unconstitutional” because they interfere with states’ ability to run elections.
She said absent the restraining order, states would have been forced to redesign their ballot mail envelopes, reorder those supplies, train election officials to comply with the new federal mandate and provide voter lists to the postal service, all before the election.
“In light of the state election officials’ unrebutted declarations that compliance with the final rule at this late date is impossible, the risk of irreparable harm to voters in those jurisdictions is grave,” she said.
She rejected the government’s justification that the new rules are needed to prevent fraud in mail-in voting, saying the case record “continues to lack any evidence” of fraud.
“In any event, the USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote,” she wrote.
The Justice Department is likely to attempt to appeal her ruling, though temporary restraining orders aren’t always deemed subject to appeals.
But at some point the matter is certain to rush back to the Supreme Court, which earlier this week erased a previous blockade from Judge Talwani, ruling that it wasn’t ripe.
That was because the previous injunction came before the postal service finalized its plans. Late last week those plans were made final, which Judge Talwani said puts the issue squarely before her.
Under the now-blocked rule, states that want to allow voting by mail would be required to submit lists of eligible voters to the postal service.
States would then have to use approved envelopes to send the ballots out and to get the ballots back — and they must be marked with unique bar codes so they can be tracked.
The postal service’s plan was issued in response to a directive from Mr. Trump, who issued an executive order in March calling for federal intervention to ensure only legitimate voters get ballots.
Another part of his plan called on Homeland Security to compile lists of those legitimate voters. DHS has yet to finalize its own regulation to carry that out.
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