The Supreme Court has rejected the Trump administration’s bid to impose severe restrictions on mail-in voting just weeks ahead of the midterms.
The court, which was divided 7-2, with conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting, upheld a lower court’s injunction blocking the United States Postal Service from implementing new rules around who can receive a mail-in ballot ahead of November’s vote.
Under this new rule, states would have had to submit lists of eligible voters to the Postal Service, which would then confirm that ballots were sent only to people on that list. The USPS does not typically hold such a role.
“The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Kavanaugh did add, however, that “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority. But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious … because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”
Voting by mail has also already begun in some states ahead of November’s elections, making the implementation of this plan even more difficult for Americans across the country to vote.
This is a major loss for President Donald Trump, who has long railed against mail-in voting, claiming without evidence that it led to election fraud, and the latest legal defeat the president and his administration have faced in a multipronged approach to undermine trust in US elections.
The White House and the USPS did not respond to a request for comment about the ruling.
“Today, Donald Trump lost another battle in his unconstitutional war to choose his own voters, and the American people are winners,” Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state, wrote in an emailed statement. “This ruling affirms what our Constitution has always held: Elections belong to the American people, not a desperate man in Washington. Democratic secretaries of state applaud the court on upholding this fundamental principle, and we stand ready to fight any attempt to cause chaos, fear, and intimidation in our elections.”
The mail-in voting battle has occurred since the spring, when the president signed an executive order in March titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” The order demanded that all states send the Postal Service a list of voters who would receive mail-in ballots. In turn, the USPS could refuse to deliver ballots to voters not on the lists or ballots that didn’t comply with new rules around barcodes and envelopes.
The majority of the provisions of the executive order were quickly blocked by federal courts before the Trump administration appealed the rulings to the Supreme Court in July. Last month, the conservative court ruled along ideological lines to allow the new rules to proceed, writing that the states that sought to block the rules didn’t have standing because the rules hadn’t been implemented yet.
In the wake of the ruling, a USPS whistleblower claimed that the online portal for the new rules had been hastily thrown together without the necessary care and attention needed for such a critical piece of software.
“The whistleblower’s allegations make clear that USPS lacks the technical or operational capability needed to effectively implement the [executive order’s] provisions in a way that safeguards every citizen’s right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, who disclosed the whistleblower’s warning, wrote in a letter to the postmaster general. “Despite this, the Trump administration appears intent on USPS moving forward with its flawed plans, no matter the chaos they may create.”