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Faced with court rulings against his attempts to rig our elections, President Donald Trump is increasingly desperate to change election laws in his favor.
Last month, he held up an important and rare bipartisan bill aimed at increasing housing availability and reducing housing costs in the U.S. in an attempt to pressure members of Congress to pass the deeply flawed SAVE America Act. The act would deprive millions of Americans, especially women and rural residents, of the right to vote. Trump and many Republicans say this is necessary to fight election fraud, which even the conservative Heritage Foundation has found to be extremely rare. The act cannot be allowed to become law.
The Trump administration has already resorted to backdoor efforts to restrict voting. The most recent is a notice from the U.S. Postal Service that it was moving ahead with rules to restrict the delivery of ballots by mail. Such a rule could impact both the delivery of absentee ballots to Maine voters and their return of complete ballots to the town offices.
The proposed rule would essentially enact a March executive order from the president to create a federal list of eligible voters. The postal service says it would rely on a yet-to-be created system to ensure that ballots only went to people on that federal list. This is way beyond the purview of the postal service and many rural communities likely don’t have the resources to use such a system.
The administration doesn’t seem deterred by court orders against the creation of such a list and the restrictions on voting by mail. Courts continually remind the White House that the U.S. Constitution gives states, and to a lesser extent Congress, the power to conduct and regulate elections. This principle was recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the conservative majority of which is generally friendly to Trump. The court ruled that a Mississippi law that allowed absentee ballots to be returned after election day was constitutional, because states have the power to regulate their own elections.
In addition, a federal court recently ruled that the March presidential executive order that sought to create a federal list of eligible voters and to restrict delivery of ballots by mail was unconstitutional. That’s because the U.S. Constitution gives states and Congress — not the president and his appointees — the power to set election standards and rules.
A federal court last week issued an injunction to stop the new postal service rule from being implemented.
Beyond the election implications, the rule is very troubling because it marks the first time the postal service is proposing to violate its universal service mandate. Under federal law, “The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.” The ballot delivery rule would move the service away from that directive to serve all patrons in all communities.
While Republicans, including Sen. Susan Collins, favor the SAVE America Act, which would enact restrictions similar to those Maine voters rejected last year, independent Sen. Angus King has co-sponsored legislation to protect voting rights. The Right to Vote Act would require that any efforts to restrict voting rights clear a high bar to prove they were necessary. It would also enshrine the right to vote in federal law and allow Americans to challenge voting restrictions in court.
Such a law should not be necessary, of course. But, with an administration determined to restrict who can vote, the protection of voting rights is essential.
