President Donald Trump’s push to impose new restrictions on mail ballots ahead of the midterm elections suffered a major setback Monday. The Supreme Court declined to lift a lower court’s injunction blocking the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing the new rules, leaving existing mail-voting procedures in place for the 2026 elections.
Supreme Court rejects the administration’s bid to enforce new USPS ballot rules
In a short, unsigned order, the justices found that the government was unlikely to prevail in its challenge to the injunction issued by the lower court. According to The Hill, the injunction came from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston and remains in place for now.
This was not the first trip to the high court for this dispute; it was the third. Earlier, the justices had actually sided with Trump, ruling that the Democratic-led states challenging his executive order probably didn’t have legal standing to bring the case in the first place. Monday’s fight was different: it centered on the Postal Service’s rollout of the directive, not the order itself.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, appointed by Donald Trump, sided with the majority and explained his reasoning publicly. He didn’t rule out that the underlying policy could eventually be found lawful, but he argued the rollout came too late for officials to manage. He wrote that applying the rule now “would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”
Two justices pushed back. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented, writing that “some of the plaintiffs lack standing, while the remainder are pursuing a claim that this Court has recently called a ‘Hail Mary pass’ that ‘rarely succeeds.'” The rest of the court kept its votes private.
At the center of the dispute is a Postal Service rule that would have required states to provide voter information to USPS and meet new requirements for sending mail-in ballots. The rule also imposed new standards for ballot-envelope designs and barcodes and allowed USPS to withhold ballots that did not meet the requirements.
