President Donald Trump's crusade to limit mail-in voting was swatted aside by a key swing state on Friday.
North Carolina became the first state this cycle to send out absentee ballots on schedule, a real-world defiance of the White House's push to choke off the practice before the midterms, The New York Times reported. Election officials in the state said the first wave went to more than 46,000 voters who'd already requested absentee ballots, with more batches to follow as requests keep coming in.
That timing "could complicate the Trump administration’s effort to impose new restrictions on voting by mail," per the Times — with the administration demanding states to turn voter data over to the Postal Service, adopt bar-coded envelopes so ballots can be scanned for verification or risk having their mail ballots "withheld entirely" if they refuse.
A federal judge, Indira Talwani, has put the rule on hold for now, but roughly two dozen Democratic-led states are suing the Postal Service in Massachusetts federal court to kill it for good, arguing only states and Congress — not the president — have constitutional authority over how elections are run.
The Times reported that 19 more states plan to mail ballots by Sept. 19, and several have told courts they simply can't retool their systems in time if judges ultimately let the rule stand.
"It is far too late in the election cycle to introduce such dramatic changes," North Carolina's deputy attorney general, Marc Brunton, wrote in one filing.
A Wisconsin official separately called compliance "virtually impossible," while Hawaii's election office said it couldn't realistically get replacement envelopes shipped in "from the continent" on such short notice.