Supreme Court joins Trump against mail-in voting

NPR - The fight over mail-in voting is not over, NPR's Hansi Lo Wang says. The Supreme Court has not ruled on whether Trump's order is legal. The Justices only ruled that a Boston judge acted prematurely in June by concluding that Trump's directives exceeded presidential authority under the Constitution. Trump has said he issued his order to prevent illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens, despite numerous studies indicating that such incidents are incredibly rare. Colorado's Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold tells Lo Wang that there's real concern this order could create chaos for the midterms.

The Guardian - The US Supreme Court has sided with Donald Trump in his effort to crack down on mail-in voting, though it is unclear whether or not his administration will be able to take action before the midterm elections in November. The court’s justices voted 6-3 along ideological lines to lift an injunction that a judge in Massachusetts had placed in June on an executive order issued by the president. But a second injunction remains in place, and the ruling leaves room for legal challenges.

Trump has repeatedly likened voting by mail to cheating, despite his own use of it and overwhelming evidence that the system is secure. In March he ordered the government to create a “state citizenship list” of eligible voters, requiring that mail-in ballots only be delivered to people on that list. He also directed the justice department to prioritise investigations and prosecutions of state and local election officials who issue ballots to people deemed ineligible to vote in federal elections.

In a blistering dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections”.

The president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Derrick Johnson, said: “Let this ruling be a reminder that democracy is never, ever guaranteed. We have to fight for it, we have to fight to keep it and we have to protect the rights we do have within it … they are trying to do everything they possibly can to make it difficult for you to vote.”

New Republic - Step back and remember this is all about "voter fraud," right? You should be aware of a recent Heritage Foundation study. The group examined every federal election from 1982 to 2024. That’s 11 presidential elections and 11 midterm elections, in which collectively well over a billion votes were surely cast, maybe closer to two billion (for example, about 90 million votes were cast in 1984; 155 million in 2024; midterm turnout rates have lately been increasing). They found—and remember, this is the Heritage Foundation—a grand total of 1,619 voting fraud convictions.