The Supreme Court allows Trump to move forward with his plan to restrict mail-in voting

WashingtonA little more than two months before the legislative elections, the Supreme Court of the United States has issued an emergency ruling that only promises to add more uncertainty to an election day that is already expected to be critical. The conservative majority has lifted the judicial blockade on an executive order that President Donald Trump had signed in March to restrict mail-in voting. The magistrates, for now, allow the tycoon to continue with his plan while they deliberate whether the executive really has the powers to dictate how Americans vote. Furthermore, the decision comes while there is still another judicial suspension on one of the sections of this same order.

The magistrates ruled this Monday afternoon that Trump can implement the decree instructing the American postal service to cooperate in the process of deciding which electors can receive ballots to vote by mail. According to this same executive order, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – the same one to which ICE belongs– will create lists of citizens that could be used to monitor electoral patterns and detect alleged electoral fraud. The president has been leading a campaign for months to further erode confidence in the electoral system, claiming that undocumented people have voted in previous elections, and insinuating that they voted for Democrats. In May, Trump had already threatened to send anti-immigration agents or National Guard soldiers to polling stations to supposedly ensure the integrity of the process.With his popularity plummeting and the Iran war stalled, Trump is clinging to election fraud theories he has been fueling for six years, ever since he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Last July, the leader addressed the nation, assuring that his administration "had detected 'vulnerabilities' in the electoral system that needed to be corrected, and was once again insisting on the lie that the 2020 elections were stolen from him. On this occasion, he went a step further and claimed that China interfered to ensure his defeat in those elections. On that day, mail-in voting was decisive in Biden's victory, which led to Trump's current fixation with this voting method, which is predominantly used by Democrats.The decision allows the administration to move forward with its plan to limit mail-in voting, even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Trump's executive order. Still, it's unclear whether the White House's rules will be ready by Election Day, when control of Congress is at stake. The same lower court that had issued this block, which the Supreme Court has now overturned, had also published another order that makes the electoral scenario even more convoluted. The second block, which remains in effect, prevents the postal service from applying certain parts of the executive order that has now been activated. All of this will probably reach the judges' table sooner rather than later. In Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's particular vote in the Supreme Court's ruling, she warned that the decision "injects unnecessary chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.

The restriction of mail-in voting is part of a broad strategy with which Trump is trying to improve his prospects for retaining control of Congress. Since early in the year, when polls began to favor the Democrats, both the White House and the Republican Party have opened different fronts to decimate the representation of citizens who in the "midterms puguin vote for their rivals. In the race to redraw electoral maps – known as gerrymandering–, the republicans have practically won the battle with the Supreme Court's approval. The conservative majority overturned the civil rights movement's fight by disabling part of the electoral rights law that protected minority rights. Thanks to this setback, the republicans have managed to divide districts with African American voters in the Southern states. In this way, the voting power of the population is diluted among the other white-majority districts. In Tennessee, for example, Republicans approved in a matter of days a new electoral map that divides the only majority-black district in two. Although in 2024 the vote of black men was key to the Republican's return to the White House, in recent years the trend among the African American community has been to vote Democrat.

Another of the campaigns that Trump is promoting to interfere in the electoral process is the Save Act rule, which has been stalled in the Senate for months. The bill proposes profound changes in the way citizens vote. Among other measures, it would require voters to prove citizenship and eliminate mail-in voting-only registration.The text involves a series of modifications that, in a country without widespread identity documents, threaten to leave certain population groups without access to voting. The Brennan Center for Justice has already warned that millions of married women could be among the main victims, as their current first and last names would no longer match those they had when they were born. In the US, women tend to lose their maiden name and adopt their husband's; herein lies the problem.