Trump says US election is ‘worse than any third world country’
President Trump said Americans have been “blatantly lied to” for years about the security of election infrastructure, including voting machines.
BOSTON – A federal appeals court on July 25 blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from enforcing an executive order in 23 states aimed at tightening mail-in voting rules ahead of midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.
The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s request to lift an injunction against several Democratic-led states secured on June 25 by a lower court judge who said key parts of the Republican president’s order were unconstitutional.
The Justice Department had asked the court to suspend U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s ruling while it filed an appeal, arguing that any lawsuit challenging Trump’s order would be premature because the agency had not yet finalized measures and policies to implement Trump’s directives.
The Court of Appeals rejected that argument in a 2-1 decision.
“As the district court reasoned,[the executive order]establishes a clear and rapidly approaching set of deadlines by which states must coordinate with federal authorities and follow new voting procedures, while states must ensure that state officials and the public understand the evolving set of rules that will govern the upcoming September and November elections,” the justices wrote. “Plaintiff states have no practical choice but to comply with the (order) now.”
Before Mr. Talwani issued his ruling, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., rejected a related effort by Democrats to block Mr. Trump’s order on similar grounds. The Justice Department warned that if it does not get a favorable ruling from the First Circuit, it may be forced to ask the Supreme Court to intervene.
President Trump’s March Executive Order
President Trump signed the executive order in March after years of pushing for stronger rules around mail-in voting and pushing false claims that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud. Under the U.S. Constitution, states are assigned the role of administering federal elections.
The order comes in addition to President Trump’s other efforts to overhaul the election. He has made it a priority to get Congress to pass a dichotomous bill of voting restrictions called the SAVE America Act. The justices blocked previous executive orders he signed that required proof of citizenship for voter registration and limited the counting of mail-in ballots.
The March order directed the Department of Homeland Security to create and send to each state a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state, based on citizenship and naturalization records and other federal databases.
President Trump’s order also required the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on each state’s approved mail-in voting list. The USPS recently moved to implement President Trump’s directive by issuing new proposed rules that would require states to provide names and barcodes associated with mail-in ballots.
It also directed the U.S. Department of Justice to prioritize investigating and prosecuting state and local election officials who issue federal ballots to people deemed “ineligible” to vote.
But Talwani sided with a coalition of 23 states and the District of Columbia led by California, Massachusetts, Nevada and Washington, saying the president does not have the authority to direct DHS to create voter eligibility lists for each state to use, and the USPS does not have the authority to institute legally binding regulations on mail-in voting.
The judge, appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, also said that Trump cannot, through his orders, “intimidate local election officials into using the necessarily incomplete verified citizenship list as a source of information and avoiding criminal prosecution.”
Reporting by Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles and Nate Raymond in Boston. Editing: Deepa Babington, Sergio Nonn, Matthew Lewis
