Illinois joined with two dozen other states Wednesday in asking a federal court to block President Donald Trump’s attempt to inject the U.S. Postal Service into the nation’s election system only weeks before the midterms by making the service the final arbiter of who can receive and cast a mail-in ballot.
The states’ lawsuit came as the Postal Service, at Trump’s direction, published rules on Wednesday that would require states to provide the quasi-government agency with lists of voters eligible to cast mail-in ballots and directing states to get its approval for envelope design and tracking standards. Voters not on the Postal Service list would not receive ballots, and ballots in unapproved envelopes would not be delivered under the rule.
“The rule I am challenging today is yet another unlawful attempt by the Trump administration to control state voting systems,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said of the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Boston, where previous challenges to Trump’s efforts to curb mail-in balloting have been filed.
“We are asking the court for emergency relief because the administration is trying to undermine our citizens’ access to voting within weeks of the midterm elections,” Raoul said in a statement. “I will not let the president sow chaos into the upcoming general election.”
The court filing comes less than a month before the scheduled start of voting by mail in Illinois on Sept. 24 and just two days after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a similar challenge by the same states to Trump’s directions for the Postal Service in a March 31 presidential executive order. The Supreme Court order said the states’ lawsuit was premature since the Postal Service had not implemented Trump’s executive order. But the order also said, “If the Postal Service’s final rule harms the States, they may challenge that rule.” That step is now occurring.
In their constitutional challenge to the Postal Service rules, the states said the issue of who is a qualified voter is a question of state law “as is the question of whether a ballot will be accepted for tabulation and processing.”
“The Constitution is clear that States have the primary responsibility for regulating and administering elections, subject only to preemption by Congress — authority that expressly extends to the ‘manner’ of elections,” the lawsuit said. “Congress has not afforded USPS any authority whatsoever to set rules for federal elections or mail voting, even though Americans have cast ballots by mail for generations.”
Trump has expressed vehement opposition to mail-in voting, which he himself has regularly used to cast his ballots, and has falsely maintained that fraud involving mailed ballots cost him the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden.
“One need not look further than the White House to explain USPS’s unprecedented and unlawful conduct,” the states’ lawsuit said. “President Trump has long opposed mail voting, expressing that it would ‘LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY.’ Since reassuming office, the President has aimed to — in his words — ‘get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.’”
But, the lawsuit notes, “neither the President nor USPS has the constitutional authority to make or alter laws governing federal elections generally, nor voting by mail specifically. In fact, the Constitution grants the President no legislative power at all.”
Still, Trump has, according to the lawsuit, “made sweeping — and untrue — claims of presidential authority” over elections, contending falsely on social media that ‘the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes’ and ‘must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them … to do.’”
In addition to challenging the constitutionality of the Postal Service’s rules, the lawsuit contends the action violates the federal Voting Rights Act as well as law protecting privacy and universal mail delivery.
Nearly 1 million of the 5.7 million votes in the 2024 general election in Illinois were cast by mail, and nearly double that number were voted in the 2020 pandemic year, State Board of Elections officials have said.
Meanwhile, a federal judge in Boston on Wednesday lifted an injunction that had prohibited the Postal Service from moving ahead with its election plans as a result of Monday’s Supreme Court decision. The injunction was lifted at the request of the Trump administration.
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In a legal action separate from the states’ effort, voting rights groups that had initially won the injunction, including the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, asked the federal court to resume blocking the Postal Service from implementing its mail ballot rule.
“The newly-finalized rule eliminates any doubt about the harms stemming from these unlawful acts. Implementing the newly-finalized rule less than 70 days before the general election would dramatically impair plaintiffs’ core voter engagement work and pose a grave risk of disenfranchisement,” the groups said in a statement. “We are asking the court for emergency relief to prevent this harm and to affirm the public’s confidence in the systems voters rely on to conduct our elections.”