4 minPolitics
Jackson dissents as Supreme Court allows Trump mail-in voting order to proceed
The Supreme Court allowed parts of President Trump's mail-in voting executive order to take effect, prompting a sharp dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who warned of election chaos and legal uncertainty.
The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with parts of its executive order on mail-in voting, prompting a sharp rebuke from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who accused her colleagues of committing a “serious legal error” that could disrupt the upcoming midterm elections.
The unsigned majority opinion granted the administration’s request to stay a lower-court injunction that had blocked implementation of the order in 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia. The court did not rule on the order’s legality, concluding instead that the states’ challenge was premature because they had not yet suffered a sufficiently concrete injury.
“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” the majority wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”
In a 23-page dissent, Jackson argued that the ruling “violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” She said the decision “lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”
Jackson contended that states were already facing election-planning costs, threats of prosecution, and uncertainty over potential changes to mail-ballot procedures. She accused the majority of adopting a “Catch-Me-If-You-Can approach” that leaves states unsure when an election-related challenge is ripe for judicial review.
“The Court does a disservice to all concerned by distorting Article III standing and ripeness principles to issue a ruling that contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it,” she wrote.
The executive order, signed by President Trump on March 31, directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-specific lists of U.S. citizens and instructs the attorney general to prioritize investigations and prosecutions involving allegedly ineligible voters. It also directs the U.S. Postal Service to pursue rules governing mail-in and absentee ballots, including ballot-envelope requirements, tracking barcodes, and state-specific voter lists.
The Postal Service outlined plans last week for implementing portions of the order, though the approaching election calendar could limit how much takes effect before November. North Carolina is scheduled to begin sending ballots to military and overseas voters on Sept. 4, with other states following soon afterward.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a separate dissent, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, arguing that the states already faced sufficiently concrete and imminent injuries to bring their challenge.
The litigation will continue in the lower courts. The Supreme Court’s order stays the Massachusetts injunction while the administration’s appeal proceeds in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and could potentially return to the Supreme Court.
Jackson closed her dissent by calling the case “not a close call,” and warned that allowing the administration to proceed risked confusion and last-minute disruption ahead of the midterms. “When the Government’s obvious goal is to interfere with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a manner that the Constitution does not authorize,” she wrote, “it is both a serious legal error and a grave misuse of our equitable emergency powers to let the Executive proceed even one step further.”
