We have this breaking news from the United States Supreme Court, which has sided with the Trump administration and against free and fair elections. Is Democracy coming to an end?
The Supreme court said that the Trump administration’s anti-voting executive order that had been blocked by the lower court, a lawsuit brought by various states, should not have been blocked.
Essentially, they found that the states that had brought this lawsuit did not have standing and the claims were not ripe for adjudication. So what legal mumbo-jumbo is this?
The following is an explanation of adjudication by the Cornell Law School…
Adjudication refers to the legal process of resolving a dispute or deciding a case. When a claim is brought, courts identify the rights of the parties at that particular moment by analyzing what were, in law, the rights and wrongs of their actions when they occurred.
To be decided, a case has to be “ripe for adjudication.” This means that the facts of the case have matured enough to constitute a actual substantial controversy warranting judicial intervention. Indeed, Article III, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution does not allow courts to decide hypothetical questions or possibilities but only actual cases and controversies.
Adjudication also refers to the judicial decision itself. The effects of a judgment are determined by the doctrine of former adjudication. Under this doctrine, a final judgment in a prior action serves to bar re-litigation of the issues relevant to that determination. There are two types of former adjudication: collateral estoppel and res judicata.
In March of this year, Donald Trump issued an executive order that did a few things.
First, after denouncing what what was said in lower court, now the Department of Homeland Security was going to create a master list of citizens, who it believed were eligible to vote, and that it would share those with the states.
Simultaneous with that, it orders the Department of Justice. to take action to criminally prosecute people who are either non-citizens who vote or who knowingly allow non-citizens to vote, which would potentially put in harm’s way election officials, state government officials, who would now have to worry that if they made a mistake or if there was an allegation made that somehow a non-citizen had voted, that they could be under investigation. Or worse.
How many non-citizens actually vote?
Until Trump raised the issue, voting by noncitizens had never been a major factor in campaigns. According to an April article in The New York Times, nationally, “The Heritage Foundation’s database of documented cases of voter fraud includes 100 cases of noncitizens voting from 1982 to 2025. That is about 0.000008% of more than 1.3 billion votes cast in presidential elections during that time.” (Note that The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank often supporting Trump’s positions.) Over time, various states have examined their voting rolls to determine how many noncitizens have registered to vote or actually voted. The state of Georgia, for example, conducted a citizenship audit of its voter rolls. In 2024, more than 5 million people voted. Of those, the audit found 20 noncitizens on the rolls, and nine of those people cast ballots in previous elections. In the 2016 election in Nevada, a statewide audit found that of the more than 1.1 million people who voted, 100 noncitizens had registered (likely due to a Department of Motor Vehicles office error) and only three had voted.
But the part of the executive order that I’m concerned about is that is says that the U. S. Postal Service is to create a new set of rules for delivering mail balance.
Under this new executive order, the Postal Service was ordered to create a new set of rules that makes it more complicated, that both specifies exactly what ballot envelopes will look like and requires a barcode that is generated, that is unique to the individual voter.
But most importantly, it also says that nobody can get a mail-in ballot or deliver it unless they are on an approved list of people submitted by the states in advance to the U. S. Postal Service.
So how many voters that are citizens of the United States will be disfranchised in the November elections with the new rules set by the Supreme Court, thanks to Donald Trump?
This is not just a wild intrusion on state power. It is not just an unconstitutional effort by the president of the United States to force the Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting where the president has no authority. (But at the same time, the President gets to vote by mail when all other citizens of the United States become restricted.) It is OK for him to vote by mail, but not the American people. That’s pretty sick.
But it’s also quite clearly an effort by this administration to get their hands on those voting rolls. Trump makes up his own hoaxes, none of them are real. He’s getting away with it for now, but the November election will prove whether we still live in a Democracy or not.