KIM KARDASHIAN AWARDED SYMBOLIC 1 EURO IN DAMAGES OVER 2016 PARIS ROBBERY.(PHOTO).
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction Friday against the Postal Service plan, writing that states "are unable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement for eligible voters." North Carolina began mailing its first absentee ballots that same day.
The rule she blocked came out of an executive order Trump signed in March. It tells the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail ballots unless states first upload voters' names and addresses to a federal portal and get their ballot envelope designs approved, complete with individualized barcodes.
A federal whistleblower warned Senator Richard Blumenthal this week of "potentially catastrophic problems" with the new system. Under the verification process, if a single ballot's barcode registers an error, the entire batch gets thrown out, even if it contains tens of thousands of legitimate ballots. The whistleblower also alleged the Postal Service violated Talwani's earlier orders by pushing ahead with Trump's directives anyway. As of this week, the portal still was not running.
At Thursday's hearing, Talwani told the Justice Department lawyer, "I'm here 70 days before the election and I have nothing from USPS telling me how this will happen." Missouri's solicitor general, whose state joined 11 other Republican-led states defending the rule, suggested she simply make compliance optional everywhere. "So we're going to do a test run on this election?" she asked. "We're not playing an intellectual puzzle game. We're talking about people's right to vote."
Her order does let states opt in voluntarily. Not a single one has said it will.
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