The Trump administration is renewing its plea to the Supreme Court to revive President Donald Trump’s plan to revamp mail-in voting in advance of the looming midterms.
The Justice Department on Sunday asked the high court to lift a preliminary injunction a federal district court judge in Boston issued last week that prevented the U.S. Postal Service from implementing a new system for mail-in ballots in advance of the Nov. 3 vote.
The new filing represents the third time Solicitor General D. John Sauer has asked the Supreme Court to set aside lower court rulings blocking Trump’s plan to have the post office compare mail-in ballots against a central database and leave undelivered those that don’t match.
In August, the Supreme Court lifted a lower-court order that had halted Trump’s plan. In a 6-3 ruling, the justices said that order was premature because the administration had not announced final details of how the new system would work. However, the high court’s majority said at the time it had not made any final determination on the legality of the effort.
The judge who has overseen the most active litigation over the mail-in ballot plan, Obama appointee Indira Talwani, has since issued two orders blocking the Postal Service’s final rule.
On Aug. 27, she issued a temporary restraining order stopping implementation of the plan for 14 days. And on Friday, Talwani withdrew that order, replacing it with a longer-term injunction.
The Trump administration, in a departure from the usual protocol, took Talwani’s temporary restraining order to the Supreme Court last week and asked that order be immediately lifted. That request, which has now been withdrawn, had not been ruled on before the latest one came in on Sunday.
Talwani is overseeing a pair of challenges to the Trump mail-in voting plan. One was filed by more than 20 Democratic-led states. The other was brought by civil and voting rights groups. They contend that the plan intrudes on states’ constitutional responsibility to run elections and could disenfranchise voters because the systems the administration is rolling out have been hastily designed and deployed.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency matters arising from the Boston-based 1st Circuit, gave opponents of Trump’s plan until Wednesday at 4 p.m. to respond to the administration’s latest emergency appeal.
How the new plan could be fully implemented for the looming election is becoming murkier by the day, since North Carolina officials began mailing out ballots on Friday and Alabama officials are set to begin doing so on Wednesday.
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