A federal judge has blocked new mail-in ballot rules from the U.S. Postal Service that were ordered by Donald Trump after states and election officials warned that it would be “virtually impossible” to comply with changes that could spark chaos for voters in the middle of midterm elections.
The new rules, ordered by the president through an executive order, would require election officials to add unique barcodes to ballot envelopes and order states to upload lists of people who requested them, giving the nation’s postal agency expansive authority to decide who gets to vote in an unprecedented shakeup of election administration.
Massachusetts District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction on Friday evening that blocks the changes while a legal battle plays out. The Trump administration has already asked the Supreme Court for permission to push the changes through as the president faces another major obstacle in his attempts to centralize control of the nation’s elections.
But the administration is running out of time. Many states are already mailing out their first waves of ballots, and election officials have repeatedly warned that the changes could accidentally disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters without any recourse to make their ballots count.
Implementing new election rules “would be an extraordinary amount of work for local officials at any time,” Talwani wrote Friday. “But imposing these mandates on election officials at present poses greater difficulties than otherwise because election officials are actively administering elections,” she said.
In addition to the work of registering voters, maintaining voter rolls and running the nation’s elections in 10,000 jurisdictions, officials must now “somehow find the time and resources to comply” with Trump’s orders “in the middle of election season,” Talwani added.
“Having considered this series of hurdles for officials against the backdrop of an impending election, and mindful of the fact that any minor malfunction will result in the denial of mail ballots, the court concludes that disenfranchisement … regardless of residence, is practically inevitable,” she wrote.
This is a developing story