President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that aims to tighten voting rules by creating a national list of eligible voters and limiting mail ballots.
The elephant in the room is him ordering the postal service not to deliver ballots from people not on the federal approved voter list. The postal service isn’t state ran. Trump doesn’t have direct control over who the post master is, but the board that selects the post master is mostly empty seats so I guess he could flood it with sycophants with support from congress and appoint a new post master if this one puts up any resistance.
It also seeks to bar the U.S. Postal Service from sending absentee ballots to those not on each state’s approved list.
Legal experts noted other potential flaws with the order. David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the Postal Service is run by a board of governors [not state governors] and the president has no power to tell it what mail it can and cannot deliver.
A spokesperson for USPS said Tuesday the agency will review the order. Trump has sought to bring the independent agency under more presidential control, proposing to fold it under the Commerce Department — whose secretary, Howard Lutnick, was on hand for Tuesday’s signing.
States are well within their power to ignore most of this. They don’t answer to the executive branch.
The elephant in the room is him ordering the postal service not to deliver ballots from people not on the federal approved voter list. The postal service isn’t state ran. Trump doesn’t have direct control over who the post master is, but the board that selects the post master is mostly empty seats so I guess he could flood it with sycophants with support from congress and appoint a new post master if this one puts up any resistance.