The ballot by Trump’s mailbox by Markus Gibbons

The President who has repeatedly treated postal voting as a suspicious contrivance has, himself, used the postal system to vote. The contradiction would be merely comic if the stakes were not the machinery of American democracy.

The Supreme Court’s emergency intervention, allowing the administration’s postal-voting restrictions to proceed for the moment while litigation continues, is another episode in the increasingly strange American habit of governing elections through emergency orders, emergency appeals and emergency judicial decisions. The Court did not settle the underlying constitutional questions. But that distinction, so important to lawyers, can become rather less comforting to voters when election officials are left wondering which rules will still exist by the time ballots arrive.

Trump’s executive order seeks to bring an extraordinary amount of federal authority into an area traditionally administered by the states. Under the plan, the Postal Service could refuse to transmit mail ballots associated with states that do not comply with federal requirements concerning voter lists and ballot procedures. The administration describes this as election integrity. Its opponents see something much more consequential: an attempt to acquire leverage over the practical mechanics of voting.

That distinction matters. Democracy does not usually collapse because somebody announces that democracy is being abolished. It is weakened through a thousand apparently technical decisions: which identification is accepted, which registration survives, which envelope is valid, which ballot arrives on time, which database is considered authoritative. The drama is bureaucratic rather than cinematic. There is no tank in the street. There is a form missing a box.

And yet, collectively, those small decisions determine who gets to participate. The peculiar irony is that Trump himself has used mail voting. The postal ballot, like many things in modern American life, appears to become perfectly legitimate when it serves the right person and mysteriously dangerous when it might serve the wrong electorate. There is something almost Victorian about this principle: the railway is a marvel when one is travelling first class, but a threat to civilization when somebody else boards the train.

The deeper problem is not simply whether every Trump proposal survives judicial scrutiny. It is the philosophy behind the proposals. If elections are regarded as contests whose legitimacy depends upon whether one side wins, then every voting rule becomes a potential weapon. The objective quietly shifts from making voting secure and accessible to making the electoral system advantageous to one political faction.

That is the road to permanent suspicion. Americans should be able to disagree ferociously about candidates, policies and parties. They should not have to wonder whether the federal government is redesigning the voting process because the people currently running it dislike how certain Americans vote.

The Supreme Court’s decision is temporary. The consequences of the administration’s campaign against mail voting may not be. Once citizens begin believing that access to the ballot depends upon political convenience, trust becomes extraordinarily difficult to restore.

Perhaps the strangest feature of this saga is that the postal service is being asked to become a gatekeeper of democracy. And somewhere in that irony lies the entire problem: Trump once trusted the mailbox enough to put his own ballot inside it. He should extend that trust to everyone else.