Trump administration asks Supreme Court to let USPS restrict mail ballots before midterms

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to let the U.S. Postal Service begin enforcing new restrictions on mail-in ballots, less than 48 hours before North Carolina was scheduled to start mailing ballots for the November midterm election and days before Alabama follows suit.

The emergency application, filed in a case docketed as United States Postal Service v. California, No. 26A297, asks the justices for both an immediate administrative stay and a full stay of a temporary restraining order that U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued in Boston last week. That order currently bars the Postal Service from requiring states to comply with a finalized rule tying ballot delivery to a federally maintained list of registered voters.

The rule at the center of the fight

The dispute traces to an executive order President Trump signed in March, Executive Order 14399, which the White House said was intended to ensure "citizenship verification and voter eligibility in federal elections." According to the White House fact sheet accompanying the order, it directs the Department of Homeland Security to assemble state-by-state lists of citizens eligible to vote and share them with states 60 days before federal elections, instructs the attorney general to prioritize prosecuting officials who issue ballots to people not on those lists, and requires states to submit their mail-ballot voter rolls to the Postal Service.

Acting on that authority, the Postal Service finalized a rule in late August that goes further than the order's original text: ballots must be printed on Postal Service-approved envelopes carrying unique barcodes, and states must upload voter information to a new USPS portal before ballots can be delivered to those addresses. Voters not enrolled on the list, under the government's plan, would not have their ballots delivered through the normal mail-sorting process.

Twenty-four Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia sued to block the order months ago in League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump, a case now in its sixth month before Judge Talwani in the District of Massachusetts. Republican-led states, including Texas, have intervened on the administration's side.

The scale of what is at stake is significant. Roughly 30 percent of ballots cast nationally in the 2024 general election — more than 48 million votes — arrived by mail, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's Election Administration and Voting Survey. Several states, including some that mail ballots automatically to every registered voter, rely on the Postal Service far more heavily than the national average, meaning any disruption to sorting or delivery timelines in the weeks before Nov. 3 could affect far more voters than a typical rule change.

How the fight reached the justices, twice

Judge Talwani ruled in June that core provisions of the executive order were "ultra vires" and unconstitutional, prompting the administration's first emergency trip to the Supreme Court in late July. On Aug. 24, a divided court lifted one of two injunctions against the order, allowing the administration to keep working toward implementation, though on narrow procedural grounds that did not resolve the underlying legal fight.

Days later, the Postal Service published its final rule, and Judge Talwani responded by issuing a 14-day temporary restraining order on Aug. 27 blocking mandatory compliance with the envelope and data-upload requirements through the fall election, while making clear that states could still comply voluntarily — North Carolina had already secured Postal Service approval for its ballot envelope design. At a two-hour hearing this week, the judge pressed Justice Department lawyers on whether the rule could realistically be implemented on the eve of early voting.

"We're not talking about an intellectual puzzle game. We're talking about people's right to vote," Judge Talwani told attorneys at the hearing, adding of the government's readiness to comply with the order: "We've been here for a week and you can't tell me the government is ready to go?"

In its filing this week, the Solicitor General's office described the Postal Service rule as imposing "only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements" and argued that Judge Talwani's order "risks sowing confusion and chaos" by making a uniform national standard optional. The government has separately told the court the rule targets "voter fraud, a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters," and characterized it as ordinary postal regulation rather than, in its words, a federal takeover of election administration.

States and voting groups push back

Judge Talwani, in her written findings, said the government had presented "no evidence regarding fraudulent absentee or mail-in voting" to justify the rule and that the challengers had shown the compliance timeline was effectively impossible for states now printing and preparing to mail ballots. Plaintiffs in the case include the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and a coalition of state election officials who argue the order intrudes on authority the Constitution reserves to states and Congress.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents several of the plaintiff organizations, said the timing of the rule's rollout was itself designed to create disorder.

• Sept. 4-5: North Carolina begins mailing ballots to voters
• Sept. 8, 10 a.m.: Deadline set by the Supreme Court for challengers to respond to the stay application
• Sept. 9: Alabama begins mailing ballots
• Sept. 14: Judge Talwani's current temporary restraining order is set to expire
• Nov. 3: Election Day

"USPS's decision to rush this blatantly unconstitutional rule into effect just weeks before an election is the latest step in a rollout that has sown confusion at every turn and now threatens to disenfranchise voters who did everything right," said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, after the rule was finalized last month.

What happens next

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency matters arising from the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has ordered the states and voting-rights groups challenging the rule to respond to the administration's application by Sept. 8, giving the full court roughly a week to act before Judge Talwani's temporary order lapses. Talwani has said she intends to rule "as quickly as possible" on whether to convert her temporary order into a longer preliminary injunction, a decision that would likely trigger another round of emergency appeals regardless of which side prevails.

The court's August ruling in the earlier phase of the case gave neither side a clear signal of how the justices view the underlying legality of the executive order; the majority acted on narrow procedural grounds without addressing the separation-of-powers questions Talwani found persuasive in June. That leaves both the administration and the challenging states arguing, in effect, over which way ambiguous tea leaves point, with a second emergency application now asking the same court to resolve a dispute it had previously sidestepped. A ruling either way is expected within days, given that ballots are already leaving printing facilities in some states.

The stakes for county election offices are immediate. States that have not yet obtained Postal Service sign-off on ballot envelope designs, or uploaded voter files to the new federal portal, face the prospect of ballots going out under one set of rules only to have those rules change again before Election Day, now roughly nine weeks away. Coverage of the litigation by SCOTUSblog and Democracy Docket has tracked the case as one of the fastest-moving voting disputes to reach the court this cycle, with both sides describing a resolution before the midterms as urgent. Whatever the justices decide, election officials in dozens of states are now operating on a compressed timeline that leaves little room for further legal detours before voters begin casting ballots.