Legit Votes Prevail: SC Blocks Voter Suppression

The US Supreme Court's recent ruling against President Donald Trump's efforts to make it harder to vote by mail in the midterms has sparked a renewed push by election officials to assure Americans that mail-in ballots are safe and secure. The ruling, which sent Trump into an angry tirade on Truth Social, has averted what election officials described as an administrative disaster for this year's elections.

The president's order would have required states to comply with cumbersome new rules, including redesigning mail-in envelopes and uploading lists of voters to the USPS, that were not feasible to implement before ballots started going out. The effort was seen as a push by the government to change voting policy as well as one to weaken confidence in voting by mail.

"That is the whole intent of the president," said Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat who serves as the top election official in Nevada, where mail-in voting is widely used. "He wanted to build doubt. He wanted to create chaos."

Mail-in voting has become a crucial aspect of American democracy, with 29% of Americans casting their ballots by mail in the 2024 presidential election and roughly one-third casting mail-in ballots in the 2022 midterms, according to researchers at the MIT Election Lab. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to cast mail-in ballots.

However, concerns about the security and integrity of mail-in voting have been raised, particularly in the wake of the Trump administration's efforts to restrict voting by mail. Wisconsin election officials, for instance, have faced questions about voters concerned their ballots won't be delivered in time. Wisconsin law requires mail-in ballots to be delivered by the close of polls on election day in order to count, and in the state's April election, there was an increase in late-arriving ballots. Higher rates of late-arriving ballots have been tossed this year, according to an analysis by the New York Times.

To address these concerns, election officials have been working to educate voters on the election process and the safety and security of mail-in voting. In Nevada, officials plan to run a series of public service announcements to inform voters about the process. In Wisconsin, officials have encouraged people to mail their ballots back sooner, using county websites, social media, and notes attached to their ballots to spread the message.

"We're really trying to encourage people to act sooner," said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat on the Wisconsin Elections Commission. "So hopefully they take that to heart. It's hard to tell people, 'No, really, you should trust the post office' when they came up with this absolutely cockamamie rule that was going to eliminate absentee voting."

In Washington state, where everyone received a mail-in ballot, more than 20,000 votes were rejected in the August primary because they arrived late at an election office. Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs acknowledged that there is a sense of distrust among voters, but emphasized that the state's election system is secure and reliable.

"We still are urging our voters to put their ballot in a drop-box," Hobbs said. "Even though there is a victory in the courts, we still want to make sure that our voters feel confident that their vote will be counted."

In Arizona, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, publicly emphasized that the proposed changes to voting by mail had not gone into effect yet and so nothing around voting by mail had changed. Since the Supreme Court's ruling preserved the status quo, Fontes said officials hadn't had to shift their messaging.

"While voters have raised questions about the proposed changes, we continue to tell them until there's a change, there is no change," Fontes said. "We are still where we were. We never jumped on the paranoia bandwagon."

Fontes, a Democrat and the top election official in a state where voting by mail is widely used, characterized the Trump administration's efforts as "intentionally damaging to the entire elections administration process in this country."

"The administration, by their actions, have proven that they are hell-bent on driving American voters away from their own elections," Fontes said. "And we've been working very hard to counter that."

As the midterms approach, election officials are working to reassure voters that mail-in ballots are safe and secure, and that the democratic process is robust and reliable. The Supreme Court's ruling has given them a boost, and officials are now focused on educating voters and building trust in the election system.