Did SCOTUS Enable Trump's Attack on Mail-In Voting?

FEATURING DAVID DALEY - The US Supreme Court on Monday issued a 6-3 ruling allowing the Trump administration to restrict mail-in voting. All six conservative justices voted to lift a June 2026 injunction on Trump’s quest to make it harder for people to cast ballots, particularly in liberal voting regions such as California, Oregon and elsewhere. 

The majority issued an unsigned opinion stating, “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. On that score, time will tell.”

In response, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her dissent wrote that the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

David Daley is a senior fellow at FairVote and the author of Antidemocratic: Inside the Right's 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections, a history of John Roberts, the Supreme Court and the Voting Rights Act. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about what the SCOTUS ruling actually means.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: I had you on about four months ago to talk about the Supreme Court's latest gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Here again, the six conservative justices out of nine seem to be doing what they can to essentially realize Trump's dream of having as few people vote as possible, particularly voters who might be against Trump's policies. What does this particular ruling mean? It doesn't necessarily sign off on what Trump is doing, but it lifts the gate. It lifts the ban on what he was trying to do, right? 

David Daley: It's a complicated and dangerous first step towards what Donald Trump wants to do. I don't usually agree with John Roberts and the conservative majority, but I do think they're right on this piece that time will tell. This is a very early first decision. 

Now, there's plenty of cause for concern with it. The Trump administration effectively wants to impose all kinds of new rules that would make mail-in voting very difficult and perhaps even impossible, if not highly dangerous. They are looking for voting rolls from states. They are looking to match them up against a Homeland Security database. 

None of this is constitutional. The president does not have the ability to make this kind of sweeping power over voting. And none of it is even practical in the two months, barely, that remain before these midterm elections. A handful of blue states went to a lower federal court and said that this would be highly chaotic, and we can't possibly imagine pulling this off.