May 28 (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Thursday declined to immediately block President Donald Trump’s executive order tightening rules on mail-in voting, but left the door open for the Democratic Party to challenge it again after the administration takes further steps to implement the measure.
Washington-based U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols’ order did not address whether Trump’s March 31 order was lawful. It also does not, for now, change how Americans vote, since federal agencies have not yet enacted the new rules that the order called on them to adopt.
Trump’s Republicans are in a tight battle to keep control of both houses of the U.S. Congress in the November midterm elections.
Trump’s executive order directed his administration to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state.
The order also directed the administration to use federal data to help state election officials verify who is eligible to vote, required the U.S. Postal Service to only deliver ballots to voters on each state’s approved mail-in ballot list, and required states to preserve election-related records for five years.
Plaintiffs, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, argued the executive order on mail-in ballots could disenfranchise millions of voters. But Nichols wrote that the Democrats’ request for a preliminary injunction blocking the measure was premature.
Nichols noted the government had not yet produced any flawed citizenship lists and the Postal Service had not yet implemented any new rules. The executive order gave the Postal Service 60 days to propose new rules to implement the executive order.
“Given that the Executive Order does not command Plaintiffs to do anything, and that no agency has yet acted pursuant to the Order in a way that could harm Plaintiffs, they have not suffered any harm at present,” wrote Nichols, who was appointed by Trump during his first term.
HEARING NEXT WEEK IN PARALLEL CASE
Trump has for years pushed the false claim that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud and has criticized voting by mail. Despite blasting mail-in ballots as “cheating,” Trump cast his own vote by mail in March in a Florida special election and used an absentee ballot to vote in the 2018 midterms.
Mail-in voting is largely seen as a secure and trustworthy way of casting ballots. Eight states allow elections to be conducted exclusively through the post and report some of the nation’s best election-integrity metrics.
Democrats had argued the order infringed on individual states’ rights to regulate elections under the U.S. Constitution. The Postal Service does not play an active role in administering elections.
They said the executive order’s direction that agencies use Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration data to build “state citizenship lists” risked improperly excluding lawfully registered voters because the data sources can be out of date and may include errors.
The Justice Department countered that the litigation was premature.
A coalition of Democratic states brought a similar lawsuit challenging the executive order in federal court in Boston. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, is due to hear arguments in that case on June 2.
A separate executive order Trump issued last year requiring voters to prove they are U.S. citizens and barring states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day has been blocked by three federal judges. The administration is appealing those decisions.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Additional reporting by Jacob Bogage in Washington; Editing by David Holmes, Bill Berkrot, Noeleen Walder, Rod Nickel)
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