The Supreme Court undermined its own prior rulings to give President Donald Trump a win on his mail-in ballot executive order, GOP legal expert Ben Ginsberg told CNN's Kaitlan Collins.
The order requires the U.S. Postal Service to restrict delivery of mail ballots to states that haven't handed over vast troves of voter information to the Department of Homeland Security — which, if implemented now, could lead to widespread chaos.
"None of those lists have been made public, so the practical implications are huge," said Ginsberg. "Plus, you have to remember the problems and, really, distress this causes to election officials who have a lot of work to do to get their elections ready to go soon."
The bottom line, said Ginsberg, is that "there is all this uncertainty about it, which takes away a little bit from the blocking and tackling that they have to do to put on an election. And that may be the most worrisome part in terms of the overall chaos around elections."
Collins pressed him on that last point. "Why do you thinkthat's the most worrisome?"
"Well, because I think that due to the rhetoric of the past few years, public confidence in elections has gone down," said Ginsberg. Ironically, he added, in one 2020 Supreme Court decision, "Justice Kavanaugh pointed out that as elections become close ... you have to have clear rules so that everyone knows what they're doing. Well, that seems to be the opposite of what's happening with these proposed rules and the continuation and the litigation."
All of this follows reports from experts that the ruling may ultimately be short-lived in Trump's favor.