SCOTUS Rules for Election Integrity

John Thune and a handful of fellow-traveling Republican senators may have succeeded in scuttling the SAVE America Act — both by refusing to force a real Democrat filibuster and, failing that, by refusing to do away with the current fake filibuster — but that doesn’t mean the Trump administration is out of the fair-election fight altogether.

As Fox News reports, "In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a victory on Monday, allowing it to enforce President Donald Trump's 'election integrity' executive order restricting mail-in voting ahead of the November midterms."

Did the Supremes actually vote resoundingly in favor of free and fair elections? No. I mean, this is the Roberts Court, after all. Fox News’s irrational exuberance notwithstanding, the Court *did* wallop the Democrats with their own lawfare cudgel by ruling in favor of an emergency petition brought by the Trump DOJ and a coalition of red states. They argued that an injunction slapped upon Trump’s March 2025 election-integrity executive order by an Obama-appointed judge should be removed because the district court’s injunction was premature.

And why was it premature? Because the Democrat-led states that petitioned for it didn’t have proper standing, as there wasn’t yet a specific policy in place to be challenged. Delicious.

“Today’s decision,” wrote a dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, “does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with States’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful … Nor does it suggest that the Executive Branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to implement the President’s directives.”

Sotomayor is right — this is a very limited ruling — but she fails to acknowledge the failure of our system so far.

According to the original executive order, "Several Federal laws, including 18 U.S.C. 1015 and 611, prohibit foreign nationals from registering to vote or voting in Federal elections. Yet States fail adequately to vet voters’ citizenship, and, in recent years, the Department of Justice has failed to prioritize and devote sufficient resources for enforcement of these provisions.”

Interestingly, Nancy Pelosi and I actually agree on the importance of the right to vote in this country. As one of her more sentient staffers tweeted last night in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, “The right to vote is the foundation of our Democracy...”

It’s a republic, but whatever. From there, though, San Fran Nan’s post goes off the rails: “…and the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the President to move forward with this assault on that right is an insult to the vision of our founders. Trump’s attempt to seize control over Americans’ ability to vote by mail threatens to silence their voices and must be challenged.”

To the contrary, voting by mail is at the heart of what’s wrong with our election system. As the bipartisan 2005 Carter-Baker Commission report stressed, “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

Democrats know that voting by mail opens up a wealth of opportunities for cheating, which is why they so favor it.

And which is why polling on voter confidence in our election system paints such a grim picture. According to recent polling from Pew Research, “A narrow majority of Americans (55%) are confident that this November’s midterm elections will be conducted fairly and accurately — down from 61% ahead of the 2024 elections, 64% in 2022 and 59% in 2020.”

Think about that: Nearly half of us don’t think our elections are legitimate. What’s interesting, too, is the partisan trending. Since 2020, Republicans have been consistently skeptical, but Democrats seem to ebb and flow depending on who’s in the White House. Only 9% of Democrats were confident in the run-up to the 2020 election, while 37% were confident during the 2022 run-up and 39% were confident during the 2024 run-up, but only 18% are confident now. Why, it’s almost as if they think Trump will try to keep them from cheating this time.

Better to let a million illegals cast votes than to deny even a single American citizen the right to vote, some sanctimonious leftist no doubt said. But this perversion of Blackstone’s ratio aside, free and fair elections are, like free expression and the right to bear arms, foundational to the health of a republic. When a people lack confidence in their elections, they necessarily lack confidence in the legitimacy of their elected leaders. That’s no way to run a country, unless you’re rooting for a Marxist overthrow and a massive bloodletting.

As for yesterday’s ruling, the U.S. Postal Service and the Trump Justice Department said they’d immediately implement the revised mail-ballot restrictions.

But we’d be foolish to believe that this puts an end to the Democrats’ designs on “finding” just enough votes in just enough districts to flip the House on November 3.