legality on a technicality
Several Iowa counties are expanding mail-in voting. The Trump campaign is only suing the Democratic-leaning ones.
The Trump campaign launched a lawsuit against two Iowa counties on Wednesday, suing the counties for making it easy to vote by mail, reports The Associated Press.
The Democratic-leaning counties had distributed absentee ballot request forms that had pre-filled boxes with voters' names, dates of birth, and voting pin numbers. The idea was that voters could just sign and return the forms to get mail-in ballots ahead of November's election.
But the Trump campaign says tens of thousands of ballot applications should be invalidated because the process wrongly includes personal information, violating Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate's instruction that the request forms should be mailed blank to "ensure uniformity." Pate, a Republican, isn't suing the counties, but said his office is investigating.
Linn County Auditor Joel Miller, a Democrat, said the applications were pre-filled to avoid common mistakes. "I'm just trying to protect people in my community from the pandemic," he said, arguing the move was within his authority.
As Obama campaign manager and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina put it, the attempt to "disenfranchise voters" isn't likely to earn the president many brownie points in a state where he's already walking a thin line.
Notably, the Trump campaign is not suing a Republican-leaning county in Iowa that did the exact same thing. Read more at The Associated Press.