Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash
Washington — A coalition of 24 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit Wednesday that seeks to block a new rule from the U.S. Postal Service that imposes requirements for mail voting ahead of the November midterm elections.
The final rule, published by the agency last Friday, came in response to an executive order President Trump signed in March that seeks to tighten the rules for mail voting. The states argue in their lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, that the rule will prevent them from administering their mail voting programs for the midterm elections and risks disenfranchising voters who cast their ballots by mail.
They said in their lawsuit that the Postal Service’s new measure unconstitutionally exceeds the executive branch’s power and interferes with states’ authority to administer elections under their own laws.
“The Rule violates the Constitution and federal statutes many times over,” the state attorneys general said. “It displaces state laws adopted pursuant to each State’s constitutional authority to administer elections, erects new USPS functions and ballot mail constraints that are inconsistent with USPS’s governing statutes, flouts USPS’s procedural requirements, violates the Privacy Act, and cannot be reconciled with federal voting rights law.”
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