The Supreme Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s bid to restrict mail ballots ahead of November’s midterm elections, a decisive defeat for the president that comes with voting already underway in several states.
The court’s brief, one paragraph order said the government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to a lower court injunction blocking the restrictions. The decision allows states to continue sending mail ballots under the processes they have used for years, a method that has accounted for nearly a third of votes cast in recent elections. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly dissented; no other justice dissented.
The ruling denied a Justice Department request to lift an injunction issued by Boston based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who blocked the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing the mail ballot rule while legal challenges from states and voting rights groups proceed. The Postal Service had adopted the rule after Trump signed a March executive order aimed at tightening mail voting requirements.
What We Know So Far
Under the proposed rule, states would have been required to submit lists of mail ballot recipients to the Postal Service and use agency approved outbound and return envelopes fitted with unique barcodes. The Postal Service could then have refused to deliver ballots that did not comply with the new standards or that were associated with voters not appearing on the submitted lists.
Election officials said there was no realistic way to carry out a complete overhaul of mail voting procedures in the weeks before the midterms. Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin had already begun sending mail ballots to voters over the past week while the proposed system remained inactive. Talwani, who imposed her injunction September 4, found the rule likely violated the Constitution’s allocation of election administration authority to the states and said compliance would be impossible given the rapidly approaching midterms. A second federal judge, Washington-based U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, separately ruled against the rule Sunday. The Boston based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had also declined to stay Talwani’s order last Thursday, writing that the rule would likely disenfranchise millions of voters while providing minimal, if any, gains against voter fraud.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a concurring statement, said there is a fair prospect the rule falls within the Postal Service’s legal authority, but that state and local election officials lack sufficient time to reasonably implement it before this year’s elections. Alito, in dissent, wrote that the Postal Service has broad authority to regulate the mail and likely does have power to enforce the restrictions, comparing the challengers’ legal claims to an unlikely to succeed Hail Mary pass.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said the ruling allows the state to continue its work without having to upend established election processes to meet what he called unrealistic mail ballot requirements. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, also a Democrat, said it remains essential to reject the notion that ballot access and election security are mutually exclusive. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican serving as that state’s chief election officer, said on social media that Utahns can have confidence the 2026 election will proceed as normal. The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment, though the administration has previously described the restrictions as commonsense measures aimed at securing elections.
A whistleblower report cited by the Associated Press said the Postal Service’s proposed requirements could have led to millions of mail ballots never being sent, since a single barcode error in the not yet operational tracking portal could result in an entire batch of ballots being discarded. Court documents indicated some states lack the infrastructure to quickly pivot back to expanded in-person voting if mail options were curtailed.
What Advocates Are Saying
Sophia Lin Lakin, voting rights project director at the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped represent some of the challengers, said the administration keeps testing the limits of its power as though election rules were mere suggestions rather than binding law. “The Constitution gives states and Congress the power to set the rules for federal elections — not the president, and not the Postal Service,” Lakin said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose state led one of the lawsuits against the rule, called the decision a good day for democracy, the rule of law and Americans seeking to exercise their constitutional right to vote. League of Women Voters CEO Celina Stewart said the proposed restrictions represented an extraordinary attempt to interfere with voting that would have thrown elections into chaos, adding that voters should never be caught in the middle of political power struggles.
Why This Matters
The ruling marks a stark setback for Trump on an issue he has consistently emphasized as central to election integrity, despite what a 2025 Brookings Institution report found to be an extremely low rate of mail voting fraud, occurring in only about four cases out of every 10 million ballots cast. Trump has long expressed skepticism toward mail voting and has made false claims of widespread fraud tied to his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, even though he has himself voted by mail in past elections, including as recently as this year.
Restricting mail voting carries direct political stakes for the midterms, since Democratic voters have used mail ballots at disproportionately higher rates than Republican voters according to various surveys, meaning the proposed restrictions could have affected the two parties unevenly heading into a closely contested fight for control of Congress. The dispute also fits into a broader pattern of administration efforts to expand federal involvement in election administration ahead of November, following an earlier Supreme Court decision on August 24 that lifted a separate Talwani injunction on procedural grounds without addressing the underlying rule’s legality.
Kavanaugh’s concurrence leaves open the possibility that the Postal Service could eventually be found to have legal authority to implement similar restrictions in the future, even though the timing made implementation impossible for this year’s elections, suggesting the broader legal question remains unresolved beyond the immediate midterm cycle.
What Happens Next
The underlying legal challenges from states and voting rights groups will continue in the lower courts, with Monday’s order addressing only whether the restrictions could take effect this year rather than resolving their ultimate legality. Given Kavanaugh’s stated view that the rule may fall within the Postal Service’s authority, the issue could return to the Supreme Court in a future election cycle with more lead time for implementation.
States are expected to proceed with their standard mail voting processes for the current midterm cycle, with several already having begun sending ballots to voters. Continued litigation over the broader legal questions raised by the case is likely regardless of the outcome of November’s elections.
Reporting drawn from the Associated Press and Reuters
