\n<\/p>\n
A federal appeals court on Saturday declined to allow Donald Trump\u2019s administration to implement in 23 states his executive order that aims to tighten rules for mail-in voting before the November elections that \u2060will decide control of Congress.<\/p>\n
The Boston-based \u2060first US circuit court \u200bof appeals rejected the administration\u2019s request to lift an injunction several Democratic-led states secured on 25 June from a lower-court judge who concluded that key parts of the Republican president\u2019s order were unconstitutional. In asking the court to \u2060pause the US district judge Indira Talwani\u2019s ruling while it pursues an appeal, the Department of Justice argued that because government agencies had yet to finalize actions and policies to implement Trump\u2019s directive, any lawsuit challenging his order was premature.<\/p>\n
The appeals court, \u2060in a 2-1 ruling, rejected that argument.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs the district court reasoned, the [executive order] lays out a clear set of rapidly approaching deadlines by which states must \u200bcoordinate with federal officials and comply with new voting procedures \u2013 all while \u200cthe states must also ensure that their officials \u200cand the public understand the evolving set of rules that would govern the upcoming September and November elections,\u201d the judges wrote. \u201cThe Plaintiff States have no practical choice \u200cbut to respond to the [order] now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before Talwani ruled, a federal judge in Washington DC rejected a related effort by Democrats to block Trump\u2019s order on similar grounds. The justice department warned that absent a ruling in its favor from the first circuit, it may be forced to ask the supreme court to intervene.<\/p>\n
Trump signed the executive order in March after years of calling for tighter rules on voting by mail and pushing the false claim that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud. Under the US constitution, states are assigned the role \u200cof administering federal elections.<\/p>\n
That order came on top of other efforts by Trump to overhaul elections. He has made winning approval in Congress of a divisive package of voting restrictions called the Save America Act a priority. Judges blocked an earlier \u200bexecutive order he signed requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and restricting the counting of mail-in ballots.<\/p>\n
The March order directed the Department of Homeland Security to compile and transmit to the states a list of confirmed US citizens eligible to vote in each state, derived from citizenship and naturalization records and other federal databases. Trump\u2019s order also required the US Postal Service to only deliver ballots to voters on each state\u2019s approved mail-in ballot list. USPS recently moved to implement Trump\u2019s directive by \u2060issuing new proposed rules requiring states to provide the names and barcodes tied to their mail-in ballots.<\/p>\n
It also directed \u200bthe DoJ to prioritize the investigation \u200band prosecution of state and local election officials who \u200bissue federal ballots to people deemed \u201cnot eligible\u201d to vote.<\/p>\n
But Talwani, in siding with a coalition of 23 states and \u200bthe District of Columbia that was led \u200cby California, Massachusetts, Nevada and \u200bWashington state, said the president lacked \u200bany authority to direct DHS to compile voter eligibility lists for each state to use and that USPS had no statutory authorization to adopt any binding regulations on mail-in voting.<\/p>\n
The judge, who was appointed by Barack Obama, said Trump also could not attempt through his order \u201cto intimidate local election officials to use the necessarily incomplete confirmed citizenship lists as a resource, lest they face criminal prosecution\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A federal appeals court on Saturday declined to allow Donald Trump\u2019s administration to implement in 23 states his executive order that aims to tighten rules for mail-in voting before the November elections that \u2060will decide control of Congress. The Boston-based \u2060first US circuit court \u200bof appeals rejected the administration\u2019s request to lift an injunction several<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51412,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[845,1532,160,11903,25064,7559,702,1561,81,3578],"class_list":{"0":"post-51411","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-appeals","9":"tag-bid","10":"tag-court","11":"tag-curb","12":"tag-mailin","13":"tag-rejects","14":"tag-rights","15":"tag-states","16":"tag-trump","17":"tag-voting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}