Ballot Emergency?

The emergency appears to be that too many people might vote in a way the leader does not like.

On Monday, in an emergency filing to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration asked the justices to revive his executive order restricting mail voting. The filing calls the situation an emergency because the administration says it needs the rules in place by mid-August to use them in the November midterms, now 97 days away.

The March order directs Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to build lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state. It directs the Postal Service to send mail ballots only to people on those lists. Combined, those lists would form a national voter registration list, something that has never existed in American history.

Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia sued. In June a federal judge ruled the order legally void, writing “The Constitution reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone.” On Saturday a federal appeals court agreed, warning of “unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections.”

The states respond August 3. This is the administration’s thirty-fifth emergency appeal to this Supreme Court.

The emergency appears to be that too many people might vote in a way the leader does not like.