Trump’s mail-in voting order is sowing chaos. That’s the point.

By Kimberly Atkins Stohr

The legal drama over President Trump’s executive order seeking to limit mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections — including a preliminary Supreme Court ruling in his favor — has sowed chaos. And that, of course, is part of the plan.

After the justices’ ruling Monday that seemed to clear the way for the order to go in effect, a Massachusetts District Court judge underscored that a separate injunction kept the matter blocked, and even accused the administration of flouting the law by publishing final regulations to implement it. That is, before she lifted that injunction Wednesday, as another challenge to Trump’s order has been filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court, which means more injunctions could soon be issued.

Meanwhile, states are left in limbo as ballots for November’s elections are set to go out as soon as next week.

The Supreme Court could have prevented this mayhem by putting the order on pause while all the litigation proceeds. Unfortunately the court’s majority seems either blind or indifferent to the confusion as well as to the autocracy that is taking hold under its watch. The rest of us cannot afford that luxury.

The occasion calls for absolute bluntness: Trump’s executive order seeking to limit mail-in voting, particularly in Democratic-leaning states, is one of the most audacious attacks on American democracy the country has experienced in its 250 years of existence.

It is not, as the court’s six conservatives so benignly described it, “an internal directive from the President to his subordinates mandating that certain agencies pursue certain policies.” Nor is it, as those justices wrote in the unsigned ruling, “designed to maintain public confidence in federal elections.” The fact that they frame it this way, despite the red flags raised by their three Democratic-appointed colleagues in dissent, is, frankly, outrageous.

What Trump’s directive would actually do is empower the US Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots of voters whose names do not appear on a voter list being compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, in ways that have raised both legal and accuracy concerns. It would also empower the Justice Department to prioritize the prosecution of state and local officials who issue ballots to voters who are not on that list. In short, the order would let the administration choose who can and cannot vote by mail. All this from a president who, despite his repeated false claims of rampant fraud in mail-in balloting, votes by mail himself.

This measure will go a long way to further the United States’ antidemocratic backslide into autocracy, bringing our nation’s system of government closer to those of Russia, Pakistan, India, Hungary, and Venezuela, where elections are held, but the parties in control — not the electorate — determine the outcome.

That threat alone should have been more than enough for the nation’s highest court to temporarily put the brakes on the directive, especially with the midterms just over two months away. I think the nation’s framers would be appalled by Trump’s attempt to rule like a king, and that any originalist view of the executive order would come to the same constitutional conclusion.

Which is just one reason why the justices’ ruling in Trump’s favor is so confounding.

Time is of the essence. The Supreme Court ruled only on the preliminary question of whether states seeking to block Trump’s order had standing, or enough of an actual injury, to sue. The majority essentially found that it was too early in the game to do so: No states had been required to do anything yet to comply with the order.

This is too clever by half. The reason states have not yet been required to begin taking steps like printing ballots with a barcode to allow the Postal Service to check the ballots against the Department of Homeland Security’s voter list is because the administration only just finalized the proposed postal regulation, and it has yet to compile the voter list. By the time it does, it will be all but impossible for states to scramble to adhere to them before the midterms. And state and local officials who opt to stick with their current methods of mail-in voting face the threat of federal prosecution.

As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson puts it in her dissent: “What makes today’s ruling so off-base is the Court’s lack of situational awareness regarding this equitable judgment.”

“Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections,” Jackson wrote.

That imprimatur is a powerful tool for a president that is seeking to put power over the foundational principle of our democracy: that the government belongs to the people, not to him.

This article originally appeared on BostonGlobe.com on August 26, 2027.