Trump files emergency Supreme Court appeal over mail-in ballot rules

Last month, President Donald Trump suffered a legal setback after a lower court temporarily nullified his executive orders requiring proof of citizenship to vote and restricting mail-in voting. In an effort to overturn the court order, the Trump administration, on Monday, filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court, urging it to allow his administration to tighten rules on mail-in ballots before November's midterm elections.

Since the start of his second presidency, Trump has been critical of mail-in ballots and, in recent weeks, has amped up his claims of massive "election fraud" in 2020 and this year's primaries. In March, the President signed an executive order directing the creation of federal lists of voters and asked the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to deliver mail-in ballots only to certain people on those lists.

In June, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani explicitly rejected the administration's argument that the order was an enforcement of existing federal law. "While the Constitution vests the President with 'executive Power' and commands him to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, it does not grant the President any specific powers over elections," she wrote, ruling in favor of 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, which challenged the order as unlawful.

Under the President's March 31 directive, titled Ensuring Citizen Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was tasked with compiling a federal database of verified U.S. citizens. Concurrently, USPS was directed to build an approved list of voters and physically refuse to deliver mail-in ballots to any individual who did not appear on those lists or comply with newly proposed barcode-tracking mandates.

However, Judge Talwani paused its implementation, writing, "There is no evidence in this record of widespread 'illegal voting, discrimination, fraud and other forms of malfeasance and error' within American elections, which the executive order purports to safeguard against." As the court order states, the 23 states challenging the rules don't have to comply with the executive order as the litigation continues.

However, the Department of Justice, in its appeal to the Supreme Court, said that the order is "especially indefensible because the agencies are still deliberating over how (if at all) to implement the Order."

Throughout his second term, Trump has been particularly critical of mail-in ballots, calling them "inherently corrupt" in a recent primetime address—even though he himself has voted by mail in several elections, including in 2018, 2020 and, most recently, in a Florida special election this March.