Pelosi: Trump’s effort to control mail-in voting ‘threatens to silence’ voters

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) bashed a recent Supreme Court decision to lift an injunction on President Trump’s mail-in ballot plan, saying it “threatens to silence” voters.

“The right to vote is the foundation of our Democracy, and the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the President to move forward with this assault on that right is an insult to the vision of our founders,” she said on social media .

The court’s conservative justices ruled in the case that the Democratic-led coalition of states — including the District of Columbia, California, Nevada and 21 others — sued too early , without ruling on the legality of Trump’s executive order.

The decision allowed the Department of Homeland Security to proceed with plans to create “state citizenship lists” composed of all eligible voters in a state.

Pelosi stated that she believes this order is “Trump’s attempt to seize control over Americans’ ability to vote by mail” and that it “threatens to silence their voices and must be challenged.”

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked enforcement of the order, but the Supreme Court wrote in the emergency ruling that she had no authority to do so.

The court’s liberal minority said they would have kept the lower court’s hold in place, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a separate dissenting decision, calling the majority’s ruling a “ Kafkaesque nightmare .”

The executive order, signed in March, also directed the United States Postal Service to only issue mail-in ballots to people on the approved voter lists.

A separate injunction is still in place from the same lower court preventing the Postal Service from enforcing certain aspects of the executive order nationwide. It is still unclear if this case will be heard by the Supreme Court.

The Postal Service on Friday released an unpublished 95-page report , slated for an official release on Wednesday, that aligned with the executive order’s new eligibility guidelines.

The new policy gives states 60 days before the Nov. 3 midterms to notify the Postal Service if they intend to submit a list of eligible voters based on citizenship data. Only then will the Postal Service send mail-in or absentee ballots to the states’ respective residents.