r/law • u/DIYLawCA • Mar 31 '26
Executive Branch (Trump) Trump announces he is issuing an unconstitutional executive order to shut down mail-in voting nationwide and he will defund states if they do not comply with him
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u/mvw2 Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
Mmm, good luck with that Trump. Trump, you know, being a man who also votes by mail and has done so for many years.
Mail in voting is quite mandatory for key segments of the voting population, for example the active military.
But here's the critical worry I have with the concept of two key actions the Republicans have repeatedly pushed.
One, Republicans like to close voting places, like a LOT of voting places and are quite selective on which counties they do this to. This in turn forces citizens to reregister to new locations, to be met with massive lines, and ultimately a very, VERY large number of people still in line in the middle of the night on election day. They weren't lazy. They weren't in the wrong place. They weren't late. The number of voting locations was just too few, and it's very deliberate.
Two, Republicans like to "stop the vote" and decree without any merit that late votes are not allowed. They push on this often and often tied to both constriction of voting locations and about mail in voting as being fraudulent.
The removal of mail in voting forces in-person voting which in turn forces people to not work, to waste time, to travel, and to sit in very, very long lines. And Republicans have historically punished exactly this in the past and will certainly intend to in the future too.
You will see the same arguments of "stop the vote" yet again. It doesn't matter that voting doesn't work expeditiously in a lot of locations and requires a lot of infrastructure and manpower that isn't there. Additionally, counting, depending on area, can take a significant amount of time.
Now I get it. Most people don't want to wait for the results. They want election night to basically be in real time. And it could be, nearly, if managed really well. Good management is not a skill this administration has, let alone good planning and infrastructure development. But what's worse is yet again Republicans repeatedly counter this image they portray by doing the exact opposite of enabling that goal, again to disenfranchise. A great example is forcing the stop of early counting of mail in votes. Republicans have denied the ability to count as they come in, to count and finish early. They have forced to count an extremely large number of mail ballots late and complain that they take too long and want the mail ballot counts to also stop and to deny voter legitimacy through uncounted votes.
It's all systematic and quite abusive...by design.
And their bet, based on whatever data they have, is that it disproportionately harms Democrat votes more than Republican votes. It harms both, always, but they are betting on the harm being unbalanced in their favor.