Millions of us vote by mail. Seniors. Veterans. People who work two jobs. People who can't stand in line for hours on a Tuesday. This year, President Trump tried to put the federal government between those voters and their ballots.

On June 25, a federal judge said no. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked major portions of Trump's executive order restricting voting by mail, ruling that he had exceeded his constitutional authority. Her words were plain:

"The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections."

What the order actually did

Trump signed the executive order on March 31. Here's what it demanded, according to States Newsroom's reporting:

• States would have to report to the Postal Service, at least 90 days before a federal election, whether they planned to allow ballots through the mail.
• States would have to hand over lists of voters who planned to vote by mail, at least 60 days before the election.
• Homeland Security would build citizenship lists of voting-age people in every state, pulling from Social Security records, naturalization records, and a federal database called SAVE.

And the price for refusing? The Postal Service simply wouldn't deliver your state's ballots.

That's not a guess. The day before the ruling, Postmaster General David Steiner said it out loud at a Senate hearing. Senator Gary Peters asked him directly: if a state refuses to turn over its absentee voter list, will the Postal Service still mail its ballots? Steiner's answer: "Under our proposed regulation, no."

Who gets hurt

Eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington — plus Washington, D.C., run their elections almost entirely by mail. Every voter there gets a ballot in their mailbox. Under Trump's order, those states would have to turn over information on every single voter just to keep their elections running.

And if Democratic-led states refused to comply, the reporting notes, mail voting would effectively survive only in Republican-led states — in a midterm election that decides control of Congress.

The justification for all this? Trump says it's about noncitizen voting — something that, as the article notes, rarely occurs.

What the judge ruled

Judge Talwani's decision, in a lawsuit brought by Democratic state attorneys general, took the order apart piece by piece:

• The Postal Service has no authorization from Congress to write binding rules about mail-in voting.
• The Constitution "reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone."
• Trump "lacks any authority to compile voter lists for each State" — the order pointed to no constitutional or legal authority at all for the citizenship lists.

Under the decision, federal officials had one week to notify their employees that sweeping portions of the order are void. The White House says it remains confident the order will be in place by November, so expect an appeal.

This isn't happening in a vacuum

The court loss is one of several defeats in the same push to take federal control of state-run elections:

• A federal appeals court ruled the same week that the Justice Department isn't entitled to states' voter rolls.
• Another judge blocked the use of the SAVE database to hunt for noncitizen voters.
• Senators keep refusing to pass the SAVE America Act, Trump's bill requiring voters to show citizenship documents like a birth certificate or passport — he even canceled the signing of a bipartisan housing bill to try to force it through.
• Every Senate Democrat, plus two independents, signed a letter urging Steiner to withdraw the Postal Service rule, warning that election officials can't possibly build a brand-new national ballot database just months before a general election.

Why this matters to all of us

Strip away the legal language and here's what happened: the President of the United States ordered the mail carrier to stop delivering ballots unless states handed the federal government lists of who votes and how. A judge had to remind him that the Constitution gives him no power over our elections.

Voting by mail isn't a partisan trick. It's how millions of Americans — in red states and blue states — have voted for years. Any politician who supports this order, defends it, or stays silent about it is telling you exactly how much your vote means to them.

We'll be watching the appeal — and watching which Republicans in Congress keep carrying water for it.

Source

Read the full reports at NC Newsline (States Newsroom): Trump order limiting voting by mail halted by federal court and States that won't obey Trump order will have their mail ballots halted, postmaster says, both by Jonathan Shorman. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, via NC Newsline.