President Trump has a long record of threatening rather than protecting the integrity of American elections. At his worst, he sought to overturn the 2020 results. Now he is menacing the midterms, with an executive order that would throw voting by mail into chaos if it went into effect.
It is up to the Supreme Court to prevent that. Nearly one in three voters now vote by mail. Mr. Trump’s order has already sowed doubt about whether Americans can continue to trust the Postal Service to deliver their ballots and prompted bipartisan alarm from states and local election officials. The sooner the court puts Mr. Trump’s ill-advised directive to rest, the better.
Mr. Trump’s order is illegal. He does not have the authority to set the rules for election administration. The Constitution gives that role to the states, with Congress providing oversight. “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations,” Article I states.
As a bipartisan task force said in 2021 in response to a relatively minor executive order from President Joe Biden, “Presidents don’t have much of a role in how elections are run — and that’s a good thing.” Nevertheless, Mr. Trump ordered the Postal Service in March to decide which voters would receive mail-in ballots, a decision that states have always made for themselves.
His order is also a recipe for bureaucratic chaos. It would force states to send lists of eligible voters to the Postal Service, with each voter’s information attached to a unique bar code. Even minor discrepancies between the information on the list and the information on a ballot envelope could lead to somebody not being able to vote.
Tracking ballots via bar codes can have benefits when election officials have sufficient time and funds to set up a system. It allows voters to see how their ballots are moving through the mail. But Mr. Trump’s rushed order is pretending to solve a problem that does not exist. He claims it will prevent voter fraud, which is vanishingly rare in the United States.
Rather than making elections more secure, the order would inject turmoil. Many jurisdictions would need far more time than they have to comply with the new rules for a November vote. And while the Postal Service has had a stellar record of delivering ballots quickly, it has no experience or expertise in making decisions about the appropriateness of sending ballots to millions of people. It has already been struggling this year with timely ballot delivery.
A Postal Service employee this month filed a whistle-blower report warning that the new system could reject an entire batch of ballots, numbering in the thousands, if even one bar code did not scan properly. Anybody who has used a self-service counter at a supermarket understands how common bar code problems are. The whistle-blower raised “grave concerns” that the change could cause major disruptions.
The order could lead some voters who request mail-in ballots not to receive them, while also slowing the election process. “There is a low but nonzero chance that in a state with a nail-biter congressional election, someone will discover 50,000 ballots at the post office on the Wednesday after the election,” said Charles Stewart III, director of the M.I.T. Election Data and Science Lab. The risks are biggest in states where most voters now vote by mail, including California, Colorado and much of the rest of the West. The numbers are also significant in Maine, Michigan and Ohio, where Senate races are tight, as well as Pennsylvania and other states with close House races.
During the decade that Mr. Trump has been at the center of American politics and spread lies about supposed voter fraud, he has repeatedly failed in his efforts to corrupt voting. Voter turnout in the past two presidential elections was higher than in any other in at least 40 years, and his illegal attempts to overturn the 2020 result failed. This executive order, however, has the potential to alter the midterm elections unlike anything else he has done.
Whether the president’s order will help his party win in November is not clear. Rural districts, which tilt Republican, are more likely to lack the equipment needed to comply with the Postal Service’s rule. But urban districts, which lean Democratic, could also struggle, given their size, and there is reason to think the Trump administration may target them unfairly, given its record. It is uniquely unsuited to be trusted with fairly overseeing elections. In any case, the partisan implications of Mr. Trump’s order should not matter. It is wrong because it could prevent many Americans of any political affiliation who are eligible to vote from doing so.
It already has caused some Americans to begin wondering whether they should shift from mail voting — which has been convenient and reliable — to in-person voting. Some may end up not casting any ballot as a result. Others who would prefer to vote by mail may go to the polls on Election Day, contributing to long lines, which can also reduce turnout. The president’s executive order is a direct threat to this year’s elections.
Lower courts have twice blocked the order in response to lawsuits by voting rights groups and more than 20 states. Last month, the Supreme Court lifted that ruling on procedural grounds, saying that the litigation was premature because the Postal Service had not issued a rule to carry out the order. The service finalized the rule late last month and the case is now awaiting the justices’ decision.
They should act quickly — within days. This Supreme Court has stood up to Mr. Trump’s election interference before, refusing to hear his allies’ appeals to overturn the 2020 election. But the six Republican-appointed justices have in other cases been naïve about his pattern of illegal, anti-democratic behavior. They have too often imagined that they were dealing with a president who would follow their rulings in good faith. This case presents a classic example. By refusing to rule so far, the Supreme Court has allowed confusion about the midterms to spread.
Nothing is more important to democracy than free and fair elections. The country has built a system that in which Americans can have confidence. Mr. Trump is trying to wreck it. The Supreme Court should protect it.
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