The U.S. Supreme Court handed Trump a 6-3 decision this week allowing key portions of his executive order on mail-in voting to be implemented ahead of the November midterms. In response, a federal judge who blocked the most controversial aspect of the executive order lifted that decision.
The order directs the Department of Homeland Security to build a federal citizenship list of verified U.S. citizens over 18 and give it to the states, the Department of Justice to target state officials who give ballots to noncitizens, and the United States Postal Service (USPS) to direct states to abide by certain mail-ballot design and tracking requirements.
Most importantly, the USPS can only deliver ballots to verified individuals on the citizenship list.
"It's actually a fairly modest rule when you get right down to it," says Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project.
"First, it standardizes what the outer envelopes are going to look like, so there can be some new designs there, and secondly, it puts unique barcodes for each individual voter on those envelopes so that you can actually track them all the way through the mail stream," he details.
It also creates a portal in which states will be asked to provide information on voters who are eligible to receive mail-in ballots so that the postal service knows who is eligible to receive them.
"It's a very basic thing," Snead adds. "It's, generally speaking, very much pro-transparency, and who could really argue with the ability to track a ballot through the mail?"
The ruling comes as the prevalence of noncitizen voting remains a subject of debate.
While the Left portrays voting by noncitizens as a "non-issue" invented and fueled by "conspiracy theories," the U.S. Census Bureau recently released data from a preliminary review of voter records related to the nearly 160 million votes cast in 2020 that shows "over 24,000 ... represented noncitizens at the time of the election."
There are still 32 million voter records to go.
There is no reliable nationwide percentage specifically for undocumented immigrants who have voted in federal elections, but broad evidence indicates the rate is less than 0.0001% of votes cast.
The Center for Immigration Studies recognizes that any vote cast by an unauthorized voter cancels out one properly cast by a U.S. citizen, making the issue a "salient" one. Still, the nonpartisan research organization says more work must be done before the Census Bureau's analysis will be widely accepted.
Conservatives argue that even relatively rare instances of fraud or administrative error can undermine confidence if voters believe safeguards are inadequate, so election systems should be designed to prevent problems rather than merely respond to them afterward.
The Supreme Court's ruling does not resolve whether all of the executive order's proposed measures are lawful. The court's decision was based on the timing of the legal challenges.
