Once Again, Leftist Judges Keep the Ballot Box Wide Open for Cheaters
Two Biden-appointed judges just told America that cleaning up elections is too much work. On Saturday the First Circuit Court of Appeals, by a 2-1 vote, refused to let President Trump enforce an executive order that would require proof of citizenship and tighten mail-in ballot rules before the November midterms. The door stays open. The cheaters get a free pass. And the left pretends this is about “democracy.”
The order Trump signed in March directed the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state, using citizenship and naturalization records plus other federal databases. It also restricted the Postal Service from delivering mail ballots to people not on approved lists.
Common-sense safeguards against non-citizen voting and the well-documented vulnerabilities of unsupervised mail ballots. A lower-court Obama judge had already blocked those provisions for 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia back in June. The appeals court left that injunction in place.
Who decided America cannot protect its own elections in time? Judge Gustavo A. Gelpí, put on the bench by Joe Biden in 2021, and Judge Julie Rikelman, another Biden pick from 2023. The lone dissent came from Judge Joshua D. Dunlap, appointed by Trump himself last year.
The majority did not even bother arguing the Constitution forbids verifying citizenship. They simply declared the deadlines too tight and the administrative burden on the states too heavy. In other words, it would be inconvenient to stop the cheating before voters go to the polls.
Reuters, ever the faithful stenographer for the regime, framed Trump’s order as an attempt to “overhaul elections” and pushed the same tired line that claims of 2020 fraud were false. Yet the Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database continues to document case after case of proven absentee ballot abuse, false registrations, and non-citizen voting. Anyone still claiming these problems are imaginary is either willfully blind or invested in the outcome.
Mail-in voting exploded under emergency COVID rules and never went back to normal. Ballots float through the postal system for days or weeks with minimal chain of custody. Signatures are checked, or not, according to the mood of the local official. Non-citizens have been found on voter rolls in multiple states.
Trump’s order simply tried to use existing federal records to give states a reliable citizenship list so they could clean their own rolls. That is not “interfering” with elections. That is the federal government finally doing its job of identifying who is lawfully present in the country.
The left’s sudden devotion to states’ rights is rich. The same activists who demand federal control over every other aspect of American life now clutch their pearls when the executive branch tries to keep illegal aliens and double voters off the rolls. They call it an attack on “our democracy” while fighting tooth and nail against the most basic requirement of any real democracy: that only citizens vote, and that their votes are counted once, under rules that are clear and enforceable.
Scripture does not mince words about honest scales. “A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight” (Proverbs 11:1 is off-limits, so consider instead the clear command in Leviticus 19:35-36 that the Lord’s people must use just balances and just weights).
An election system that refuses to verify citizenship and treats mail ballots like lottery tickets is a false balance. It rewards the lawless and punishes the citizen who shows up in person with identification.
Trump has made the SAVE America Act a priority in Congress for the same reason he issued the executive order: Americans are tired of watching elections decided by people who should never have been on the rolls in the first place.
The courts keep slamming the door. The media keeps gaslighting. And the republic keeps sliding toward a place where the rules only apply to one side.
This is not complicated. If you want clean elections, you verify citizenship and lock down the mail. If you want to keep winning by any means necessary, you appoint judges who will call those efforts unconstitutional the moment they threaten the left’s power.
The First Circuit just made its choice. The rest of us still get to make ours in November—if the ballots that reach the counting rooms actually belong to American citizens.