Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s Mail Ballot Scheme

A mailbox and a ballot drop box in Washington state.M. Scott Brauer/ZUMA Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. President Donald Trump’s latest effort to steal the midterms has played out in plain view. His plan was to force states to conform to last minute, untested, and too-late-to-implement vote-by-mail requirements with the inevitable result of disenfranchising thousands, if not millions, of voters. The only thing Trump needed to launch this bomb into November’s elections was the go-ahead from the Supreme Court. But on Monday evening, the court refused to okay the scheme. The brief, unsigned order stated that the Trump administration was unlikely to prevail in its argument that its US Postal Service rule limiting ballot delivery was legal, and that the harm of letting the rule take effect was too great. As with so many of Trump’s corrupt and lawless actions—from his crypto schemes to bulldozing the East Wing of the White House—the president often carries out corrupt and illegal schemes in public. His plan to disrupt mail-in voting, which he perceives would harm Democrats more than Republicans, was the latest. By sanitizing the effort with the language of executive orders, rule-making, and court documents, the administration hoped to blind people to the election-stealing scheme underneath it all. It was an attempted heist in broad daylight. In addition to the scheme’s illegality, officials said it would be impossible to implement in six weeks. On Monday, only two justices publicly went along with this plan. In a dissent, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, argued that the government likely had the authority to regulate mail-in ballots in the way the administration tried. A third justice, Brett Kavanaugh, agreed, but said implementing it so close to the election would cause too much harm. That means there are likely three votes, if not more, that would side with a Trump administration push to implement its mail-in ballot rules for the 2028 elections and beyond. Trump has been set on winning this fall’s midterms by any means for more than a year. Shortly after returning to power in 2025, he issued an executive order requiring citizens to show a passport or similar document to prove citizenship when registering to vote. But the president has no authority to interfere with states’ administration of elections, and a federal court blocked the order. Next, he pressed Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which would have similarly required documentary proof of citizenship. When that failed, he issued the March 2026 executive order that led to today’s court action, this time instructing the Postal Service to limit the delivery of mail-in-ballots by promulgating a rule that places new requirements on how states can send mail ballots. The rule, formally unveiled in late August, would have allowed the Postal Service to throw out thousands, even millions, of ballots that are legally cast. It’s an illegal power grab that states, election officials, and legal experts warned would cause a preventable and monumental disaster. “The rule threatens to disenfranchise millions of elderly voters, disabled voters, military voters, and all others including the most vulnerable who depend on mail voting, in both red states and blue,” four experts wrote in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court. “This disenfranchisement risk is literal, not hyperbolic.” The Trump administration even acknowledged the fallout. In asking the justices to allow the USPS rule to take effect, the administration downplayed it as merely imposing “modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements.” But a few pages later, the brief argued that failing to swiftly implement the rule—an impossible feat so close to the midterms—would have disastrous results. Unless the rule takes effect immediately, “there is a grave risk that States may not have taken the necessary steps to comply…potentially depriving those States’ citizens of the ability to vote by mail.” In other words, even the administration knew that rushing out the rule would lead to mass disenfranchisement—it simply wouldn’t accept that that was a good reason to block implementation of its “modest” envelope requirements. Though it help against Trump this time, the Supreme Court let the order get this far. On August 24, the court threw the midterms into turmoil by ruling that it was too soon for states to challenge the executive order because it wasn’t yet affecting the states. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson denounced that ruling as a “Kafkaesque nightmare” that “contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it.” The Postal Service had unveiled its rule on August 21, which specified that it will only deliver mail-in ballots if states both hand over their voter rolls to the Trump administration via an online portal that the Postal Service has yet to complete, and adopt new envelope and bar code requirements. In addition to the Postal Service rule, Trump’s executive order instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create a nationwide database and individual lists of citizens in each state, presumably to limit who can vote. Such a system might be used to override state voter rolls with potentially inaccurate lists. That portion of the order was put on hold in a different legal challenge, but the administration has appealed to the Supreme Court, which will soon seperately decide whether DHS can use it. This means that the threat of administration meddling in the midterms through this executive order has not disappeared. Trump’s executive order is a massive power grab that aimed to usurp states’ authority to run their own elections and radically transform the role of the Postal Service from delivering the mail to determining who receives a ballot according to Trump’s whims. “Never before has USPS attempted to interfere with elections in this way, let alone a fast-approaching election,” the 23 states challenging the rule told the court. “And nothing in federal law authorizes USPS to refuse to deliver ballots.” In addition to the scheme’s obvious illegality, election officials have repeatedly told courts it would be impossible to implement six weeks before the midterms. “In some States, unrebutted evidence establishes that compliance with USPS’ rule would be impossible ahead of the midterms, meaning that millions of voters would be unable to vote by mail and some would not be able to vote at all,” the 23 states challenging the rule wrote. “In the remaining States, there would be chaos—and a significant risk that millions more voters would be denied the ability to vote.” A Postal Service whistleblower told Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on August 31 that the new USPS system was “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed” and could lead to a “catastrophic failure which could derail the midterm elections.” As one example, the whistleblower said that if one ballot out of 10,000 failed to scan properly, all 10,000 ballots would be rejected. The whistleblower concluded that “potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.” Election officials across the country and from both parties amplified these concerns. “Even if state and local officials were somehow able to implement this new rule perfectly, there is a high risk of mistakes, incompetence, and delay on USPS’ part,” the 23 states opposed to the rule told the courts. “One statistic from USPS’ final rule illustrates how little the agency has thought all of this through. USPS estimates that its ballot-scanning process could take up to one minute per ballot. If that is right, it would take USPS approximately 43 years to scan all of California’s 23 million mail ballots, to say nothing of the time required to scan the millions of ballots mailed in other States.” The opposition to the USPS rule didn’t just come from blue states. Top Republican election officials in Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah told the court that “neither election officials across the country nor USPS are equipped to successfully implement this Rule for the 2026 midterms.” The election administrators’ brief notes that mail-in ballots have already been sent in states including North Carolina, Delaware, and Alabama, and will soon go out in many other places. “Attempting to implement the Rule now will almost certainly lead to mistakes, delays, and confusion for both voters and election officials,” they wrote. District Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee, first blocked Trump’s order in June in the 23 states that challenged it and extended that to a nationwide injunction in early August. “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” she wrote. Following the Supreme Court’s decision on August 24 to allow the executive order to move forward, she specifically blocked the new USPS rule after a new challenge from states and voting rights groups, finding that states working “on a prescribed timeframe” would be “unable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement.” A unanimous panel of judges on the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Talwani’s decision last Thursday. “We see no obvious error in the district court’s conclusion that allowing this Final Rule to be effective for the soon-arriving November 3 election will likely result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters across the country while providing minimal—if any—gains in combating voter fraud,” they wrote. On Sunday night, a Trump-appointed district court judge, Carl Nichols of Washington, D.C., also issued an injunction against the USPS rule. While Judge Talwani had only enjoined key parts of the USPS rule, Judge Nichols blocked the entire rule, writing that it exceeded “any conception of the outer bounds” of the agency’s authority. Trump’s proposed system appeared designed to fail—which is exactly what the president wanted. One in 3 Democrats voted by mail in 2024, compared to 1 in 4 Republicans, according to data published by The New York Times. Trump was willing to disenfranchise a significant chunk of his own voters so long as more Democrats pay the price. This Supreme Court has allowed many of Trump’s illegal actions to proceed, from deporting people without due process to building his ill-gotten ballroom. Massive chaos and disenfranchisement in the midterms, with the court’s imprimatur, proved beyond the pale. But the court has done the president and his party many favors this election cycle. After all, the six conservative justices have already green-lit a key part of Trump’s effort to tilt the midterms in the GOP’s favor by destroying the Voting Rights Act and approving the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering that has allowed Republicans to draw 10 more GOP-friendly seats in the race for the House of Representatives. They’ve repeatedly overruled their own so-called precedents and allowed states like Louisiana and Alabama to cancel primaries and suspend elections in order to give Republicans as many extra seats in the midterms as possible. Just last week, they intervened on the shadow docket to further boost the GOP’s fortunes by holding that political party committees, where Republicans hold a huge financial advantage over Democrats, should get the same discounted TV ad rates as candidates. Trump’s Postal Service ruse will not take effect for the midterms. But the administration is likely to turn to other tactics, and the Supreme Court could be drawn into the fray. Trump may try to interfere in the midterms through actions like sending ICE to the polls, seizing ballots, or declaring a fake national emergency. After all, this is the same president who launched a violent insurrection to overturn an election. The president has long acted like he was above the law and dared the courts to stop him. He’ll almost certainly try it again.