California is once again squaring off against the Trump administration over mail-in voting, this time with a new legal challenge filed just days after the U.S. Supreme Court handed the state a procedural setback in an earlier round of the fight.
Attorney General Rob Bonta announced Wednesday that California, along with a coalition of Democratic-led states, has filed suit in federal court in Massachusetts to block newly finalized U.S. Postal Service rules tied to President Trump’s executive order targeting mail voting. The move fulfills a promise Gov. Gavin Newsom made to renew legal action as soon as the administration issued concrete regulations.
The timing traces back to the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this week, which found that California’s original lawsuit had been filed prematurely — before the administration had actually put formal rules in place. That gap closed late last week when the Postal Service published final regulations requiring states to hand over lists of eligible mail voters, redesign ballot envelopes to meet federal approval, and add new tracking barcodes to ballot mail.
Trump’s executive order goes further, directing the Postal Service to withhold delivery of ballots to any voter not listed in a federal database the administration intends to create, and to cut off ballot delivery entirely in states that refuse to comply with the new requirements.
Bonta argues the Postal Service’s rules trample on constitutional boundaries that leave election administration primarily in the hands of states, not the federal government.
“President Trump doesn’t get to rewrite our voting system on a whim,” Bonta said during a virtual news conference Wednesday. “And the United States Postal Service cannot sidestep the laws that govern the postal service just to carry out the president’s agenda.”
The coalition of states contends that neither the president nor the Postal Service has the legal authority to dictate how elections are run, and warns that the new requirements threaten to disrupt mail voting on a broad scale. In California alone, more than 89% of voters cast ballots by mail during the state’s most recent primary in June, according to the Secretary of State’s office.
Trump has long criticized mail-in voting, repeatedly making unsupported claims that it fuels fraud, even though he has used mail ballots himself in past elections. Last year, he said on social media that he wanted to “lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots” altogether.
With the case now working its way through the courts, it remains uncertain whether the Postal Service’s new rules will be resolved — or enforced — in time to have any impact on this November’s elections.
Original source: CalMatters
