An executive order abolishing mail-in voting would almost certainly violate constitutional provisions that allocate election rulemaking to state legislatures and would face legal challenges. The US Supreme Court has upheld statewide vote-by-mail systems, including a 1998 Oregon initiative. For decades Republicans benefited from mail-in ballots by encouraging early voting among reliable voters, but recent denigration of mail voting altered behavior. Political maneuvers include mid-decade redistricting in Texas and a proposed DOJ federal voter database. Eliminating vote-by-mail would likely damage Republican prospects in upcoming midterm elections and rests on unproven claims of widespread fraud.
Trump has been thrashing about for months looking for ways to manipulate the midterms. He is so afraid that Republicans could lose Congress that he persuaded Texas Republicans to conduct a mid-decade redistricting to carve out five additional GOP congressional districts. He ordered the Department of Justice to create a federal database of information on voters, presumably to hunt for illegal voting and serve as a precursor to federal control of state elections.
Remember, the States are merely an agent' for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes, Trump wrote in an error-filled post on Truth Social. Not according to Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution, which says that election rules shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof. What's more, the US Supreme Court has ruled that statewide vote-by-mail systems are constitutional, upholding a 1998 ballot initiative that adopted the practice in Oregon.
And now he's attacking the mail-in ballot, which Trump has long claimed, without evidence, cost him the 2020 presidential election. Trump is likely responding to the shift in behavior he engineered by denigrating voting by mail after his 2020 loss. For decades, Republicans were the beneficiaries of mail-in balloting, and they encouraged their high-propensity voters to bank their votes early and avoid the risk of bad weather, power outages,
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