A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the U.S. Postal Service cannot carry out President Donald Trump’s mail-in ballot executive order.
U.S District Judge Emmet Sullivan, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, ruled Trump’s directive would violate a 2020 settlement agreement between the USPS and NAACP. The March executive order instructed USPS to submit lists of mail voters in which they planned to send ballots, and it required the institution to refuse ballots to voters not recorded on the lists.
“The Proposed Rule violates paragraph 2 of the Agreement because the Postal Service cannot post documents reflecting ‘practices and policies for prioritizing the monitoring and timely delivery of Election Mail’ if the policies provide that it will not accept ‘noncompliant mailing’ and therefore will not deliver mail-in or absentee ballots to some voters,” Sullivan said in his ruling. “nd if will not mail ballots to any voters in a state where the state ‘declines or fails to certify a list.'”
The White House and the USPS each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
‘[The Postal Service retains discretion over … the substantive contents of any such documents posted.,” the 2020 agreement said.
This discretion “does not give the Postal Service discretion to disseminate ‘substantive contents’ that are inconsistent with the Agreement as a whole,” Sullivan argued, explaining that the postal service cannot fulfill posting requirements if its politics contradict the definition of those documents.
Trump’s order additionally directed the Department of Homeland Security to collect lists of voting-age citizens in each state from federal databases.
“This ruling in favor of the NAACP’s case marks another major blow to Donald Trump’s attempt to rig the election,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said, according to CNN.
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