The U.S. Supreme Court did not allow Trump to restrict voting by mail ahead of the midterm elections
Kyiv • UNN
The court allowed states to retain the existing rules for voting by mail in the midterm elections. Trump's plan could have made it more difficult to send millions of ballots.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump's attempt to restrict mail-in voting in the midterm elections, putting an end to a series of recent court actions as voting had already begun. AP reports, UNN writes.
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The decision allows states to continue sending out mail-in ballots under the same procedures they have used for years. Mail-in voting in the United States typically accounts for nearly one-third of the votes cast.
The court's decision was a defeat for Trump on an issue he had called critically important to ensuring election integrity, although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in mail-in voting.
A majority of Supreme Court justices said that the Trump administration's attempts to impose restrictions this year would likely fail in court. At the same time, most Supreme Court members did not provide a detailed rationale for their decision, stating only that the Trump administration's position was unlikely to succeed.
Election officials said that, just weeks before the midterm elections, it would be simply impossible to completely overhaul the procedure. Some states, such as Alabama, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, began mailing out ballots as early as last week.
The Trump administration's plan would have required states to adopt a uniform envelope format and submit lists of eligible voters to an online portal. The U.S. Postal Service could have refused to deliver ballots to states that failed to comply with these requirements. This could have caused particularly serious obstacles in states that send election ballots exclusively by mail.
The White House and the Justice Department did not respond to AP's request for comment, but had previously characterized the proposed restrictions as common-sense changes aimed at ensuring election security.
A number of Democratic officials and voting-rights groups challenged Trump's proposed restrictions in court, arguing that the president of the United States lacks the constitutional authority to establish election rules that "would make voting by mail practically impossible on the eve of important elections."
The new requirements for the postal system were estimated to potentially result in millions of mail-in ballots never being sent, since, due to problems with the portal—which has not yet been launched—even a single barcode error could cause an entire batch of ballots to be rejected.
According to court documents, some states lack the infrastructure to quickly abandon the mail-in voting procedure.
Lower courts blocked Trump's plan, but his administration appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that federal control over the Postal Service allows it to establish rules for processing mail-in ballots and that compliance with those rules is feasible.
The federal government won a preliminary procedural ruling in the Supreme Court, but the justices deliberately did not rule on the legality of Trump's plan.
Trump has long opposed mail-in voting and baselessly claims that fraud carried out through this voting method was the reason for his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, when he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. At the same time, Trump himself often votes by mail.