LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The Trump administration is back at the Supreme Court again, asking the justices to let the U.S. Postal Service control some mail-in voting. A note that USPS is a financial supporter of NPR. Under a plan advocated by President Trump, mail-in ballots wouldn't be delivered to voters in states that haven't shared their voting lists. To discuss this, we're joined by Rick Hasen. He's a professor at the UCLA School of Law, where he directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project. Good morning, and welcome back to the program.
RICK HASEN: Good morning.
FADEL: So this is the third time the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in. We covered their last emergency appeal just this past Friday. What's different now?
HASEN: Well, the first time it went up to the court, it was a question of - was it too early? - because the Postal Service had not come up with their final rule. And the Supreme Court agreed - said there can't be an injunction against this mail-in-ballot rule until there's a rule. Second time it went up, the district court judge had put in a temporary restraining order. There was a question whether that was appealable. Now finally, we have a preliminary injunction. Everyone agrees it's appealable. It's now before the 1st Circuit and the Supreme Court. I expect by the end of the week or the beginning of next week, we'll finally know what the rules are going to be.
FADEL: Now, you wrote that this should be an easy case for the Supreme Court to deny a stay. Why?
HASEN: So when the court's considering preliminary relief, it has to consider four things. How likely is it that the party is going to win? How much injury would the party suffer? How do you balance the harms to both parties and the public interest? And it's those last two that really matter here because elections are already happening. Ballots are already going out. The Postal Service doesn't have its act together, doesn't have its portal ready for states to upload their lists.
So in some, what's happening is there would be a tremendous burden on both election administrators and voters, whereas the burden on the federal government would be quite small because they can't even put their plans into place in order to prevent the voter fraud that they said is happening that they haven't proven.
FADEL: Now, what kind of confusion would a Supreme Court decision siding with Trump create? I mean, North Carolina started mailing out ballots last week. More states begin that process very soon.
HASEN: Well, it'd be beyond confusion because under the rule as it was written, unless a state is able to upload its portal, print new envelopes, put these intelligent barcodes on them, do a perfect matching, then the ballots don't go out. And so millions of people - the elderly, disabled, people who are traveling, people in the military who depend on mail-in ballots and states where there's all-mail elections - they'd have to find another way to get a ballot. There's already talk about trying to get UPS or FedEx to deliver ballots. Some states don't have the capacity to have all these voters showing up in person.
So it'd be beyond confusion. It would just be chaos in an election. And I hope that the Supreme Court understands that potential for chaos and will take that into account when it considers whether or not to rule in Trump - in the Trump administration's favor.
FADEL: So it could potentially disenfranchise millions of people.
HASEN: Yes. I think there's the real danger of disenfranchisement. There's - I mean, election administrators take months to get things together. You don't roll out a brand new program with just, you know, days, if not, you know, hours before elections actually starting. So we're really in a kind of uncharted waters if the Supreme Court allows this to go forward.
FADEL: That is UCLA law professor Rick Hasen. Thank you so much for your time.
HASEN: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SYL JOHNSON'S "SOUL HEAVEN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
