Trump admin renews Supreme Court ask to let mail ballot rule to take effect ahead of midterms

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday again asked the Supreme Court to allow the US Postal Service plan for mail ballots to take effect immediately, a mostly procedural move that nonetheless underscores the president’s desire to restrict mail voting during the critical midterm elections.

The Supreme Court was already considering an emergency appeal filed by the USPS on Sept. 3 that urged the justices to allow the agency to implement the new ballot rule ahead of the November elections that will determine which party controls Congress. In that appeal, the USPS asked the Supreme Court to stay a temporary restraining order from US District Judge Indira Talwani that barred the agency from moving forward for two weeks.

On Friday, a day after the Justice Department filed that appeal, Talwani ruled again, handing down a preliminary injunction. That subsequent order blocked the USPS plan indefinitely. It is that second, indefinite block on the plan that the administration appealed to the Supreme Court on Sunday. Shortly after filing the second appeal on Sunday, the administration withdrew the first case.

In a letter to the court on Sunday, the Justice Department said it had filed the new appeal out of “an abundance of caution” and that it withdrew the first case “to simplify proceedings.”

For voters and states, the difference between the cases will make little or no difference.

The high court is being asked to rule with an extraordinarily quick timeline on an effort by the administration to give the USPS an unprecedented role in elections. North Carolina has already begun mailing out ballots. Alabama will begin doing so on Sept. 9. At least five additional states will begin mailing ballots on September 13, according to the Justice Department.

“Once those ballot envelopes enter the mailstream, there is no retrieving them,” the Justice Department told the Supreme Court in its filing on Sunday. “And while the injunction allows the Postal Service and the states to continue taking steps to ensure that their envelopes satisfy the rule’s requirements, each day the injunction is in place risks sowing confusion and chaos because the injunction makes those preparatory steps voluntary, rather than mandatory.”

The USPS rule would require state and local election officials to upload lists of their mail voters to a portal. It would also require election officials to use special barcodes on the envelopes to ease tracking of that mail. Many election officials have argued that it’s already too late to implement those requirements.

It’s unclear if the new filing from the Trump administration will change the timeline of the case. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency appeals rising from the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals, had required the states to respond to the first appeal on Tuesday. With that case now withdrawn, she may keep that deadline, or she may push it back shortly.

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