SACRAMENTO — California could have some zany theater this fall: county prosecutors charging federal postmasters with felonies for obeying President Trump’s order to withhold delivery of mail ballots to voters.
Does Trump then federalize the California National Guard to protect his postmasters from local sheriffs bent on hauling them off to the jailhouse?
Just wondering after reading legislation whipping through the state Capitol.
None of it seems likely to happen, but with this unhinged president and his conservative Supreme Court hardly anything is certain — except chaos.
Trump keeps making himself even more unpopular with Democratic voters and tarnishing the GOP image.
One glaring example is Trump’s hypocritical move to interfere with state elections and cripple voters’ ability to cast ballots by mail.
“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” Trump asserted in March, while escalating his crusade against popular “absentee” voting. “Cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible what’s going on.”
It’s a big lie. There has never been any hard evidence produced by anyone, anywhere of significant mail-ballot cheating.
It’s also hypocritical because Trump routinely votes by mail himself in Florida elections.
Why is mail-voting OK for him but not for other Americans? “Because I’m president of the United States,” he told reporters. “I had a lot of different things” to do. As if the rest of us don’t. Voting apparently only needs to be convenient for him.
But Trump obsessively keeps trying to justify his false claim that Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory over him was rigged. It’s sick.
It may please his MAGA base, but Democrats and independents across America — especially in California — frown on Trump’s attack against their voting rights. They favor mail voting.
Overall, 58% of Americans support allowing ballots to be cast by mail, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. But there’s a huge difference between the parties — 83% of Democrats and left-leaning independents favor mail voting while 68% of Republicans oppose it.
In California, 72% of all voters approve of balloting by mail, according to a recent poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. But there’s a big split ideologically: 93% of Democrats and 72% of independents approve, but 62% of Republicans disapprove.
Regardless of what GOP voters tell pollsters, they must be overwhelmingly voting by mail. That’s because 81% of all California ballots were cast by mail in the 2024 presidential election. In this year’s gubernatorial primary, it was up to 89%.
In March, Trump issued an executive order directing the Homeland Security Department to compile a list of eligible citizen voters in each state and commanding the U.S. Postal Service to handle only the ballots of people on the list.
Gosh? What could possibly go wrong with Trump’s Homeland Security agency — the overseer of divisive ICE — deciding who is entitled to vote in the pivotal midterm elections?
California, along with a coalition of several blue states, sued.
The nation’s Founders decreed in the Constitution that states could decide on “the times, places and manner” of federal elections — unless Congress wanted to alter the rules. Trump persuaded the House of Representatives to pass legislation restricting mail voting, but the bill died in the Senate, blocked by Democrats.
Trump’s executive order was an effort to bypass Congress and essentially enact a law by himself.
The Supreme Court decreed on a 6-3 vote last week that Trump could proceed with his planning. But since no precise regulations had yet been announced by the administration when the opposition lawsuit was filed, it was premature to rule on their constitutionality.
But now Trump’s draconian rules have been revealed. And California has joined other states in filing a new lawsuit.
“Donald Trump does not run elections. States do,” Gov. Gavin Newsom declared. “California will continue to lead the way in defending democracy.”
In the Legislature, a bill was introduced to make it a felony punishable by up to four years in prison for a person in authority to order the withholding of a ballot’s delivery to a voter or its return to a local election official.
A person like a postmaster? Who else could order mail carriers not to deliver ballots to some registered voters?
“That’s for law enforcement to decide,” says the bill’s author, Sen. Aisha Wahab (D-Hayward), who was just elected to finish the current term of resigned U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell.
“My bill is trying to protect all voters. They may be on vacation, they may be ill. They may want to vote early or late. Whatever. They remain entitled to vote by mail.”
Her bill breezed through three Assembly committees in 24 hours — Democrats voting yes and Republicans no.
The measure is unlikely, however, to ever result in a postmaster being jailed for obeying the president.
For starters, it’s hard to envision the president’s executive order ever being ruled constitutional — even by this lackey court.
“Trump is trying to exercise control over elections when he has absolutely no authority to do so,” UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in a Times opinion piece last week.
If the Supreme Court shockingly did rule that Trump has the authority, then could his postmasters be arrested under the new state law? Under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, the answer would seem to be “no.” Federal law generally supersedes conflicting state law.
“An executive order cannot supersede state law,” says UCLA law professor Rick Hasen, who specializes in election law. “But there are all kinds of immunity doctrines and other reasons why a state would have a hard time prosecuting a federal official for violating state law in the conduct of official duties.”
The real answer is for Trump to stop trying to concoct a solution to an election problem that only exists in his warped imagination.
What else you should be reading
The must-read: Will Trump interfere in the midterms? Democrats and their allies are preparing
California vs. Trump: Racist ‘Magic Deportation Bus’ isn’t the way for Trump to keep Latino voters
The L.A. Times Special: Two of California’s top law enforcement leaders trade barbs over state election integrity
Until next week,
George Skelton
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