Trump Asks Supreme Court To Protect Elections From Eligible Voters

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to protect American democracy from the growing menace of registered voters receiving ballots they are legally entitled to cast. The emergency application seeks approval for President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to assemble federal citizenship lists and requiring the U.S. Postal Service to mail ballots only to voters appearing on government-approved rosters. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia are challenging the restrictions before the November 3 midterms, clinging to the obsolete theory that states administer elections rather than whichever federal department has the largest spreadsheet.

A federal judge and the First Circuit have frozen key provisions in the plaintiff states, citing the Constitution’s increasingly inconvenient failure to authorize presidents to redesign elections by memo. A coalition led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta warned that imposing new citizenship checks, database comparisons and mailing rules could disenfranchise lawful voters and overwhelm local officials. The administration countered that no eligible citizen is being denied anything, because anyone missing from an incomplete federal list may still pursue the traditional American voting process of calling four agencies, submitting six documents and remaining on hold until polls close. “Nobody understands mail ballots better than I do, and every envelope is basically suspicious until Washington checks its papers, interviews its neighbors and confirms it has never voted for a Democrat,” Trump said, explaining the Constitution’s little-known envelope doctrine.

The order would relieve election officials of the dangerous burden of sending ballots to registered voters and replace it with the calming precision of federal databases that routinely disagree about names, addresses and citizenship status. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson received the emergency application before referring it through the Court’s standard procedures, leaving the justices to determine whether voting by mail is an established election method or an unsupervised paper insurgency demanding presidential containment. Under the administration’s theory, election security rises with every additional form, delay and clerical error placed between a citizen and the ballot box. The safest ballot is therefore the one the voter never receives.

* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.