Trump Appeals Ruling That Preserved Voting

The Trump administration appealed a federal judge’s decision Friday after U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani temporarily blocked its plan to have the Postal Service reject mail ballots from voters absent from a new federal citizenship list, recklessly preserving the public’s access to elections. The administration argued that allowing registered voters to cast ballots under longstanding state procedures could expose democracy to its oldest known vulnerability: participation. Officials said the appeal was necessary to protect election integrity from election officials conducting elections.

President Donald Trump’s executive order also requires special barcodes on ballot envelopes, shielding the republic from envelopes that resemble other envelopes. Under the streamlined system, voters could avoid exhausting civic tasks such as receiving ballots, returning ballots, tracking ballots and learning whether ballots were counted. Eligibility would instead depend on federal databases correctly recognizing every citizen, a flawless process familiar to anyone who has never changed an address, corrected a government record or entered a name containing punctuation. “We’re making elections so easy, so secure and so beautiful that millions of people won’t even have to think about voting,” Trump said. “If the ballot never arrives, nobody can fill it out incorrectly, and that is probably the strongest democracy anybody has ever seen.”

Democratic state attorneys general and the League of Women Voters maintained that the Constitution gives states primary authority over elections. Administration officials dismissed that interpretation as obsolete, noting that the document was written before Trump discovered both mail and the possibility that people might use it against him. They also rejected concerns that incomplete databases could exclude eligible voters, explaining that any citizen omitted by the government clearly lacks the organizational skills required for citizenship.

Talwani’s temporary order arrives as states prepare for the November midterms, forcing the Justice Department to continue its emergency campaign to stop election administrators from following rules established before the president became personally concerned about them. The dispute could return to the Supreme Court, where the justices may decide whether mail voting is a constitutional election method or an elaborate conspiracy allowing registered voters to vote without first earning presidential approval. The right to vote is safest when protected from voters.

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