The Washington Post
Supreme Court blocks sweeping mail ballot restrictions for midterm elections
The Trump administration had said its new restrictions were necessary to prevent fraud.
About one-third of voters used mail ballots in 2024.
In a brief order Monday evening, the majority did not explain its reasoning for leaving in place a lower court order blocking the administration’s plans. The majority wrote that the Trump administration was “unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge” to the lower court order.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a concurrence that in his view, there was “at least a fair prospect” the administration’s actions were within its authority. But, he continued, it “would be arbitrary and capricious” to impose the changes in the midterms because state and local authorities would not have time to implement them.
Two other conservative justices — Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas — dissented from the high court’s decision Monday evening.
Alito, joined by Thomas, wrote that organizations challenging the plans probably lacked standing and that states doing so were making arguments unlikely to succeed.
States had said there were practical issues involved in implementing the administration’s changes so close to the midterms, Alito wrote, adding that he took that problem seriously. But he wrote that states challenging the plans and the courts “bear a substantial share of the blame” for the timing, saying the litigation and earlier court orders had effectively shaped the calendar.
Election administrators in a number of states run by Democrats and Republicans alike have said it would be extremely challenging — if not impossible — to implement the administration’s changes with less than two months to go before elections. Some states have already started sending out mail-in ballots and others will soon follow.
An anonymous federal whistleblower also warned that voters could be disenfranchised and ballot delivery disrupted, asserting that the system created to implement the plan was rushed and did not undergo adequate testing. The Trump administration disputes that characterization.
The Supreme Court’s decision ends — for now — a dizzying legal battle among blue states, voting rights groups and the administration that has ping-ponged through the courts in recent weeks.
The Trump administration says the new restrictions, which were laid out in a March executive order, are necessary to prevent voter fraud. Trump has long claimed without evidence that voter fraud — particularly by noncitizens and with mail ballots — is rampant, but studies have found such instances are rare.
Under Trump’s plan, states would have to use ballot envelopes containing barcodes to combat fraud, and they would have to provide the federal government with lists of voters who are eligible to receive mail ballots.
The U.S. Postal Service would not deliver ballots in states that don’t hand over lists and would need to approve ballots in thousands of electoral districts.
States and voting rights groups argued that Trump had overstepped his authority, since the Constitution assigns election administration to the states and Congress. They also said the plan would cause electoral chaos.
“The Rule would disrupt the administration of mail voting mid-election and disenfranchise eligible voters nationwide, including voters in all-mail states like Colorado and Utah and elderly, rural, and disabled voters who must vote by mail,” the League of Women Voters and other groups wrote in their filing with the high court.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) on Monday evening called the Supreme Court’s ruling a victory for democracy. Colorado is among the two dozen states that sued over the postal rules.
“Trump’s attempt to sabotage the 2026 elections has failed,” she said in a statement.
The voting rights groups that challenged the rule changes also celebrated.
“This executive order was a blatant power grab designed to silence voters and undermine our elections, but it failed because the people and the law were on our side,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, president of the nonprofit group Common Cause.
The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday night about the Supreme Court’s ruling.
The high court’s order dealt only with applying the changes to the upcoming midterms. The case now returns to the lower courts, where legal fights will continue over whether the order can be implemented in future elections, including the 2028 presidential contest. That legal battle could return to the Supreme Court in the years ahead.
The administration last week had asked the justices to overturn a preliminary injunction by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee in Massachusetts, that blocked its plan from going into effect.
“The Rule ensures that States remain responsible for determining voter eligibility and eligibility to vote by mail, and it does not dictate ballot content, mailing or receipt deadlines, or ballot-counting procedures,” the appeal said. “The Rule thus plainly does not seize control of States’ administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”
On Sunday, a day before the Supreme Court weighed in on Talwani’s ruling, a federal judge in D.C. issued a separate ruling blocking the Trump administration’s plan from taking effect.
District Judge Carl J. Nichols, whom Trump appointed during his first term, wrote that plaintiffs challenging the administration’s plan had shown it “likely exceeds the authority Congress conferred on the Postal Service.”
The Trump administration on Monday sent Nichols’s opinion to the Supreme Court as the justices weighed Talwani’s ruling. In a filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said that if the high court stays Talwani’s ruling, it would require lower courts to also pause Nichols’s order.
The rapid-fire legal moves underscored the urgency of the matter for the Trump administration and the dwindling time officials had to get the executive order in place for November.
Some states have already set in motion voting for the Nov. 3 elections. Officials in some places — including Wisconsin, North Carolina and Alabama — had begun sending out mail-in ballots, and voters have in some cases submitted theirs. More states will follow suit in sending out ballots in the days and weeks ahead.
The executive order requires states to upload lists of voters to a portal being created by the U.S. Postal Service that has yet to be unveiled. The federal whistleblower said that the portal could result in many voters not receiving mail ballots.
The Postal Service had adopted a “zero-percent failure policy,” which might result in an entire batch of ballots being rejected if a single barcode sampled by a Postal Service employee did not match information submitted to the portal, the whistleblower said. One batch could contain tens of thousands of ballots.
“The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), who made the whistleblower complaint public.
A Postal Service spokesperson maintained in a statement that the system would perform well, saying, “Americans can have confidence that their election mail will be handled securely and delivered reliably.”
Lower courts have sided with two dozen states and the voting rights groups, finding that the Trump administration did not have the power to regulate the administration of state elections.
The Trump administration appealed some of those rulings to the Supreme Court in August on narrow, technical grounds. It argued that the lawsuits against his executive order were premature because the Postal Service had to finalize its rules for implementing the plan.
The high court agreed, and the cases were dismissed. But soon after the Postal Service finalized its order, the states and the voting rights groups renewed their challenges. The cases wended back to the Supreme Court in recent weeks.
Many states face looming deadlines to begin sending out absentee ballots, and some would have to replace envelopes, train staff and make other changes to comply with the order. Such preparations can take a year or more.
One hundred election officials from across the country submitted a friend-of-the-court brief saying Trump’s plan could wreak havoc with elections and it was too late to implement it.
“The court should understand that what hangs in the balance is every eligible voter’s right to cast their ballot and have it counted,” they said in the brief.
A dozen Republican-led states also weighed in, asking the court to green-light the plan and saying it would shore up confidence in voting. They called the changes “commonsense.”
“Allowing the federal government to promulgate final rules advancing election integrity reforms enhances the ability of states to ensure the security of mail voting within their jurisdictions,” the Republican states wrote.
Trump has been trying to exert greater federal control over elections. The administration this month asked the Supreme Court to clear the way for states to have access to a database that would allow them to verify that voters are citizens.
Trump has also been pushing the Senate to pass the Save America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship to register and to show photo identification when voting.
He aired debunked claims about vulnerabilities in election systems during a prime-time television address in July, fired members of a federal bipartisan election commission and threatened to withhold funding from states that do not make changes to electoral procedures.
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