WASHINGTON—Union leaders and constitutional scholars, including the three dissenting U.S. Supreme Court justices, blasted the High Court majority’s go-ahead for Donald Trump’s crusade to ban mail-in balloting this fall.
Though the six-justice GOP-named majority said the Trump administration admits it probably cannot implement the ban in time for the Nov. 3 elections, dissenting Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson vigorously disagreed.
Sotomayor and Kagan said just the prospect of criminal prosecution for violating Trump’s executive order ban on mail-in voting would cause some states which rely on it, and voters, to bow to Trump’s dictate.
Jackson said upholding Trump’s “unconstitutional” order would sow “chaos and confusion” because while the majority said the states challenging Trump acted too early, the majority didn’t say when the right time is to act—including after the damage is done. She called the whole situation a “Kafkaesque nightmare.”
“The government’s actual objective: To secure our imprimatur [ratification] for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections,” Jackson wrote.
The vehement union disagreement came from Postal Workers President Jonathan Smith, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, and American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) President Everett Kelley. All spoke at the Postal Workers (APWU) convention the week before the High Court ruling.
“This fight is for the millions of Americans that just can’t get to the poll stations to vote on a specific day at a specific time because life showed up, because they’re caring for elderly parents, because they can’t get a day off of work, because they can’t stand in line,” Smith told his convention delegates.
“It’s physically painful and harmful,” for those voters, he continued. “They need us to show up for them. America depends on us. America depends on voting by mail, and we will deliver it. As we say it, keep it protected and expanded.”
The chaos Jackson predicted would be widespread. The federal Election Assistance Commission reports that in the 2024 election 37.4% of voters cast ballots in person on Election Day and 35.2% cast ballots in person before Election Day, at voting sites or in drop boxes. And 30.3% mailed in their votes.
But the damage would actually be worse than that, since the entire Pacific Coast, plus Colorado, are virtually total mail-in balloting states: 99.3% mailed-in ballots in Oregon, 98.5% in Washington state, 91.5% in Utah, and 91.3% in Colorado. Others with high mail totals included California (80.8%), Arizona (74.7%), Vermont (67.4%), Hawaii (64.5%), and Nevada (44.1%). Idaho has not gone legally to total vote by mail, but 92.5% of its voters did so two years ago.
Curbing or killing vote-by-mail could also affect key races. In 2024, 53.7% of Iowans voted by mail,
and this year the state has close races for the U.S. Senate, the governorship, and at least two of its four U.S. House seats. More than a third, 35.4%, of Michigan residents voted by mail in 2024, and it has a hot U.S. Senate race this fall. So do Ohio (18.4%) and Maine (25.5%). And more than a third (37.3%) of voters in the key swing state of Pennsylvania mailed in their ballots in 2024.
Trump has crusaded against mail-in balloting for more than a decade, claiming it is rife with fraud and particularly screaming that mailed-in ballots, which state and local election boards often count last, cost him the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania in his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump’s executive order, and U.S. Postal Service regulations issued on Aug. 21 to implement it, would go even further: Trump’s Department of Homeland Security would compile a master list of voters, turn it over to the USPS and the states, and the USPS would not deliver election mail to people whose names were not on the master list.
And if the 23 states plus D.C. that challenged Trump’s order don’t cooperate with DHS and provide it their voter lists for the matching process, none of their voters would get election-oriented mail, including ballots.
Even so, Trump’s order is not yet in effect. The Supreme Court’s Aug. 24 ruling stayed only one of the two injunctions blocking it—the one won by the 23 states and D.C. A second injunction, issued Aug. 11 by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in a separate suit brought by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, still blocks the Postal Service’s new rule nationwide. Voting rights advocates said they would go back to court immediately to challenge the final rule USPS issued Aug. 21, days before the justices ruled.
Now that he’s back in the Oval Office, Trump and Republicans in Congress and state legislatures are doing everything they possibly can to disenfranchise workers, women, people of color, students, and people with disabilities—all groups which strongly oppose the extremist and corporate-backed MAGA agenda.
The ban on voting by mail is just part of that wide-ranging effort. It also includes the so-called SAVE Act, which critics label “Jim Crow 2.0” and which would apply nationwide, forcing states to scrub their voter rolls.
It’s those rules that the Supreme Court majority greenlighted, even though the lower courts haven’t finished with the challenges yet. It’s also those rules the union leaders denounced.
Other Trump voter repression moves go up to and possibly including sending Trump’s troops, a.k.a. ICE agents, to “monitor” the polls in heavily Democratic cities such as D.C., Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. That intimidates voters, too.
AFGE President Kelley challenged the Postal Workers to go out and volunteer in the massive registration and get-out-the-vote drives that are planned or already underway.
“AFGE has repeatedly challenged the administration in court and held rallies in affected communities,” he said. “Respond to attacks on service with organizing and turnout. Register voters, mobilize families and friends, and make concrete voting plans ahead of the November elections.”
“Nobody knows better than you what they’re trying to do with our elections,” said Shuler. “They’re attacking mail-in ballots” she said before listing other GOP attacks. “Vote by mail is going to be absolutely essential to making sure our voices are heard and you are absolutely essential to making sure that happens.”
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