States are in charge of elections.
States are in charge of elections.
Anything Trump tries to do to control elections is flat out unconstitutional.
And sure, sometimes he still does stuff anyway, but just look at last week, the Kennedy Center is the Kennedy Center again (on social media anyway, the actual building it taking a little longer). That was a lawsuit and he did listen.
Plus this is about another agency. So they’re most likely going to follow the order.
This is, of course, the news that Trump is ordering USPS not to deliver mail in ballots to states that don’t give DHS full access to their voter rolls.
First, it’s a proposal. This is not something that has gone into effect, and we know this because Trump appointee, Judge Carl Nichols refused to issue a temporary injunction, late last month, in one of the multiple lawsuits that has already been filed.
He explicitly said he wasn’t issuing the injunction because it “requires nothing from Plaintiffs — no compliance, no changed behavior, nothing at all — because it is not aimed at them but instead tells only the agencies to do something.”
Meaning, it’s not in effect yet. The order is telling USPS to not mail out mail-in ballots, no one has to change the way they vote, yet.
So anyone who says that this is happening already is trying to scare you.
It is very unlikely it will successfully go into effect at all.
That said there are ways to help make sure it doesn’t. Talk about people who live abroad and active service members. They can only vote absentee. Talk about the burden on various people to vote in person.
And vote by mail as often as you can. It’s a lot harder to implement this if the lawsuit can point to an outsized number of people being affected.
But, even though it’s unconstitutional, and any Judge worth their salt would agree with that, it’s possible it will have to go into affect before a judge will agree to a temporary injunction.
So the first step is to build your infrastructure. South Carolina was able to stop the Republican gerrymandering, for this year, because there are organizations focused on gerrymandering that started building support in 2019. The infrastructure was there to get out the vote on the first day of early voting.
Every state needs this. Find your local voting rights group and help grow the organization. They are the ones who will give us our marching orders and tell us how to keep our voting rights.
Finally, have a plan. Hopefully you won’t have to use it, but start looking at when in person early voting starts in your state. Find out where those polling centers are and how you will get there. Look into what days they are open and figure out which days work for your schedule.
This is not a moment to panic, but it is a moment to be prepared.
There is a very low likelihood that anything like this can happen, but it’s not zero, so we should start getting everything in order now. Especially since Republicans are counting on our fear and confusion to keep us home and disenfranchise us.
Breathe. This is ridiculous and terrible. They can try to stop us from voting but they won’t succeed.
