The Latest: 2nd judge freezes Trump mail ballot order with Supreme Court poised to rule
Another federal judge has ordered the U.S. Postal Service to stop implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail balloting as the Supreme Court prepares to weigh in. The ruling late Sunday adds another obstacle to Trump's effort to rewrite election rules as Americans prepare to vote.
Trump is playing down any need to check the development of artificial intelligence, saying he doesn't want America to give up its edge over China in a global competition. Winning, he said over the weekend, would help address the risks.
And Trump announced that he plans to drop a 10% tariff on Irish whiskey after lobbying by golfers and Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin. “Everybody’s been bugging me” to do it, Trump said.
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As technology leaders have issued warnings in recent days, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer says Congress should get a “full accounting” of how the Trump administration is working to put guardrails around testing for AI models, what it is doing to prevent American technology from flowing to China and how the U.S. would defend itself against the potential for increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled cyberattacks.
“Warning bells are ringing louder than they ever have – and the Trump administration is looking the other way,” said Schumer, D-N.Y. If the Trump administration does not act, “then Congress must.”
“The only ‘fears’ Americans have about our elections are being fueled by extreme liberal Democrats who refuse to support commonsense legislation that ensures Americans, and Americans only, decide our elections and other basic election security measures like Voter ID,” spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement.
Litigation about election rules has reached such a pitch that the National Bar Association announced a hotline to help voters who encounter trouble casting ballots amid last-minute changes.
Every election, the two major parties mobilize massive operations of attorneys, staffers and volunteers to monitor polling places and ballot counting. The Republican National Committee said it’s already recruited a record number of poll watchers.
“We’ve built the largest election integrity operation in Republican Party history because our mission is simple: secure every legal vote and ensure Americans can trust the outcome of our elections,” RNC spokeswoman Ally Triolo said.
Law professor Rick Hasen, who directs UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, said it’s important not to unduly scare voters about what might happen, but it’s “hard to walk the line between alarmism and complacency.”
During his first term, Trump refused to accept his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden and attempted to overturn the vote, only to be defied by career officials and more establishment Republicans. He’s stocked his second administration with people who helped his 2020 efforts, used the federal government to target his political enemies and pardoned more than 1,000 people prosecuted for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that was intended to halt the certification of Biden’s win.
Trump demanded Republicans redraw House maps to create more safe seats for themselves, held last week’s unusual midterm convention and has tried to change election rules even as states begin to send out ballots.
Democratic state parties announced their “New Battlefield Project” on Monday, an effort to recruit 10,000 volunteers to guard polling places in case armed federal officers show up.
Activists are planning mass protests if the Trump administration tries to interfere with voting or ballot counting. And legal scholars are distributing white papers advising judges how to respond if the government tries to seize ballots.
The unprecedented efforts are in response to Trump’s equally unprecedented moves to interfere with voting this year, including attempts to impose proof-of-citizenship requirements and directing the Postal Service to decide which voters should get a mail ballot.
“We have never prepared for an election sabotage event like we have now,” said Ezra Levin of the left-leaning group Indivisible.
Security researchers say rapid advances in artificial intelligence can exploit a flaw in voting equipment in Georgia to allow voters’ choices to be exposed after their ballots have been cast.
Election security advocates are criticizing state election officials for failing to fix the system’s vulnerability before the November elections. Election officials say they’ve taken steps to address the potential harm, but some advocates say it’s not enough.
The vulnerability does not allow votes to be changed, but it could match voters to their choices, violating the fundamental right of ballot secrecy and potentially creating an opening for legal challenges.
Other jurisdictions across the country use the same voting system. But many have applied a software fix and some states don’t allow the release of records needed to exploit the flaw. Georgia is the only state where the machines are used by nearly all in-person voters.
Trump said Sunday that he will look into requests from families of Sept. 11 victims to release records that could shed light on Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in the attacks 25 years ago.
Several families have long alleged that a group of extremist religious leaders in Saudi Arabia gained influence in the Saudi government and aided the hijackers. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, but the Saudi government has long denied any involvement in the attacks.
The families have asked Trump to declassify and release the relevant records. Asked about it Sunday during his trip to Ireland, the president said he would consider it.
“I’m going to look at it when I get back,” Trump said just before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington after a weekend in Ireland. “I know they asked me Friday.”
The relatives of 9/11 victims have been engaged in a lengthy legal battle against the Saudis. One of them, Terry Strada, called on Trump during the remembrance in New York City on Friday to “tell the Saudis to stop lying.”
Trump has agreed to a significant portion of a stringent ethics proposal that is part of broader cryptocurrency legislation headed for a key vote this week, according to three of the bill’s main Republican authors.
The bill initially had just a provision included that would bar all federally elected officials and their spouses, as well as federal judges, from issuing digital assets.
A core group of Democrats, as well as Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said that didn’t go far enough to address conflict-of-interest issues they had with Trump’s crypto wealth. Their votes would be needed to advance the bill in a key vote this Tuesday.
Tillis and Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., along with several other Democrats, had demanded language that would allow state attorneys general to step in and enforce the law in addition to the Justice Department.
In private, White House officials had raised concerns about giving state attorneys general the power to enforce the law. But a senior GOP aide said the president had agreed to “about 80%” of the proposal from Tillis and Gallego, pointing mainly to the state attorneys general provision.
Trump announced on Sunday at the close of a golf tournament in Ireland that he plans to remove a 10% tariff on Irish whiskey.
Trump said during the trophy ceremony for the Irish Open that he had been asked about the issue by everyone, including Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin and even some of the golfers. Irish Open winner Shane Lowry was among them, Trump said.
“Everybody’s been bugging me” to do it, the Republican president said. “And I said, ‘On behalf of the United States of America, I am going to take the tariffs off’” of Irish whiskey.
Irish whiskey currently faces the standard tariff imposed by Trump on most imports from the European Union, which was reduced from 15% to 10% in July.
Trump announced in April that he was lifting certain tariffs on U.K. whiskey, which includes Scotch and spirits made in Northern Ireland, creating an imbalance with Ireland.
Trump’s surprise announcement was met with loud whistling and cheers from the crowd of spectators. Details on how soon the tariff would be lifted were not immediately available.
Trump on Sunday played down the need for his administration to check the development of artificial intelligence, saying he worried about ceding America’s edge over China in a global competition and that winning would help address the risks from the advancing technology.
While acknowledging the need for some regulation, Trump provided no specifics about potential rules and attributed warnings about the technology moving too quickly and with little oversight to “negative forces” he did not identify, though industry pioneers have raised such concerns.
“We can put guardrails, we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that ... shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” Trump told reporters during a weekend trip to Ireland. “But whoever wins with AI wins.”
The Republican president spoke a day after Dario Amodei, CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, said the industry should put the brakes on its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Other tech leaders, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, publicly agreed with Amodei.
A federal judge ordered the U.S. Postal Service on Sunday to stop implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail balloting, adding another obstacle to the administration’s effort to rewrite election rules as the Supreme Court is poised to weigh in.
The nation’s highest court already is considering the administration’s appeal of an order by U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani in Boston prohibiting the Postal Service from enforcing its new rule on mail voting before this year’s midterm elections.
Late Sunday, U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols in Washington, D.C., handed down a similar hold on the rule.
Nichols had refused to issue an injunction in May, ruling at the time that a lawsuit was brought too early. That was the high court’s reasoning late last month when it lifted an earlier freeze by Talwani. Then the administration issued its rule to move ahead with Trump’s plan and the plaintiffs in Boston and Washington, D.C., refiled their lawsuits.
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