The Washington Post reports:

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to immediately allow new restrictions on mail-in balloting, potentially setting up a major legal clash that could affect millions of voters for November’s midterm elections.

The fight could possibly upend election procedures just as states begin to send out mail-in ballots in pivotal contests that will determine control of the U.S. House and Senate.

Some communities in Wisconsin mailed ballots to voters this week, North Carolina is set to send them to voters Friday and other states will follow suit in coming days and weeks.

The administration says the new rules, set out by President Donald Trump in an executive order, are necessary to keep noncitizens from voting. Under the plans, states would have to get approval for the design of their ballot envelopes from the Postal Service and would have to provide the federal government with lists of voters who are eligible to receive mail ballots. In addition, Trump’s executive order directed the Department of Homeland Security to develop lists of citizens for each state to help prevent ballots from going to noncitizens.

But some states and voting groups have warned that eligible voters could be blocked from casting ballots and that a rollout this close to the election would be chaotic.

The issue of whether Trump’s order can move forward has been the subject of dizzying legal challenges in recent weeks. Thursday marked the second time it reached the high court.

The administration is taking the rare step of seeking to appeal a federal judge’s temporary restraining order, which generally cannot be appealed, and skipping over an appeals court.

The high court could decide to take up the case at this juncture, or decline to consider it until it works its way through the typical appeals process.

Either way, the move underscored how little time is left for the courts to act before the election and the urgency of the issue to the Trump administration.

The Trump administration said not clearing the way for the executive order risks irreparable harm to the federal government and voters and could disrupt elections as states grapple with rules that are unclear. Therefore, the administration said, the high court should treat the restraining order like an appealable order and take up the case.

“The Rule’s regulation of the U.S. Mail—not federal elections—is plainly constitutional,“ the administration wrote in its filing. ”While the States have primary authority to regulate the manner of elections, they cannot choose to use the federal mails to carry out their elections but then insist that their election-related mail is somehow exempt from the Postal Service’s rulemaking authority.”

The court has given challengers until Tuesday to respond to the administration’s emergency request.

Earlier this week, an anonymous federal whistleblower warned the system the U.S. Postal Service was developing to carry out the plan was rushed and not tested sufficiently.

“The Whistleblower … raises grave concerns that the administration has hidden the high likelihood that the new ballot mail verification processes will result in major disruptions in mail ballots ever getting delivered to voters,” the group Whistleblower Aid, which is representing the whistleblower, wrote in a summary of the allegations.

A Postal Service spokesperson disputed that characterization, saying, “Americans can have confidence that their election mail will be handled securely and delivered reliably.”

Trump’s executive order prohibits the Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots in states that do not turn over voter data through a new online portal. States may have to update those lists frequently as new voters register and existing ones change their addresses. The order also requires states use envelopes with barcodes to prevent fraud.

Steven Monteith, the chief customer and marketing officer for the Postal Service, offered few details in a court filing Thursdayon how the portal would work. He said he expected to make it available to states “sometime next week.”

Trump has long claimed noncitizen voting is a major problem and was a factor in his 2020 election loss, but studies have shown it is rare and few verified cases have been found in recent elections.

The topsy-turvy legal fight has ricocheted through multiple federal courts and involves a pair of lawsuits filed by blue states and a handful of voting rights groups.

Lower courts had blocked the executive order, ruling Trump did not have the authority to regulate state elections, because the Constitution assigns that power to the states and Congress.

The justices removed lower courts’ block on the plan in late August, ruling roughly two dozen states and the District of Columbia had challenged the executive order prematurely. The Postal Service had yet to finalize the rules for implementing the executive order.

Once the new rules were in place, the states and voting rights groups renewed a pair of lawsuits seeking to block the order. A federal judge in Massachusetts quickly agreed in a ruling.

The administration appealed U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani’s temporary restraining order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit.

Talwani held a hearing Thursday to determine whether to issue a preliminary injunction, a longer-term stay on the Trump executive order, when the Trump administration decided to take its case to the Supreme Court. She is still expected to issue a ruling on the preliminary injunction in the near future.

“This is highly unusual procedurally,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert, wrote on his blog. “Not only is the government not waiting on the First Circuit to rule on its stay request; it is not waiting for a (certainly appealable) preliminary injunction order that will likely come out by tomorrow.”

Election officials and voting rights groups said the mail voting changes would lead to chaos and prevent large groups of people from being able to vote because there is so little time to implement them before millions of ballots must be mailed. [Continue reading…]