Conservative Supreme Court justices, in a 6-3 ruling on Monday, refused to support a block on a March executive order that would implement restrictive rules on the use of mail-in ballots in the mid-term elections.
Another lower court is weighing the legality of the US Postal Service from implementing parts of the executive order. That case could soon be sent to SCOTUS’s shadow docket for an “emergency ruling.”
The Trump executive order would direct the postal service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of eligible US citizens that the administration could use to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens.
The majority said the states that challenged the president’s order could not demonstrate that they were sufficiently harmed by voting rules that had not yet taken effect.
The ruling reasoned that it was too soon for the states to challenge the order but left the door open for them to sue again as the midterm contest approaches. Liberal justices dissented, with Ketanji Brown Jackson warning that conservative justices were injecting needless chaos and uncertainty into the mid-term elections.
- The unsigned order was issued just after the US Postal Service on Friday published final regulations on how it would carry out Trump’s order.
- The USPS said in its rule that it would “not take actions to implement the rule specifically for the 2026 election” unless the Supreme Court ruled in the administration’s favor.
Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in June ruled that Trump lacked constitutional authority to change how states run federal elections, noting states have the role of determining voter eligibility requirements, and that federal agencies lack the ability to compile accurate citizen lists for all 50 states.