President Donald Trump and his administration have cited the need to prevent voter fraud as a justification for their desired mail ballot restrictions for the midterm elections.
But in a new ruling blocking those restrictions, a Trump-appointed judge became the latest jurist to highlight a lack of proven fraud or how the administration’s efforts would help to combat such fraud if it existed.
That observation came from U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who issued a preliminary injunction Sunday against a U.S. Postal Service rule whose fate is pending at the Supreme Court in a separate case.
Nichols noted that the rule would require all absentee and mail-in ballots for federal elections — including the rapidly approaching November midterms — to be transmitted only in envelopes satisfying new design requirements and only to voters who are verified by the Postal Service to have been enrolled in a newly created federal portal.
“As the Government concedes, the Postal Service could issue (and enforce) the Rule only if Congress gave it the authority to do so, but here no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule,” wrote Nichols, whom Trump appointed to the Washington bench in his first term.
When judges weigh whether to issue injunctions, one of the factors they consider is the public interest. When he did so for this case, Nichols said the plaintiffs showed that without an injunction, there’s an increased risk that a significant number of legitimate ballots wouldn’t be counted.
“The public has a strong interest in ensuring that doesn’t happen,” the judge wrote.
“On the other side of the ledger,” he wrote, “the Federal Government does not point to any record evidence that there will be significant fraud in the upcoming elections in the event the Court enters preliminary injunctive relief.”
The Trump appointee’s analysis on that score mirrors that of U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee whose preliminary injunction the administration is currently pressing the Supreme Court to lift ahead of the midterms. A decision from the justices could come at any time.
When Talwani issued her injunction earlier this month, the Massachusetts judge weighed the public interest factor by first noting that implementing the postal rule right before the midterms “threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail.”
On the other hand, she said, the litigation record “includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule.”
Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
The post Judges point to lack of voter fraud proof in blocking mail ballot restrictions appeared first on MS NOW.
