美 연방대법원, 트럼프 우편투표 제한 행정명령 6대3으로 허용

The U.S. Supreme Court has handed President Trump a win. With the November midterm elections approaching, an executive order aimed at overhauling mail-in voting had been stalled by a lower-court injunction — until the justices, in a 6-3 vote, cleared the way for it to move forward. Six conservative justices formed the majority to stay part of an injunction a Massachusetts federal judge had issued in June, allowing a central provision to proceed: the U.S. Postal Service would deliver ballots only to voters on a list compiled by the Department of Homeland Security. Twenty-three states, led by California, had fought hard to block the measure. The ruling is a reminder that the question of election integrity is not a problem confined to the other side of the Atlantic — it is very much alive here as well.

President Trump’s executive order, signed in March, was straightforward in design. The Department of Homeland Security would compile a list of citizens eligible to vote, and the Postal Service would send mail ballots only to those on that list — an attempt to shut off, at the source, the practice of sending ballots en masse to unverified or “ghost” voters. A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the measure in June, and twenty-three states led by California joined the litigation, halting implementation altogether. On the 24th, the Supreme Court lifted one of the two injunctions standing in its way. The vote was 6-3, with every conservative justice in the majority. This is not yet a complete victory — one injunction remains in place, and the legal fight continues in the lower courts. Still, the weight of the decision is not to be underestimated: the Supreme Court siding with the Trump administration lends legitimacy to the broader effort to overhaul election administration ahead of the midterms. Since the 2020 presidential election, confidence in mail-in voting has remained a live fuse within the American conservative movement — unverified voter rolls, weak signature matching, and disputes over ballots arriving after Election Day dogged the previous administration throughout its term. It is no accident that President Trump made this issue a priority the moment he returned to office. With this ruling, the system in which the Department of Homeland Security and the Postal Service jointly control the voter list is now, for the first time, being put to the test.

The logic behind the twenty-three states’ opposition to the executive order has been consistent: stricter identity verification, they argue, would suppress turnout among low-income, elderly, and disabled voters. That was the same rationale the Massachusetts federal judge cited in issuing the June injunction. But flip that logic over, and the calculation becomes simple. The more a state resists list-based verification, the less willing it is to give up the influence that unverified mail ballots exert on outcomes. Behind the banner of protecting voters lies an organizational logic aimed at securing the broadest possible pool of ballots that cannot be checked. That most of the states suing over the order lean Democratic only reinforces this picture. The public rhetoric is about protecting the vulnerable; the private calculation looks a lot more like defending a familiar formula for winning elections built on unverified mail ballots.

This is not a fight to be dismissed as someone else’s problem. South Korea, too, has faced recurring allegations of lax oversight surrounding absentee and early voting outside one’s home district every election cycle. Even during the most recent local elections, allegations surfaced repeatedly that ballot counts at certain polling stations did not match vote tallies — and calls for verification were, as always, pushed to the margins. The United States is at least attempting to build a minimal cross-checking mechanism, matching the Department of Homeland Security’s voter list against Postal Service delivery records. South Korea’s National Election Commission, by contrast, continues to rely solely on its own internal audits, remaining reluctant to accept outside verification or an independent special counsel investigation. Even after the Lee Jae-myung administration took office, reform of the election commission has amounted to little more than lip service, with the ruling party devoting far more energy to constitutional revision than to fixing the electoral system. To be clear, none of these allegations have been established as fact — they remain matters requiring verification. The problem lies in the refusal to allow that verification in the first place. What conservatives need to do now is clear: use this U.S. ruling as leverage to put list-based verification, independent audits reconciling ballot counts with vote totals, and a special counsel investigation into election-fraud allegations back on the agenda. Demanding verification is not conspiracy theory. It is the basic minimum democracy requires.

What this Supreme Court decision ultimately shows is simple: public trust in election outcomes is not given freely — it survives only on procedures that can be verified. President Trump pushed that principle through, all the way to the courtroom. South Korean voters need to ask themselves the same question now: can our elections truly be verified? As long as the Lee Jae-myung government and the election commission cannot give a clear answer, the distrust will not fade. Restoring election integrity has to go hand in hand with a change of government.