Trump’s war on mail ballots is eroding democracy before our eyes

Just weeks before the election, the Trump administration is preparing an end run around the rules for how tens of millions of Americans cast their ballots.

It is no secret that President Donald Trump wants to tightly restrict voting by mail. But he has failed to persuade the public, which continues to support it by wide margins; state officials, who have declined to abandon a popular voting method; and Congress, which refused to pass the legislation he backed.

So he's turning instead to a secretive and rushed effort to use the U.S. Postal Service to disrupt mail voting on the eve of the midterms.

Trump's proposal to have postal workers determine who may receive a mail ballot would be wrongheaded at any time. Under the Constitution, voter-roll decisions are made by state and local officials, subject to rules set by Congress. The president has no role in making them.

But trying to impose this system after some states have already sent ballots to voters is more than a misguided policy proposal. It would turn routine election administration into chaos, destabilizing the midterms and undermining voter confidence.

Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to compile lists of citizens, prioritize the investigation and prosecution of state and local election officials who provide ballots to people who aren't on those lists, and impose new federal requirements on sending ballots through the mail.

The Constitution did not place the administration of American elections in the hands of the president.

Whatever you think of voting by mail, the Constitution did not place the administration of American elections in the hands of the president.

Article I, Section 4 gives state legislatures the initial authority to set the "Times, Places and Manner" of congressional elections, while reserving to Congress the power to make or alter those rules. That division of authority was deliberate. The framers understood the danger of allowing those in power to set the rules that determine whether they remain there.

Arguing that Trump had usurped their authority, a coalition of Democratic-led states sued to block the order. Voting-rights groups filed a separate challenge on behalf of voters who could lose access to mail ballots.

At first, they succeeded. A federal district court ruled that key provisions were unlawful and barred federal agencies from using the order to interfere with the plaintiff states' voter-roll maintenance and mail-voting systems.

The Supreme Court could have left that protection in place. Instead, it stayed the lower-court order and allowed significant portions of Trump's plan to proceed while litigation continues, focusing on whether the states could challenge the administration's actions at this stage.

But elections do not wait for appellate litigation. Ballots must be printed and sent. Voting systems must be programmed and tested. Election workers must be assigned, and volunteers trained. A court ruling months from now can't undo the confusion created by changing the rules in the middle of an election.

The stakes are more than the future of mail voting. Our very democracy is at risk.

Democracy depends on the constitutional architecture that supports fair elections, from the separation of powers to the independence of state and local officials.

That is where the present danger becomes larger than Trump.

If he succeeds, he will have pushed presidential power into an entirely new area. Unless that authority is restrained, it will expand. Eventually, powers long understood to belong to Congress, the states or other institutions will have migrated to the presidency.

No coup would be necessary. The country would have simply acquiesced to a massive change in the constitutional system.

The founders constructed a government intentionally filled with friction because they distrusted concentrated power. James Madison warned in Federalist No. 47 that the accumulation of legislative, executive and judicial authority in the same hands "may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Our constitutional system therefore asks something difficult of us. It asks us to care about process even when we disapprove of the result.

A Republican should be troubled when a Republican president exercises powers the Constitution does not give him, just as a Democrat should be troubled when a Democratic president does the same. Otherwise, constitutional principle becomes nothing more than partisan convenience.

If a president can rewrite one election rule by executive order, future presidents will claim the same power to reshape others — directing the Postal Service to withhold ballots or sending federal prosecutors after local officials who resist the White House's demands.

That is how democracy slips away: not in a single dramatic break, but through small accommodations to power until once-extraordinary breaks with the Constitution become ordinary.

The question is not whether Donald Trump is testing the limits of presidential authority. Presidents will always test limits. It is whether the rest of us still believe those limits matter — or whether, little by little, we stop insisting that they remain.

Evan Brechtel contributed to this report.

For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Symone Sanders Townsend and Luke Russert, watch "The Weeknight" every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW.

The post Trump's war on mail ballots is eroding democracy before our eyes appeared first on MS NOW .

This article was originally published on ms.now