Democrats sued Wednesday to block President Donald Trump’s latest executive order restricting mail voting, arguing that the U.S. Constitution empowers states and Congress, not the president, to determine who is eligible to vote by mail.
The lawsuit marks the second round of battles over the president’s power to control elections. Trump’s opponents handily won the first round last year, blocking his initial executive order intended to reshape election procedures by convincing multiple federal judges that it was likely unconstitutional.
Trump on Tuesday announced that his administration would compile lists of who is eligible to vote in states and that the U.S. Postal Service would only mail ballots to those who met that criteria. Critics note that there’s little time to comb through voter rolls before ballots start going out for this fall’s elections, in some places as soon as September, and question whether the administration’s list would be reliable.
The lawsuit was filed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic National Committee and other party organizations working on campaigns for the House, Senate and governor offices around the country. Trump is one of the defendants, along with top administration officials.
“We will see him in court and we will beat him again,” Schumer said in a statement.
Democrats said Trump was attempting to strike at the heart of America’s democratic machinery.
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“President Trump has tried again and again to rewrite election rules for his own perceived partisan advantage,” their lawsuit said. It adds that “our Constitution’s Framers anticipated this kind of desire for absolute power,” dispersing the power to control elections to individual states and Congress.
Mail voting has existed for more than a century and had steadily been increasing in popularity in both Democratic and Republican states until 2020. Then Trump decided to target the method, levying baseless claims of mass fraud. As a result, it’s become less popular among Republicans and more among Democrats, giving Trump additional incentive to throttle it before midterm elections that will determine whether his party continues to control Congress.
Trump himself often votes by mail, as recently as in a special election in Florida last month.
Since he returned to office, Trump has tried to interfere in state-run elections, citing often-disproven falsehoods about how fraud cost him the presidency in 2020. Repeated investigations, including ones by Republicans, showed no significant fraud in the 2020 vote.
Nonetheless, Trump has called for his administration to “take over” voting in Democratic areas, launched a probe of the 2020 vote fueled by election conspiracy theories and unsuccessfully pushed Congress to pass a law that would create new hurdles on voting, including a requirement that people provide in-person, documentary proof of citizenship when registering. That bill has stalled in the U.S. Senate over Democratic opposition.
