Democrats sue to block Trump’s executive order targeting mail ballots

Democrats sued Wednesday to block President Donald Trump’s latest executive order restricting mail voting, arguing that the US 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 US 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. 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 the 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 fuelled 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 US Senate over Democratic opposition.