The Supreme Court’s Mail-In Ballot Ruling Is a Step Toward Chaos in the Midterms

The US Supreme Court ruled on Monday that President Donald Trump’s executive order imposing severe restrictions on voting by mail ahead of November’s midterms can proceed. While a nationwide injunction preventing the US Postal Service from implementing the order remains in place, election officials and experts believe Monday’s ruling could still result in chaos and voters being disenfranchised.

The Supreme Court ruling, which split along ideological lines, paused an injunction by a federal judge in Boston that prevented the Trump administration from applying provisions of the executive order to 23 states, along with the District of Columbia.

The court didn’t rule on the legality of the order, which seeks to impose federal oversight on elections that are, under the Constitution, controlled by states. The conservative majority ruled, rather, that the states that brought the lawsuit did not have standing because they could not show actual damage caused by the order.

“The court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful,” the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion. “On that score, time will tell.”

The executive order is predicated on the baseless allegations pushed by Trump and his allies that widespread mail-in voter fraud has altered the outcomes of recent elections. (To put the claims in perspective, a database of supposed voter fraud incidents, maintained by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and dating back to 1980, contains fewer than 100 proven examples of noncitizen voting of any sort.) Experts and election officials have long warned that if implemented in full, the executive order would disenfranchise millions of voters . In a blistering dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed, writing that the ruling could create a “Kafkaesque nightmare [that] needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

Despite the possibly temporary nature of this victory , election denial groups cheered the result as a major victory for so-called election integrity efforts. And experts worry that even if Trump’s executive order is eventually blocked, the decision will still have a direct impact on voter turnout in November by sowing doubts about the legitimacy of mail-in voting.

“Voting rights organizations have experienced first-hand the significant confusion that President Trump’s executive order is causing right now,” the counsel and plaintiffs in a second lawsuit against Trump’s executive order wrote in a statement on Monday . “With the November election right around the corner, nonpartisan voting rights groups should be fully engaged in the vital work of educating all eligible voters to prepare to cast their ballots. Instead, plaintiffs and similar organizations are scrambling to understand how the rules may change while fielding inquiries from voters who rely on mail ballots and who are confused and fearful about how they will exercise their right to vote.”