Supreme Court Ruling on Mail-in Voting Could Add to Election Confusion

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday to allow the Trump administration to move ahead with its plans to restrict mail-in voting threatened to introduce confusion into the midterm elections as states grapple with how to respond.

The executive order at the center of the ruling directs federal agencies to create “state citizenship lists” of eligible voters. Those would be sent to state election officials and to the Postal Service, which could refuse to mail ballots for anyone whose name was not listed.

But some state elections officials and experts said on Tuesday it was unclear whether the new rules could be put in place by the November elections. Some states have already designed and printed ballots, a costly endeavor, and the first absentee ballots will be sent starting Sept. 4.

At least one state, California, has already said it will sue again in the aftermath of the ruling. Other states, including Oregon and Colorado, signaled they expect voting in the November elections to proceed as expected. Some, such as North Carolina, said they were monitoring the tangle of litigation.

“I have no doubt that our election is going to go on as normal: Safe, secure and transparent as always,” said Dag Robinson, who is the county clerk in rural Harney County, Ore., the president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks.

The Supreme Court ruling adds to a chaotic pileup of legal rulings and challenges surrounding the nation’s electoral system as control of Congress hinges on just a few seats.

Every state has some form of mail-in or absentee voting. Many of the states with the highest rates of mail voting oppose the executive order.

A coalition of Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C. challenged the new rule as unconstitutional. But on Monday, the Supreme Court said that move was premature because the voting rules had yet to take hold and their effect on states was unclear. “On that score, time will tell,” the court’s conservative majority wrote.

The Postal Service on Friday published a final rule explaining how it would carry out the executive order, a move that opens the door to new lawsuits. The Supreme Court allowed for that possibility in its order, writing that “if the Postal Service’s final rule harms the states, they may challenge that rule.”

In an interview, Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state, said she was disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision, but stressed — like top election officials in other states — that multiple legal avenues remained.

“The Supreme Court did not answer the question: Is this executive order unlawful?” she said. “They only answered the question, did the lower courts weigh in too soon on this?”

Democrats and voting rights groups have argued that the executive order violated the Constitution because Congress and the states have authority over elections, not the president.

California and other Democratic-led states have also moved to shore up existing laws, including some signed this year, aimed at toughening election protections around who can have access to key voting data and speeding up the counting process for mail votes.

President Trump has repeatedly said that mail-in voting is “cheating,” “corrupt” and “horrible,” despite having voted by mail as recently as this month in Florida’s Republican primary. He has moved to restrict mail-in voting using a variety of procedural and legislative levers, though many of those efforts have failed to overcome judicial scrutiny or resistance from within his own party.

Even as some Republicans have started encouraging their voters to use mail-in ballots, several G.O.P. state leaders have broadly sided with the president’s claims of election fraud. Attorney General Liz Murrill of Louisiana, for example, called Monday’s ruling a “huge win for election integrity.”

Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting from New York and Laurel Rosenhall from Sacramento.