This is a flat, substabtial interface with the 10th Amendment’s allowance of states to manage and run elections. If a state allows elections such that they aren’t denied on account of race, gender, and people under 18, they can be run however the states deem. Requiring someone to register with the federal government is not a power of Congress
How the fuck is this even supposed to work at all in Oregon and Washington?
Oh right, it’s not, and the point is to completely disenfranchise those states from a national election entirely.
This EO will certainly be shot down by the courts like all the election-related ones before it. And if it weren’t, states would likely just ignore it and continue to run their own elections like they always have been.
Well, Oregon and Washington have all-mail-in-voting.
If ballots are not being delivered to voters homes by USPS, that actually is a major issue.
You can’t vote without your ballot, and in these states your ballot is mailed to you for you to return.
So if USPS is refusing to deliver ballots to people not on the Federal registry, that means people won’t get their ballots to begin with, which is actually something that Washington and Oregon don’t control since USPS is Federal.
It means that both States will have to run around trying to figure out how to get the ballots to the voters to begin with. This isn’t about not delivering them once they have already voted, this is about delivering the ballot that allows them to vote to begin with. If those ballots go undelivered, the voters who did not recieve ballots cannot vote. They can run their own elections, but they aren’t in control of the Post Office.
The only other options will be for the states to throw together a last minute ramshackle operation to get people to come in and physically get their ballots, which takes time, effort, and becomes a barrier to voting. Which is obviously the fucking point.
Send 'em in unmarked envelopes with no return address then. How would they know it’s a ballot?
Could also use a private service like UPS or DHL. It’d be expensive but maybe you could get a bulk rate.
Oh yeah, that’s really helpful. That’s just dimissing the entire point that they’ve created a barrier to voting, and Washington alone has over 5 million registered voters, with an average of 4 million ballots cast in Presidential elections and 2 million ballots cast in mid-term elections. That’s still 2 million fucking people you have to figure out an all new process for in less than six months. Less than that if the court fucking dawdles while making a stay on it and not actually coming down with a ruling in favor of Trump until closer to the election.
You’re just saying exactly what I am saying is the problem: You’ve got a massive number of people to do this with, and in less than six months you have to figure out how to create a new system from scratch from the old system, in a way to get around it, and in a way that Trump doesn’t get whiff of and write another EO for like “don’t deliver mail with no return address in blue states.” We shouldn’t have to be doing anything at all, and the reason he is doing it this fucking way is to make it harder on everyone. Stop dismissing making the job harder and more likely to have mistakes made which will give Trump even more reasons to discredit votes from those states.
If you think it’s so simple why don’t you sign the fuck up to be Secretary of State for Oregon or Washington?
It still signals intent. They’ll just do it off-book.
It’ll be shot down in the courts, while Trump cronies ignore it and fuck up the elections anyway. They don’t care, if they stay in power the court rulings won’t matter.