Supreme Court Sets Urgent Deadline in Voting Rules Case

With the midterms nearing, a welter of election integrity disputes threatens to cast a shadow on the voting. President Trump wants the Supreme Court to revive his attempt to tighten up mail-in balloting rules. Lower courts had blocked his reforms. New Jersey is grappling with a growing scandal of voting by non-citizens. Meanwhile, legislation requiring voters to prove their citizenship, and show identification to cast ballots, is held up on Capitol Hill. Faced with the bottleneck in Congress, Mr. Trump in March issued an executive order aiming at ensuring that only citizens can cast ballots. The order sought to create lists of citizens for each state, in part to ensure that mail ballots were delivered only to eligible voters. The president cited his authority under federal law, along with what he called his obligation under the Constitution to make sure that all states have a republican form of government.That obligation is laid in Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution on the United States itself. Yet Democrats in 23 states, plus the Columbia District, sued to halt Mr. Trump’s order. They argued that states and Congress, not the president, hold the power to make rules for elections. A panel of riders on the First Federal Appeals Circuit over the weekend upheld a decision by a district judge kiboshing much of the order. Mr. Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, turned to the Supreme Court to get the voting reforms back on track. “It is definitionally lawful for the President to direct his subordinates to pursue his policy priorities,” General Sauer averred. He added that it was premature for the courts to block the president’s order before the relevant agencies had even started to act on Mr. Trump’s directives. The high court asked for responses from the states by August 3.That deadline underscores the urgency of the dispute. General Sauer emphasizes the potential for “irreparable harm” if the high court fails to lift the court-imposed bars to “a presidential policy that seeks to ensure voter integrity in the upcoming November 2026 election.” He warns, too, that if the Nine fails to act “there is not enough time” to resolve the disputes over Mr. Trump’s order in the circuit courts “before the November 3, 2026, election.”So the stakes are high as the justices, currently on their summer vacations, weigh whether to intervene in this dispute over the validity of the midterm voting. The concerns mooted by Mr. Trump, too, are thrown into sharp relief by the unfolding imbroglio over hundreds of non-citizens casting ballots in the Garden State. The improper voting followed thousands of non-citizens being improperly registered to vote in 2023 and 2024.The state GOP chairwoman, Christine Hanlon, reckons “I know it’s more than that.” Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was quick to wave away the problem, blaming faulty software supplied by a contractor to the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission. Yet the Jersey Vindicator wonders “Who knew about the problem, and when? And why weren’t the approximately 6,600 registrations reviewed and removed after the system was fixed?” The irregularities in New Jersey follow another case, in Virginia, where non-citizens made it on to the voter rolls as a result of the so-called Motor-Voter law. That Democrat-backed measure forces states to let people register when they apply for licenses. These issues all appear ripe for action by Congress, yet the solons seem more eager to begin their recess than to undertake the work required to vouchsafe the integrity of America’s elections this fall.

Supreme Court Sets Urgent Deadline in Voting Rules Case

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