Slate losing their minds: Three Trump Judges Just Issued a Shock Ruling That Could Wreak Havoc on the Election
Mark Joseph SternOct 25, 20246:58 PM
On Friday afternoon, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit handed down a shock decision declaring that states may not count ballots that are mailed by Election Day but received shortly thereafter. By its own terms, the ruling applies only to Mississippi, throwing the legality of its voting procedures into question just 11 days before the election. Nationwide, however, 18 states and Washington D.C. accept late-arriving ballots; the 5th Circuit’s reasoning would render all these laws illegitimate and void, nullifying hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of ballots. The court’s obvious goal, aside from destabilizing a close election, is to tee up a Supreme Court decision that could wipe out all these laws in one fell swoop.
The Republican National Committee manufactured this dispute as a test case to end the widespread practice of accepting ballots that come in after Election Day, but are postmarked by Election Day. (Republicans believe that these ballots are disproportionately likely to support Democrats.) The RNC filed its lawsuit in Mississippi because that’s the one state within the 5th Circuit that counts late-arriving ballots, and conservative lawyers knew they could get a favorable ruling from the far-right court. RNC lawyers argued that federal law requires all votes to be received by Election Day, not just cast by Election Day. And they claimed that this federal rule overrides, or “preempts,” state laws to the contrary, including Mississippi’s.
U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. sharply rejected this argument. He pointed out that, under the Constitution, “the times, places and manner” of federal elections “shall be prescribed” by the states, though Congress may “make or alter” the state’s laws. Congress has not prescribed specific rules for mail ballots, instead leaving those decisions up to the states. The fact that Congress created one “Election Day” does not mean that it intended to void ballots that are cast by that date but, for whatever reason, arrive shortly thereafter.
Now the 5th Circuit has disagreed. The three-judge panel that decided this case is made up of extremely far-right, ultra-partisan appointees of Donald Trump: Andrew Oldham, Kyle Duncan, and James Ho.In his majority opinion joined by Duncan and Ho, Oldham latched onto federal law setting out “the day for the election.” He then declared that this is “the day by which ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials.” Oldham asserted that a ballot is not actually “cast” until “the state takes custody of it”—a contested question on which federal law is silent. By fabricating this atextual rule, he was able to insist that late-arriving ballots are actually “cast” after Election Day.
Oldham’s definition of the word “cast” is, to reiterate, not rooted in the text of the law. It also defies common sense: In regular English usage, a person has “cast” their ballot when they’ve returned it—by, for instance, dropping it in the mailbox. By relying on an idiosyncratic definition of the word that does not appear in federal law, Oldham was able to decree that late-arriving ballots are not “cast” on time.He therefore held that Mississippi’s law counting these ballots is preempted by federal statute.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/trump-judges-election-day-voting-disaster.html