A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the U.S. Postal Service cannot carry out President Donald Trump’s mail-in ballot executive order.
U.S District Judge Emmet Sullivan, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, ruled Trump’s directive would violate a 2020 settlement agreement between the USPS and NAACP. The March executive order instructed USPS to submit lists of mail voters to whom they planned to send ballots, and required the institution to refuse ballots for voters not recorded on those lists.
“The Proposed Rule violates paragraph 2 of the Agreement because the Postal Service cannot post documents reflecting ‘practices and policies for prioritizing the monitoring and timely delivery of Election Mail’ if the policies provide that it will not accept ‘noncompliant mailing’ and therefore will not deliver mail-in or absentee ballots to some voters,” Sullivan said in his ruling. “[A]nd if [the postal service] will not mail ballots to any voters in a state where the state ‘declines or fails to certify a list.’”
“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of our elections. The President’s executive order lawfully protects our elections, and we are confident that we will ultimately prevail in its implementation,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement. “President Trump has also urged Congress to pass the SAVE America Act and other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting to secure our elections for generations to come.”
The USPS did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
An activist holds a USPS envelope while protesting Donald Trump’s visit on August 17, 2020 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Trump brought his campaign to Wisconsin, on the same day as Democrats held their virtual National Convention hosted in Milwaukee. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
‘[The Postal Service retains discretion over … the substantive contents of any such documents posted.,” the 2020 agreement said.
This discretion “does not give the Postal Service discretion to disseminate ‘substantive contents’ that are inconsistent with the Agreement as a whole,” Sullivan argued, explaining that the postal service cannot fulfill posting requirements if its politics contradict the definition of those documents.
Trump’s order additionally directed the Department of Homeland Security to collect lists of voting-age citizens in each state from federal databases. (RELATED: Post Office Phasing Out Migrant Drivers As Trucker Crashes Pile Up)
“This ruling in favor of the NAACP’s case marks another major blow to Donald Trump’s attempt to rig the election,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said, according to CNN.
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