A federal judge blocked a proposed restriction on mail-in voting across the US, challenging a crackdown on elections ordered by Donald Trump.
Judge Emmet Sullivan of the US district court for the District of Columbia ruled that a US Postal Service (USPS) plan to deny ballots to voters in states that do not turn over their voter rolls to the federal government should not proceed.
It was the second time in recent weeks that the US president’s plan to restrict mail-in-voting has suffered a setback in court.
The decision by Sullivan bars the postal service from enforcing an executive order issued by Trump in March that called for sweeping changes to the administration of elections nationwide.
In accordance with the order, the postal service issued a proposed rule on 2 June that would require states to give the US Department of Homeland Security and other agencies access to lists of voters and to adopt new balloting procedures before the mail agency would make deliveries. If states did not comply, USPS would refuse to deliver the ballots.
Sullivan, who was appointed to the bench by the Democratic former president Bill Clinton, sided with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) civil rights group, which argued that the new rule would run afoul of a 2021 legal settlement which forced USPS officials to take “extraordinary measures” to ensure timely delivery of ballot mail.
In that case, the NAACP sued the postal service in 2020 after delayed mail service threatened election access for voters during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Sullivan’s decision follows a ruling by US district judge Indira Talwani last week, in which the NAACP had also challenged the executive order. Talwani blocked the administration’s plan for mail-in voting across 23 states and the District of Columbia, which sued the administration to stop the proposed rule.
The latest order appears to extend this injunction nationwide, as it is meant to enforce an agreement that bound the postal service as an agency until 2028.
Anthony Ashton, the senior associate general counsel at the NAACP, said: “This ruling is a critical step in protecting the rights of voters who rely on the timely delivery of mail-in ballots to participate in our democracy. The proposed USPS changes would have created unnecessary and unlawful barriers, in direct violation of the USPS’s mandate to prioritize election mail.
“Those barriers could have disproportionately harmed Black voters, who are more likely to rely on mail voting due to longstanding inequities in access. Put simply, the use of mail-in voting helps reduce voter intimidation at the polls and election day dirty tricks,” Ashton added.
“The court today correctly recognized that USPS’s plan to create roadblocks to mail-in voting was inconsistent with its commitment to timely deliver election mail,” said Allison Zieve, the director of Public Citizen Litigation Group. “USPS’s plan was unwise, unlawful, and a threat to the millions of voters who rely on mailed ballots to participate in our democracy.”
The USPS was approached for comment.
