Postal voting by Court ruling?
26th May 2020 · 0 Comments
Donald Trump enjoys the comfort of voting by mail. Shouldn’t everyone?
A federal judge in Texas thinks so, and a court battle has commenced as to whether – as long as the coronavirus epidemic persists – every American should have the same right to postal vote as the president.
Secretaries of State stand ready! You may need to print and distribute millions of ballots by autumn — in part because the judiciary, and even some senior Republican elected officials like the Governor of Arkansas – worry that COVID-19 could keep the elderly from going to the polls on November 3.
At a May 20 White House meeting, GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson heard the president voice his opposition to mail-in voting. Trump, responding to a question about mail-in voting in Michigan, said voting by mail is “dangerous” because of its potential for “tremendous fraud and tremendous illegality.”
Trump then asked Hutchinson to weigh in on the matter.
“In terms of the election in November, there’s a lot of discussion about how we can make the vote accessible, if there is continued worries from a health standpoint,” the Arkansas Republican governor said. “And we want to be able to use no-excuse absentee voting as a way to do it, but it’s still a person-to-person identification of the individual versus the mail-in variety that, as you said, can be manipulated. So we’re looking at that but we believe in the identification of the voter.”
Hutchinson’s comments – that requests for postal ballots and confirmation of ID are not mutually exclusive – have been a rising argument in the GOP, to Trump’s dismay. The Arkansas Governor, normally a close ally of the president (who went so far as to never issue a stay-at-home order in his state), has declared that if the pandemic continued to rage this fall, he was open to employing his emergency powers to order postal voting in his state.
He may not need to. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, in a preliminary injunction last Tuesday with national implications, ordered expanded mail-in voting for Texas voters “who seek to vote by mail to avoid transmission of the virus” under the age of 65 who would ordinarily not qualify for mail-in ballots. Normally, only those over 65 would qualify in the Lone Star State. Biery cited the irreparable harm voters would face if existing age eligibility rules for voting by mail were in place for elections held while the new coronavirus remains in wide circulation.
At the behest of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals last Wednesday did issue an administrative stay, stopping Biery’s ruling from taking effect, while the court considers whether it will issue an injunction nullifying it during the entire appeals process. The Texas AG spun the stay as a win, yet his success could prove temporary. Both the Texas Supreme Court and more importantly for Louisiana, the U.S. Fifth Circuit, both seem to hold sympathy for Biery’s argument that the virus could keep voters from the polls – in violation of federal voter protection acts and the U.S. Constitution.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin had formulated a plan last month to allow those concerned about infection to request a ballot for the summer elections, and potentially the autumn as well. The GOP legislature blocked those efforts amidst a national Republican outcry that voter fraud and “ballot harvesting” could come as a result of postal elections. Since that time, though, just a few short weeks ago, the promise of electronic identity verification (through motor vehicle offices) has ameliorated some Republican fraud worries.
More importantly, many Trumpian conservatives like Hutchinson have privately begun to muse that COVID-19 could keep elderly Republican voters from the polls. As Caucasians over 65 constitute a large portion of the GOP base, this proves no idle concern.
The U.S. 5th Circuit could rule on Judge Biery’s preliminary injunction in the next few days, and should the entire panel of appellate judges affirm it, expect a battle that will fast track all the way to the United States Supreme Court by early autumn. Chief Justice John Roberts could yet again provide the swing vote – if he concludes that the danger of the appearance of voter suppression outweighs state rights.
It would not be the first time that the Chief Justice broke with the party-line, calculating as he did with affirming Obamacare, that the long-term political advantage for the GOP matches doing the right thing – regardless of what the impassioned on the Right might declare.
Secretaries of State had better call the print shops to make sure the postal ballots can be ready by November! Donald Trump may be just one of countless septuagenarians able to request a mail-in ballot, as he did as recently as two months ago for Florida’s presidential primary. Yet Trump has one other proverbial “ace up his sleeve.” If the president blocks a $10-billion rescue of the Postal Service, the USPS might not remain in service by the November 3 election – which would make postal voting, and frankly running the economy, all the more difficult.
This article originally published in the May 25, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
