A federal judge on Thursday froze major parts of an executive order by President Donald Trump aimed at cracking down on mail voting, blocking the administration from taking further steps to implement it as it would affect two-dozen states that challenged the directives in court.
Background
US District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee who sits in Boston, is the latest judge to push back on Trump’s broader efforts to insert the federal government into election administration, a task largely designated by the Constitution to the states. The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections, she wrote.
The ruling partially halts a Trump directive that would have imposed new requirements on states’ mail voting programs in order for the US Postal Service to deliver the ballots. The order also blocks for those states Trump’s order that the Department of Homeland Security create lists of each state’s voting-age citizens ahead of the election.
Implications
Critics say the plan is practically infeasible, while running afoul of both the Postal Service’s statutory obligations and the Constitution’s separation of powers. The Trump administration was ramping up efforts to use federal immigration data to hunt for non-citizens, but the DHS citizenship data program is known to turn up false positives, prompting fears that eligible voters will be wrongly purged from the voter rolls.
Original reporting: KRDO (Colorado Springs metro) — read the source article.
