Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a scathing dissent regarding the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday concerning President Donald Trump’s mail-in voting order, cautioning that it creates election chaos and forces states to respond hastily.
“This ruling…needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” Jackson wrote. “It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”
On Monday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority aligned with the Trump administration on an executive order imposing new mail-in voting restrictions ahead of the fall midterms. The order instructs the Department of Homeland Security to provide lists of U.S. citizens to state officials and urges the U.S. Postal Service to establish new regulations regarding mail-in ballot transmission.
The justices did not address the order’s legality; instead, they lifted a lower court’s injunction that blocked the implementation of parts of the proposal. Another nationwide injunction on a different provision of the order is still active.
Previously, 23 states, along with the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit challenging the administration’s order, claiming the Constitution grants states the authority to manage elections. District Court Judge Indira Talwani agreed, stating that parts of Trump’s order “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.“ In June, she issued an injunction halting the order, which was reaffirmed by an appeals court.
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In their decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices concluded that the states had not yet experienced harm from the administration’s regulations and therefore lacked sufficient standing to challenge the policy.
Jackson opposed this reasoning in her dissent, emphasizing that states had already shown they’ve been harmed and that the ruling diverged from how the Court has previously handled election cases. She also pointed out the lack of clarity for states on when to file a lawsuit with the election approaching quickly.
Liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor also issued a separate dissenting statement.
The decision by the panel allows for potential further legal challenges to the order itself. As CNN Supreme Court analyst Steve Vladeck has explained, the U.S. Postal Service has implemented new mail-in ballot rules in efforts to comply with the order, which could also face blockage.
Jackson highlighted that the majority’s decision on Monday intensifies uncertainty for state officials preparing for the November general election, which is rapidly approaching.
“A stay grant puts the Plaintiff States in a precarious position: Their election officials would have to scramble in the coming weeks to challenge or attempt to take on the potentially impossible task of complying with the President’s new mail-in ballot regime,” Jackson wrote.
Ultimately, she argued that the court made a mistake in lifting the existing injunction, removing a significant legal obstacle for the administration as it seeks to enforce the mail-in order.
“When the Government’s obvious goal is to interfere with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a manner that the Constitution does not authorize, it is both a serious legal error and a grave misuse of our equitable emergency powers to let the Executive proceed even one step further,” Jackson wrote.
