Election Interference
Trump issues an EO; now we wait on the legal challenges.
Trump’s crusade against vote-by-mail, despite having availed himself of the privilege recently, now takes the form of an Executive Order: Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections. It seems worthy of mention that the week after No Kings, we see the sitting president again trying to rule by decree.
The basics are this: the EO requires a number of federal agencies to compile a list of voters and confirm their citizenship status. The US Postal Service would then not deliver ballots from persons not on the list.
This is a Rube Goldberg machine of agencies and entities not designed to do any of this. There are serious legal questions (such as whether the President has the authority to order the USPS in such a manner). Moreover, there is the pesky fact that the US Constitution gives the Congress, not the President, powers over elections.
As per Article I, section 4, clause 1:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
The presidency is nowhere in sight of that clause.
There is also the matter of timing, something that rarely seems to emerge in media discussion of things like this or the SAVE Act. There simply is not enough time to implement a massive change in how we handle elections in the middle of an election year. Primaries are already underway in some states, and final ballots will be cast in just over six months.
Any attempt at rules or legal changes at this stage is untenable. And yes, I recognize the combination of disruption being part of the goal and the utter lack of understanding of how anything works (see, e.g., the Strait of Hormuz).
There is the added bonus to all of this, which leans towards the lack of understanding part, that rules of this nature will not just affect Democrats, even if Trump, in his limited understanding of, well, everything, seems to think this to be the case.
While there are firm grounds to assume that the courts will block this order, and block it soon, it is nonetheless disconcerting (to put it mildly) to have the president attempting to throw monkey wrenches into the machinery of our elections.
And, for anyone in the back who hasn’t heard me say some version of this: if people who have sincere (albeit misguided) concerns about non-citizens voting (spoiler: this is an infinitesimal problem), then they should be advocating a universal, free, and easy-to-obtain voter ID card/system. Sponsor that in Congress and be willing to pay for it, and I will happily take your concerns more seriously. But until such a time as people want to have that conversation, I can’t help but see all of this as a combination of ignorance mixed in with insincere concerns, racism/xenophobia, and a hope that any rule changes hurt opponents and help co-partisans.
For a good run-down of provisions, see Kevin R. Kosar: Several Thoughts on Trump’s Executive Order on the Postal Service and a National Voter Registry List.
“…that rules of this nature will not just affect Democrats”
That kinda depends on just what names go on those lists, right?
@Jay L. Gischer: Hasn’t the administration been demanding voter information from the states? Hm….
As someone pointed out, voter rolls are not static. People die, people turn 18, people move in, people move out, people get married and change their names. Every single damn day. Unless voting systems are real time, none of this is possible.
I wish more people would realize that Trump doesn’t think strategically. What he does is simply try to impose his will moment to moment, whether it works or not. It’s no more planning for the future than an army of cockroaches is planning to infest your apartment. The power and danger of it is that it’s done at such a high volume (like the way roaches multiply) that it can quickly overwhelm us even if any individual action (like any individual roach) isn’t particularly threatening.
He’s not playing a long game. He’s not doing this expecting it to fail just so he can use it as a stepping-stone to some later action. All he’s doing is thinking up ways to stop people from voting against him, and every one of those ways is something he hopes will succeed and believes has a significant chance of success. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.
@reid: Given that voters are geographically sorted, and that many states disqualify ballots that arrive after the deadline even if they are postmarked before, this doesn’t really even need voter information.
I’m trying to remember if Washington State ballots even has voter information on the outside of the outer envelope — it’s a turducken of paper with the ballot in a security envelope in another envelope.
@Scott: You’re making the mistake of assuming this is a remotely good faith effort.
@Scott:
In an article that I saw this AM, there was a quote that at the state level, the voter lists are updated on nearly a daily basis and any list sent to the Feds would be obsolete as soon as it was sent.