Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is pushing back hard against 25 Democratic state attorneys general who are suing to block President Trump’s executive order directing federal agencies to help states verify that only citizens receive mail-in ballots and requiring the U.S. Postal Service to make those ballots trackable.
“The left, because they’re concerned about losing at the midterms, want to be able to obstruct this administration’s efforts to ensure the integrity of our elections,” Marshall told Fox News Digital ahead of Thursday’s oral arguments before U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston.
Marshall, a Republican, led a letter in July from 13 GOP attorneys general backing the Postal Service’s follow-through on Trump’s March 31 executive order, which set up an audit of states’ voter rolls.
“You have to wonder – when those that are objecting to this – how confident they can be in the security of their elections, as opposed to becoming just a partisan opportunity to ensure the Democrats win and keep conservative voices from being heard, not only in local and state levels of government, but particularly in Washington.”
The order lets the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration cross-check voter rolls against citizenship records. If a state refuses to share that data, the Postal Service could halt the mailing of that state’s absentee ballots.
Talwani, an Obama appointee, issued a restraining order against the administration, writing that “USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote.”
Marshall rejects the premise that the problem is “unsubstantiated,” pointing to what he says is documented fraud in his own state.
“This is not a solution looking for a problem. This is in response to what we know is going on across the country. And this provides a commonsense, straightforward way for states to be able to ensure elections, but most importantly, for the people of this country to have belief that their elections in fact are accurate.”
He also tied the fight to the SAVE America Act, which he says Democrats oppose because they don’t want assurances that people here illegally cannot vote.
“It’s not a shock that Democrats are standing up the ability for us to pass the SAVE Act because they don’t want to allow for there to be assurances of what is already in the law: That somebody here illegally cannot be able to vote. But here we have the president being able to make sure that we are allowing for government resources to be used in an appropriate way to simply allow those who are qualified to vote, vote, and those who aren’t, don’t.”
Marshall doesn’t expect Talwani to rule in the administration’s favor. “I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I would fully expect her to continue with the Democratic Party line,” he said. The Trump administration has already asked the First Circuit for a stay of Talwani’s order. “We’re going to continue to battle this case along with the administration and look forward to standing beside them when they obtain this victory,” Marshall said.
Marshall insists the order doesn’t stop anyone from getting an absentee ballot legally — it just verifies the process. “Here we have a barcode that allows us to be able to connect it directly with the voter – we have the assurance that that ballot is being cast by the person in fact that receives that ballot,” he said. “Democrats and Republicans alike ought to praise this as a commonsense effort to be able to restore election integrity in this area, but it’s not a shock that Democrats have opposed it.”
He cited the 2005 bipartisan commission chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, which identified mailed absentee ballots as particularly susceptible to fraud.
“This is about securing elections, not interfering with states’ abilities to conduct elections, and we think that we’ll be able to eliminate many of the issues that we’ve seen, including in Alabama, that have occurred in the past.”
Talwani’s restraining order remains in effect for up to another week while she weighs whether to issue a longer-term preliminary injunction. The Democratic Attorneys General Association did not respond to a request for comment on Marshall’s remarks.
