Federal Judge Blocks Trump's Mail-In Ballot Overhaul as GOP's Redistricting Wins Hold and Midterm Cash Sits Unspent

The mail-in ballot fight

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out rules that would have let the Trump administration dictate the design of state ballot envelopes and control a federal database of absentee voters, according to The Daily Beast and reporting cited by Head Topics. President Trump pushed for the changes through executive order, arguing mail-in voting is prone to fraud, a claim these reports do not attach to any specific verified evidence.

Richard Hasen, a UCLA law professor who directs the school's Safeguarding Democracy Project, told The Washington Post, as cited by The Daily Beast, that implementing the changes for November is no longer realistic. "It is already too late," Hasen said. "I cannot see how any court in good conscience could allow them to be implemented for the midterm elections."

The clock is the problem. North Carolina began mailing ballots to voters who requested them on Friday, as state law requires ballots go out 60 days before the election. Wisconsin doesn't have to mail ballots until mid-September, but many municipalities are sending them early anyway. Ann Jacobs, a Democrat on Wisconsin's elections commission, told The Washington Post that getting ballots out matters most because "there are other ways at least to return them" through drop boxes or government offices.

Some election officials aren't waiting to find out if the Supreme Court steps in. New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver told the Post her office is talking to FedEx and UPS as a backup to the Postal Service. "We are still planning for plan B in a worst-case scenario," she said. "There are other ways to deliver ballots."

There's a legitimate case on the other side of this. Voter ID and ballot-security requirements are mainstream positions, and concerns about envelope design, chain of custody, and absentee-voter recordkeeping aren't automatically bad faith. The practical problem is clear from these sources: state deadlines have already passed, ballots are already in the mail, and no court has cleared a path for the administration's rules to take effect before November.

Redistricting: where Trump actually won

While the mail-ballot fight stalls, Republicans have banked real gains elsewhere. Fox News reports that Texas passed a new congressional map about a year ago, Trump's first major redistricting victory, and mid-decade redistricting nationwide has since netted the GOP at least 10 additional right-leaning House seats heading into the midterms. A Missouri judge allowed another Trump-backed map to stand for November just this month.

Democrats tried to counter but were slowed by rulings from the Supreme Court and Virginia's top court that favored Republican maps, according to Fox News. Progressive commentators had cast the original Texas push as an attack on democracy. Joy Reid labeled it "Voting Rights 911" and titled a segment "Texas's War on Democracy Through Gerrymandering." John Oliver called gerrymandering a way of "putting a heavy thumb on the scale of who gets elected." Fox News said it reached out to both for comment on whether they still stand by those characterizations now that the maps have held up in court, and got no response by publication.

Redistricting is legal, both parties do it, and courts have now weighed in on both sides' attempts. That's a factual outcome, not a verdict on whether gerrymandering itself is good policy.

The money problem and the referendum gamble

Trump's own strategy runs into trouble, according to reporting by The New York Times' Annie Karni, Reid J. Epstein and Luke Broadwater, relayed by AlterNet. Trump's PAC has raised close to $1 billion, but as of early September had spent almost none of it on House and Senate races. "This is my money that I control," Trump said, floating $400 million to $500 million for Republicans "that I think are good." His political operation's first reported expenditure went to defending a Senate seat in Texas.

Instead of writing checks, Trump has focused on making the midterms about himself. He hosted a Rose Garden dinner for endangered House Republicans and told them he'd be the face of the campaign. Speaker Mike Johnson told the Times that the idea for a midterm convention came from a phone call from Trump: "He said, 'Mike, we gotta do a midterm convention.' And I said, 'That's not a thing.' And he said, 'Make it a thing.'"

Not everyone in the party is thrilled. Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., who isn't seeking reelection, told the Times he's worried the president's numbers are "a ball and chain" for swing-district Republicans, citing unpopular tariffs in the Midwest and voter fatigue with "chaos and name calling." Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes was blunter, calling the strategy "political malpractice on an epic scale" for turning a swing-seat election into a referendum on one man.

Trump's own response, per these reports: "Some people like me more than they like the party." Whether that bet pays off depends on turnout numbers that won't be known until after ballots already in the mail right now get counted in November.

The unresolved question is whether the Supreme Court takes up the mail-ballot rules before Election Day. If it doesn't act soon, Hasen's read stands: the window has closed regardless of how the justices eventually rule.