RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Jim Slowikowski oversees the unloading of pallets filled with mail-in ballots at a U.S. Postal Service processing and distribution center in 2020 in Portland, Ore. Nathan Howard/Getty Images hide caption
A federal judge in Boston has expanded a court-ordered block on a key part of President Trump's executive order to limit voting by mail in this fall's midterm election.
The order released by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani on Tuesday comes as the wait continues for the Supreme Court to weigh in on an earlier ruling by Talwani.
The judge's latest ruling bans the U.S. Postal Service from trying to finish carrying out Trump's directives in every state. In June, the judge put out a ruling that blocks USPS efforts in only the 23 mainly Democratic-led states, plus Washington, D.C., that sued over the order.
Elections A federal law bans late voter roll purges. Republicans are pushing to reinterpret it Talwani found that the voting rights groups that made the request to effectively expand her June ruling are likely to prove in their lawsuit that Trump's order oversteps a president's authority under the Constitution. Talwani, a nominee of former President Barack Obama, also found that the order is causing confusion among voters.
"Throughout the multiple actions before district courts, courts of appeal, and the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal government has declined to defend the constitutionality of the EO's directives," Talwani wrote.
The judge concluded that blocking USPS from following Trump's directives across the country will not harm the public, noting that the Trump administration "declined to argue that enjoining implementation of the EO will jeopardize the integrity of mail-in voting" and provided the court with no evidence of fraudulent absentee voting.
Politics Postal Service says its cash crisis is delayed until at least 2031, but problems loom Under Trump's order, USPS is supposed to compile lists of eligible voters from states and deliver absentee ballots only to people on those lists.
The president has defended this order as a way to stop illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens, a problem that many studies have concluded is extremely uncommon.
The League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and other groups that sued over Trump's order hailed Talwani's latest ruling as a protection for voters preparing to take part in the midterms.
"Today's ruling sends another necessary message to an administration that continues to weaponize portions of the government to sow chaos into our elections at the expense of eligible voters," said Sophia Lin Lakin, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney for the order's challengers, in a statement. "The president does not get to rewrite the rules of voting, and he certainly does not get to treat voters as collateral damage in his campaign to control state-run elections."
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