This week at Democracy Docket: Will Trump restrict mail voting during the midterms? It’s up to the Supreme Court now

As November rapidly approaches, we’re still waiting for a key question to be answered: Will President Donald Trump get a chance to impose sweeping restrictions on mail voting during the midterms? It will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court.

The restrictions, which stem from the president’s March anti-voting executive order, would require states to send their lists of eligible voters who requested mail or absentee ballots to the United States Postal Service (USPS). The order then directs the postal agency not to deliver ballots to or from voters who aren’t on the lists. If imposed, the restrictions would likely disenfranchise a huge swath of voters.

This week, Jim Saksa reported that Massachusetts District Judge Indira Talwani had again blocked USPS from implementing provisions of the order — this time, nationwide. Previously, in a separate lawsuit, she had prohibited the order’s implementation in 23 states and Washington, D.C.

After this second block, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to hurry up and decide whether it can implement the executive order. As Jim explained, that request emphasizes just how desperately the administration wants to kneecap mail voting in time for the midterms, where Republicans appear to be cruising for a bruising at the polls.

The Supreme Court could decide any day now to either suspend Talwani’s order or affirm it — and Democracy Docket will be ready to report on it when that happens.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only attack on free and fair elections this week. 

Texas’ Galveston County wants to alter its local election map between the primaries and the general election — and the state supreme court just denied an emergency effort to stop it. If that plan sounds unfair to you, that’s because it is. And the county isn’t playing coy with its motives: It wants to boost Republicans’ chances of winning. As Jen Rice wrote, a win for the county could “embolden other Texas jurisdictions to tweak election maps after seeing primary results in order to boost partisan advantages in the general election.” Pro-voting plaintiffs still have the option of challenging the plan in a lower court, though time is of the essence.

In other bad news, anti-voting candidates won two GOP primaries this week. In Wisconsin, election denier Rep. Tom Tiffany snagged the Republican nomination for governor. He previously voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania. In Minnesota, former state Rep. Tad Jude, who has called for imposing new restrictions on voting, won the GOP secretary of state primary. In both cases, these aren’t the people you want having power over elections during the 2028 presidential race. Thankfully, Jude has a slim chance of winning the general in Democratic-leaning Minnesota.

There was also some abysmal news out of Alabama: Turnout was a minuscule 5.24% during a special primary there. After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) earlier this year, Alabama quickly redrew four of its seven congressional districts to disempower Black voters and increase the GOP’s advantage. It also delayed the primary vote in those races, meaning Alabamians would need to vote twice. That split primary likely confused voters and influenced the low turnout, Jen Rice reported. But the state also didn’t exactly throw its heart into informing the public of the changes and the new primary. One expert characterized it as “a perfect storm for nobody to show up.”

The primaries also gave us a bit of good — and funny — news. 

As Matt Cohen reported, Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and one of America’s leading election conspiracists, lost his bid to be the GOP nominee for Minnesota governor. An election denier to his core, Lindell even denied his own double-digit defeat, claiming that his election team found “a couple anomalies” in the vote tally.

Matt also explained how, in the run-up to Michigan’s primary earlier this month, election deniers resurrected old debunked conspiracy theories and bombarded the state with them. Expect them to keep targeting Michigan and other key battleground states with lies and disinformation as the midterms approach.

As much as Trump and his acolytes want to undermine the midterms, there are limitations to what they can actually do. The Department of Justice (DOJ) is 0-22 in pursuit of access to states’ unredacted voter rolls now that a federal judge has ruled against the department in Nevada, Yunior Rivas reported. Democracy Docket has been following the slow-motion trainwreck of the DOJ’s multiple voter roll lawsuits from the beginning, and we’re not stopping anytime soon. 

And after the president fired the leadership of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a bipartisan agency created to help states administer elections, there were real concerns he would now try to use the headless commission to wrest control over elections from states or decertify voting machines. But in a new memo, the EAC laid out what it can and can’t do without a board. 

In short, it can’t change the standards it uses to test and certify voting machines. And if Trump wants the board to change other rules, he will first have to appoint new board members — and they will need to be confirmed by the Senate.

And some more positive news: After the destruction of the VRA, more states are passing their own legislation protecting voting rights, Natalie Hausmann reported. Following the fatal Supreme Court ruling in April, Delaware and New Jersey passed their own voting rights laws, joining 10 states that already had them on the books. And California is looking to expand its protections.

This isn’t the end of the story: Republicans and anti-voting activists are specifically targeting state efforts to prevent voter suppression. But the push for state-level protections shows voting rights is a priority for Democratic leaders — something House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries emphasized in a speech this week.

“We can cut [Trump’s] presidency legislatively in half by winning the midterm elections, and that’s incredibly important,” Jeffries said.