Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield and top Democrats in 22 other states asked a federal judge Thursday to permanently block President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting.
The coalition of attorneys general plus one governor filed a motion for summary judgment in their three-week-old challenge to Trump’s order that attempts to limit voting eligibility and bar delivery of mail ballots to voters other than those pre-authorized by the federal government. Those efforts have so far hit several political and legal roadblocks.
The latest court filing says the president has no power under the Constitution or federal law to interfere in elections or stop delivery of mail. Under the Constitution, elections are controlled by states, while the U.S. Postal Service is governed by Congress, it says.
“The U.S. Postal Service delivers the mail,” Rayfield said in a statement. “President Trump wants to turn letter carriers into election gatekeepers – and that’s not a role the Postal Service was built for, not a power the federal government has, and not something Oregon will accept. This is really about a years-long campaign to manufacture doubt about elections that Trump didn’t like.”
The Trump administration has not yet filed any substantive responses to the states’ key assertions that the executive order is invalid under the Constitution and federal law.
Massachusetts-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani has given the administration’s lawyers until May 7 to respond.
Meanwhile, a coalition of 12 Republican-led states has sought to join the case on the side of the Trump administration, saying their states have a concrete interest in receiving the resources promised under Trump’s executive order. They say it would be a big help and cost-saver if the Department of Homeland Security were to compile and send to states a list of all voting-age residents confirmed to be U.S. citizens.
“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump, and the American people sent him back to the White House because they overwhelmingly supported his commonsense election integrity agenda,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement earlier this month.
Trump has long fixated on mail-in voting to bolster his baseless claims of widespread election fraud, even though he personally voted by mail in a Florida election this spring. As he signed the executive order, he reiterated his false claims that “cheating among mail-in voting is legendary.”
Voter fraud is in fact exceedingly rare, both in Oregon and nationwide.
Oregon became the first state in the nation to vote exclusively by mail following a 1998 ballot measure that passed with broad support. That policy has led to the state having among the highest rates of eligible voting-age residents who cast ballots.
California took the lead in filing the lawsuit against Trump and a host of officials in his administration. California’s deputy attorney general, Michael Cohen, certified Thursday that lawyers for the complaining states met with lawyers for the Trump administration on April 10 as well as Tuesday but said the two sides couldn’t narrow their differences.
The case is scheduled for oral arguments on June 2, court records show.
In addition to Oregon, the Democrat-led states in the coalition include Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.
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