By The Washington Times (Politics) | Created at 2026-08-24 22:09:34 | Updated at 2026-09-19 02:38:42
3 weeks ago
The Supreme Court on Monday gave President Trump some leeway to work on plans to have the U.S. Postal Service decide which mailed ballots to deliver, saying it was too early for lower courts to intervene and block him.
The justices, in an unsigned order, said the district court that tried to stop Mr. Trump was meddling in internal decisions of the Executive Branch, preventing the president from trying to carry out his election-integrity agenda.
“The government is likely to prevail on the merits of its argument that the district court lacked jurisdiction to enter the judgment,” the court said.
That doesn’t settle matters, as the case will continue to develop in lower courts. But it does give the president some room to run.
In an executive order in March, Mr. Trump directed Homeland Security to come up with lists of eligible voters for each state, excluding noncitizens and others who lacked qualifications. He then directed the postal service to only deliver mailed ballots to voters who were on the approved lists, seeking to block others from using the mail to cast illegal ballots in the coming midterm election.
Since then, the Justice Department has been playing legal defense, trying to fend off lower courts even as the postal service and DHS pondered how to meet Mr. Trump’s expectations.
The result has been a weird sort of chaos, where the government has said it can’t be sued unless and until it comes up with concrete plans — and challengers said states were already being forced to rethink their vote-by-mail procedures to comply with the president’s vision.
Things got more complicated in recent days when the postal service finalized its mail ballot plans, releasing a rule that requires states to run their ballot envelopes by the post office for approval and to mark outgoing and incoming ballot mail with unique barcodes so they can be tracked.
Already, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who’d issued the blockade that the Supreme Court erased Monday, said she’s considering a temporary restraining order preventing the postal service from publishing — and thus finalizing — its new plans.
In her earlier ruling Judge Talwani, an Obama pick for the court in Massachusetts, said Mr. Trump was interfering in states’ ability to run their own elections.
She said roughly half of the states had already obtained ballot envelopes for November’s elections that would fail the postal service’s new standards.
That means they are injured even before the post office finalized its rules, she said.
“The Executive Branch has no authority to regulate elections,” she wrote in her Aug. 11 preliminary injunction.
The postal service, in the new filing, rejected the notion that it is regulating elections.
“States will retain full autonomy to decide whether (and to what extent) they utilize the U.S. mail as part of their electoral systems and who can use ballot mail to cast a vote,” the agency said. “The rule instead imposes modest data and mail preparation requirements on federal ballot mail envelopes.”
Those requirements are an envelope that meets post office approval, use of an election mail logo so the envelope can be flagged and tracked, and the use of unique barcodes, generated by the state but written on each mailing.
Postal officials said they’ve long subjected some types of mail to similar standards.
They made the comparison to cremated human and animal remains, which must be in certain boxes and sent with trackable barcodes, and to replica explosives, which must be brought in-person to a post office counter and sent by registered mail.
“Although ballot mail does not present precisely the same operational issues as cremated remains or replica explosives, it is unquestionably sensitive mail that raises unique operational considerations,” the service said.
The equation sparked derision from Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic election lawyer who now runs Democracy Docket.
“Ballots do not raise ‘unique operational considerations’ unless you are aiming to limit voting and undermine democracy. Such Orwellian reasoning is dangerous to an already fragile republic battered by years of Trump’s lies,” he wrote Monday.
Election experts also said when the postal service finalized its rule Friday, it undercut its argument to the Supreme Court. The Justice Department had said lower court injunctions were premature because there was no final agency action. Now, the final rule means there is.
The high court didn’t address that issue.
The court’s three Democratic appointees dissented from Monday’s order, saying states have already begun to plan their election.
“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
DHS has yet to finalize its proposal to come up with lists of eligible voters, but the contours were laid out by Mr. Trump in his executive order in March pushing the feds into the election regulation business: Get states to submit lists of voters, then scour those lists trying to spot noncitizens and other ineligible voters.
Mr. Trump has made grandiose claims of noncitizen voting.
In a prime-time speech in July, he claimed more than 300,000 noncitizen names on states’ voter rolls, citing a preliminary DHS estimate.
Last week the Census Bureau released a cursory analysis claiming to have identified 24,000 noncitizens who cast ballots in the 2020 election. California led the list with 4,300, followed by Texas at 2,500, Florida at 1,800, New York at 1,700 and Arizona at 1,100.
None of those numbers are big enough to have changed outcomes of that year’s presidential election, but they still met with derision from Trump opponents who said the Census Bureau data was unusually weak.
They said the bureau broke with its usual protocol by not releasing margins of error or describing potential sources of error. And the experts said there were several big potential sources, including the notorious difficulty of matching names and identities to voter lists.
“The whole thing stinks,” wrote Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Marymount University, who served in the Biden White House as a senior advisor on voting rights.
