A Needed Win for Democracy
As the Supreme Court deals blow to Trump
Americans’ most sacred right, the right to vote, was given a lifeline by the Donald Trump-packed Supreme Court. If not for today’s ruling, millions of Americans could have been disenfranchised from casting their ballot.
The president must be seething.
Not only did the Court refuse to hear his appeal of the $5 million verdict against him in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case today, but it also ruled against his multiyear effort to restrict mail-in voting.
Trump loves to create a problem out of whole cloth and then ride to the rescue, manufacturing a solution that, unsurprisingly, benefits him. Mail-in voting may be his most egregious use of this tactic.
Falsely insisting voter fraud is a massive problem is Trump’s cause célèbre. He has built his entire political persona and his cult-like grip on his loyalists around the issue.
For the past six and a half years, he has claimed he won the 2020 election, but that Joe Biden was sworn in as president only because he stole the election. The January 6 insurrectionists were goaded by Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories about voting irregularities. He made no mention of any problems in 2024, when he won.
Trump insists, with zero factual evidence, that mail-in voting allows for widespread election abuse. The facts show that such abuse almost never happens. A study conducted by the Brookings Institution, using data from the far-right Heritage Foundation, found that mail-in voting fraud was statistically insignificant, happening in just 0.000043% of cases. That works out to four out of every 10 million votes cast.
Trump’s obsession with curtailing mail-in voting is rooted in data. He knows that late-arriving mail-in ballots tend to come from young voters of color, who tend to vote Democratic.
Today’s Supreme Court ruling in Watson v. RNC upheld the Mississippi law that allows for a grace period for late-arriving mail-in ballots, postmarked by Election Day. The 5-4 decision rejected Trump’s insistence on invalidating state law in Mississippi, 18 other states, and several territories.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that “by ‘default,’ however, ‘responsibility for the mechanics of congressional elections’ belongs to States.” She also noted that the constitutional framework for presidential elections is similar.
On Thursday, a federal court dealt another blow to Trump’s assault on free and fair elections. Judge Indira Talwani sided with almost two dozen states that challenged his March 2026 executive order attacking — you guessed it — mail-in voting and requiring the creation of a federal voter registration list. She ruled that the order is unconstitutional and exceeds the president’s power by encroaching on states’ rights to administer elections.
As is his wont, Trump directed his Department of Justice to appeal the ruling. Not because there is a reasonable legal basis for the appeal, but because he refuses to admit defeat.
In yet another setback for Trump, on Wednesday, a judge halted an earlier executive order that would require people to show documentation to prove their citizenship when registering to vote. Every state already has mechanisms in place to guard against registration and voter fraud.
Noncitizen registration is incredibly rare, and noncitizen voting is even less common. In addition, voting by noncitizens is a felony punishable by deportation.
With all of these rulings going against him, Trump has become like a dog with a bone when it comes to the passage of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility or SAVE Act.
The SAVE Act would require Americans to show proof of citizenship (birth certificate or passport) to register to vote, eliminating online and mail-in registration. It would also direct states to purge voter rolls and give voter lists to the Department of Homeland Security for citizenship verification. (Please see above for all the reasons this is unconstitutional and unnecessary.)
The House has passed several versions of the bill, but even the most slimmed-down version can’t get through the Senate. It would require a filibuster-proof 60 “ayes,” which it is not close to having.
Trump has been rage-posting about the SAVE Act for months, demanding it get pushed through the Senate. Some of his MAGA loyalists have taken up the mantle, slamming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) online for not doing the president’s bidding.
Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) defended Thune, blasting “keyboard warrior-geniuses and grifters who are ignorant of Senate rules and precedents who have miraculously become experts in its arcane rules.”
Trump is so insistent on the SAVE Act that he reportedly berated Republican Senators in a closed-door meeting on Friday for not using the “nuclear option.” The nuclear option is the elimination of the filibuster. It is a very risky move because if Republicans lose control of the Senate, they will want and need the filibuster to limit Democrats’ legislative power.
Screaming at Republicans in person and on social media does not seem to be working, so Trump is holding legislation hostage, in the hopes that will move the needle.
He tried to scuttle the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and almost stopped Republican efforts to pass reduced immigration enforcement spending. He won’t sign a hard-fought bipartisan housing bill that could help Republicans in close midterm races. That tactic likely won’t work since the housing bill has such broad support and may become law even if Trump vetoes it.
The president and his MAGA allies are unabashedly trying to disenfranchise millions. They believe most of those impacted would likely vote for Democrats. The irony is that notion, on which Trump has bet the ranch, is likely incorrect.
Many experts believe that his tactics to make registering to vote more difficult would disproportionately hurt Republican voters. Such voters tend to live in more rural areas of the country. Women who change their last name when they marry are more likely to be Republican. And Democrats are more likely to have passports.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) thinks Trump’s obsession with voter fraud is unfounded and misplaced. “We won all the damn elections, and we’re in charge, and what are we doing with it? We’re bankrupting the country, we’re starting new wars, we’re violating the Constitution, we’re not cracking down on the fraud. The problem is not the elections,” he said.
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Stay Steady,
Dan
This is good news! But you never know what song those Supreme’s will be singing. We take the win!!!
I admit to having been pleasantly surprised by the high court's ruling today on mail-in ballots. Given the relatively large number of Republicans who vote by mail (and therefore presumably want their votes counted, too), the restriction Trump wanted made no practical OR political sense. And treating overseas military one way and everybody else some other way would have raised 14th-Amendment questions.