On MS NOW, Marc Elias commented on the mail in voting case: <\/p>\n
CHRIS HAYES, MS NOW HOST: Tomorrow is Tulsi Gabbard’s last day as the Director of National Intelligence, and that position will then be filled by Donald Trump’s pick for acting DNI, Bill Pulte, a guy with zero national security or intelligence experience who, in his current role as the country’s top mortgage financing official, has dug through people’s private mortgage documents to refer Trump critics for criminal prosecution. Even some Senate Republicans don’t want Pulte overseeing intelligence. That all came to a head yesterday when Trump blew up the Senate intelligence hearing for his actual permanent nominee, Jay Clayton. Senate Majority Leader John Thune was asked about that today. REPORTER: Do you have a better sense of why he did this? SEN. THUNE: I think he’s very committed to Bill Pulte.<\/i> HAYES: Yeah, no kidding. He’s very committed to Bill Pulte. He’s very committed to Pulte spending a few months using the apparatus of American intelligence to corrupt the midterm election process. Marc Elias is a voting rights attorney who fights voter suppression efforts around the country. He’s the founder of Democracy Docket. And he joins me now. Marc, I suppose there’s not much to do about Bill Pulte, but do you share our concerns about why Trump wants him in that position? MARC ELIAS, DEMOCRACY DOCKET, DEMOCRATIC PARTY ATTORNEY: Absolutely. I mean, look, Donald Trump doesn’t put anyone as an administration who is not at least OK with being an election denier. But when it comes to the really important positions from his standpoint, FBI director, you know, attorney general and yes, ODNI, the director of national intelligence. He wants someone who’s all in. And you saw that with Tulsi Gabbard. You’ve seen that with Bill Pulte. And I think Jay Clayton tried to like audition for the role, but maybe he didn’t go far enough. HAYES: There are a number of fronts on which this sort of assault in the midterms happening. One of the kind of real obsessions of Trump is mail in voting. He wants to stop mail in voting. He wants to attack it. He wants to sort of be able to control who gets to mail in vote, who doesn’t. You have filed a number of lawsuits on this today. You got a win in which a judge is going to allow your lawsuits to proceed. A federal judge in Massachusetts said the Democratic state attorney general and pro voting organizations like yours can continue to challenge his sweeping executive order that attacked mail voting before the midterm elections. What does that mean functionally? ELIAS: Yeah, so just to be clear, this was a parallel suit to the one we followed. We followed one in Washington, D.C. This is the one in Massachusetts. But both of them basically seek the same thing, which is to prevent Donald Trump’s executive order, which claims that he has the power to control mail in voting by, among other things, telling the Postal Service that that what mail in ballots they can carry to election offices and which ones they can’t. In other words, Donald Trump wants to put together a list of voters who are eligible to vote by mail. And if you’re not on Donald Trump’s list, then the U.S. Postal Service simply cannot deliver your mail in ballot. And this is obviously a threat to free and fair elections. You can imagine it. You can only imagine how those lists will be put together. My law firm and I are involved in 30 cases against the Department of Justice to try to keep their hands off of these voter files. We are so far undefeated in those cases. And and all of this is laddering up, Chris, to an effort in which Donald Trump wants to create a national voter file and then dictate to states, to the Postal Service, to the Department of Justice who gets to vote and who doesn’t. HAYES: There’s also I mean, I think my read of the law is that this executive order is going to be stopped because it’s it’s flatly illegal and he doesn’t have the power. But there is a threat to mail in voting that seems much more acute, which might be coming to the Supreme Court any day now. They’re going to they’re going to rule on whether states can allow the counting of mail in ballots that arrive after Election Day, like many states do. Mississippi, 18 other states allow late ballots to be counted. Obviously, California is a place we see this. And it seems to me like a torture right wing reading of the federal statute that would make it not possible. We’re all familiar with like filing our taxes on April 15th and it gets there when it gets there. But you’ve made the deadline. What are you expecting from the court on this and how big a deal might it be if they say you can’t can’t count late, late arriving ballots? ELIAS: Yeah. So, first of all, I’m not going to swear, but this is back crazy. I mean, this is nuts to say it is a strained reading of the federal statute. I was like, give strained, strained is doing a lot of work there, Chris. The argument that the Republicans are making is that because federal law sets Election Day as the Tuesday following the first Monday in November, that the result of that is that people who timely return their mail in ballots, they put it in the mail, they are postmarked on or before Election Day, that those ballots should be thrown in the trash and those voters disenfranchised, even though they have done everything right, they shouldn’t be they should vote shouldn’t be counted. As you point out about this will affect voters in at least 19 states. It’s actually higher than that if you count subsets of voters and it will lead to the disenfranchisement of of of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of voters. And look, here’s the thing, Chris, you got to give credit to the RNC that brought this case. We have been I’ve been litigating this against them and they keep losing and losing and losing. So they decided to sue. Wait for it. Mississippi, Mississippi, a state that doesn’t even have no excuse mail in voting. That’s where they brought the lawsuit. I think they were hoping that they wouldn’t face stiff opposition. We intervened and have been defending the Mississippi law. As you point out, we are waiting for a ruling from the Supreme Court. And, Chris, I have to say, you know, I feel like our faith in the Supreme Court is constantly tested as to how far they will shift the Overton window. This one would be that crazy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n