In the United States, the Supreme Court rejects an appeal by the Trump administration against postal voting

The American Supreme Court with a conservative majority rejected, on Monday, September 14, an appeal from the Trump administration aimed at allowing it to more strictly regulate postal voting from the crucial mid-term elections in November. This is a setback for the Republican president.

In a brief ruling, four of the court’s six conservative justices, including its president, John Roberts, as well as the three progressives, reject the Trump administration’s request. They believe that the government is unlikely to prevail when the case is judged on the merits and that it has not demonstrated the need to suspend, in the meantime, the first instance decision.

The influential civil rights association ACLU immediately welcomed a “great victory for voting rights, election integrity and democracy.” “This decision means that all fifty states can continue to use their current mail-in voting procedures, which have proven safe, secure and reliable for decades”added the association.

The stakes were high: almost a third of American voters voted by mail in 2024, according to the United States organization. This decision comes less than two months before the November 3 elections, which are off to a bad start for Donald Trump’s Republican majority. The American right could lose its slim majority in the House, or even the Senate, to the Democrats.

This is the latest episode in an intensifying legal battle, as the sending of the first postal ballots to voters has just begun in certain states. On September 4, a federal judge extended the suspension until these elections of the new rules issued by the United States Postal Service (USPS) for the delivery of electoral ballots by mail. These rules followed a decree from Donald Trump aimed at more strictly regulating this method of voting.

A federal appeals court had already confirmed last week the suspension of measures linked to this decree, but the nine judges of the highest court in the United States had not yet ruled.

Among the conservatives in favor of rejecting the Trump administration’s appeal, Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote, in a separate opinion of agreement, that if, in substance, the new Postal rules could possibly be legally valid, their application from the polls in early November would be ” arbitrary “. “State and local election officials do not have enough time to implement them before the election”he emphasizes.

Only the two most conservative judges, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, expressed their disagreement, believing that the government had demonstrated that a suspension of the first instance decision would be justified.

Legal debate

The appeal judges declared Thursday that they shared the conclusions of the court of first instance, according to which these new rules of the Post Office, which depends on the executive, derogate ” probably “ to the Constitution which entrusts Congress and the States with the organization of elections, including federal elections. They also noted the risks mentioned by this federal judge from Boston of “chaos and large-scale disenfranchisement of citizens” if these new rules were applied immediately.

Donald Trump regularly denounces postal voting, to which he largely attributes his defeat – which he still does not recognize – in 2020 against Democrat Joe Biden. On March 31, he signed a decree intended to more strictly regulate postal voting, a measure challenged in court by a group of states governed by Democrats and an organization of women voters.

The decree orders the Immigration and Social Security departments to create a federal list of eligible voters, and the Postal Service to issue mail-in ballots only to people on that list. The stated objective is to limit the risk that foreigners will be able to vote in the American elections, a specter regularly raised by Donald Trump and the Republican camp, although the phenomenon is extremely rare, according to official statistics.