Trump is trying to restrict mail-in voting. Will it matter in the midterms?

**Eric Garcia** (0:01)
WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**Rick Hasen** (0:06)
I think that the clock is just running out on doing anything effectively this time around.

**Chris Bentley** (0:12)
President Trump wants to restrict mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections. But even with the Supreme Court weighing in in his favor, he probably can't change much before November.
It's Tuesday, August 25th, and this is Here & Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.
Today on the show, thousands of people in Indiana lost power for weeks after a derecho blew through the area. But some people say there's a bigger threat to the local power supply than severe weather. Data centers. We'll hear from one of them in a few minutes. Also, you're probably familiar with Amber Alerts for Missing Children, or Silver Alerts for Missing People Who Are Elderly or Have Mental Health Issues. But some states issue another kind of alert, specifically for missing people with intellectual disabilities.

**Eleni Carvos de Gras** (1:13)
She was missing for many days before her mother was able to find her, and unfortunately, we could not get a police department to issue a silver alert for her.

**Chris Bentley** (1:21)
Now, the Department of Health and Human Services is launching a new national alert system for missing people with autism. More on that in about 15 minutes.
But first, the Supreme Court is throwing a wrench into the fight over voting just a few months before the midterm elections. On Monday, the court said President Trump can go ahead with an executive order that would make it harder to vote by mail with an absentee ballot.
The unsigned ruling did not determine the legality of the president's order, which faces other challenges in court. But it could still affect the midterms. For more on how, we called up Rick Hasen, who directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law. Here's what he told Scott Tong.

**Rick Hasen** (2:10)
Well, the part that is relevant to the Supreme Court's ruling yesterday has to do with a USPS rule that would require states to do certain things, including use certain kinds of ballot envelopes with intelligent markings on them, as well as provide a list of all of their eligible voters to the USPS. And if they don't do that, then the USPS is not going to deliver ballots. So that's a huge change because the USPS always has been delivering ballots. And this would inject the federal government into who can mail ballots in a way that they never have been before.

**Scott Tong** (2:47)
Yeah, and we should note the US Postal Service is a financial supporter of NPR. Now many Democratic state attorneys general are challenging this in a court document. They called it a voter verification and ballot interception program. What scenario are these critics worried about?

**Rick Hasen** (3:06)
Well, I mean, there are a few things here. One is there's a different part of the executive order that requires the Department of Homeland Security to come up with a rule and create a list of citizens that it would then share with the states.
That would get submitted to the USPS as would the states list. And there's another part of the executive order that says the DOJ, the Department of Justice will prosecute those election officials who don't do enough to keep noncitizens off the rolls. So there is this implicit threat. It's not explicit, but there's an implicit threat if you don't match your list with the DHS list, you could be facing criminal liabilities. So that's another thing that is kind of a threat hanging over the heads of state and local election officials who already are stressed enough trying to prepare things for November.

**Scott Tong** (3:57)
Well, I guess that's the question, right? We're 10 weeks out from the midterms for state election officials clearly already planning to make this happen. What do they do at this point? All this is still being fought out in court.

**Rick Hasen** (4:13)
Right, so the ruling from the Supreme Court yesterday was not on the merits of whether the executive order is legal, whether the USPS could limit which mail ballots they could deliver.
Instead, it was a technical ruling that said that the states had brought their case too early before the USPS had finalized their rule. Now, on Friday night, this past Friday, the USPS did announce their final rule and it's now in effect, except there's another court order from the same judge in the district court that stops that from going into effect nationwide. So it's a huge mess. It's going to go back before that judge in Massachusetts. There's going to be a new order and this could be back before the Supreme Court within a week or two. And in the meantime, ballots are going out by mid-September for overseas and military voters and some states even earlier than that.