A tangled fight over mail in ballots developed another knot Thursday when President Donald Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court to temporarily pause an order that is blocking it from implementing parts of a U.S. Postal Service rule.
“Thursday’s filing was the second time in less than six weeks that the Trump administration came to the Supreme Court seeking to clear the way to implement restrictions on mail-in voting,” said Amy Howe for SCOTUS blog.
One could see this fight as the extension of Trump’s years-long effort to paint mail-in voting in the U.S. as corrupt. Last month FactCheck.org noted that Trump “launched his second-term assault on mail-in ballots and electronic voting machines on Aug. 18, firing off a series of unfounded claims while announcing an effort to do away with both.”
This particular court battle stems from a an executive order Trump issued in March that directed federal agencies to take a series of steps that change mail-in voting. One of the provisions in the order requires states to give the U.S. Postal Service a list of voters to whom the states plan to send mail ballots. It prohibits the USPS from mailing ballots to voters who are not on the lists of “enrolled” voters that it is expected to create.
In June, Audacy reported on U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner testifying before Congress about a rule proposed by the USPS on this issue. He said it would be a national expansion of a program that’s already followed by some states, including California and Oregon.
However, the proposed requirement drew criticism since states themselves have the power to conduct elections, not the federal government or postal service. For example, Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) argued that it would amount to “a power grab to swap congressionally mandated state control for what the president wants.”
In response to Trump’s executive order, a group of 23 states, led by California, and the District of Columbia took the issue to federal court in Massachusetts. They argued that order conflicts with certain provisions in the Constitution.
“U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani barred the federal government from implementing the challenged restrictions on or before Nov. 3, 2026, in the District of Columbia and the 23 challenging states,” Howe noted. When the Trump administration went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, the court declined to pause Talwani’s order while the litigation continued.
Then, the administration went to the Supreme Court on July 27 and a group of 12 states, led by Alabama had joined the case on the Trump administration’s side by that point. On Aug. 24, a 10-page unsigned opinion from the court allowed the Trump administration to begin implementing the executive order, said Howe.
“The majority wrote that it was too soon for courts to consider the states’ challenge because the order had not yet been carried out – and, as a result, the states have not suffered the kind of injury that would allow their lawsuit to proceed,” she explained.
Talwani also lifted an injunction that she had issued in a separate challenge brought by the League of Women Voters around this time. Then she issued a temporary restraining order that blocked the Trump administration, for 14 days, from requiring states to comply with several provisions of the new Postal Service rule in an Aug. 27 decision. Howe said those provisions included ballot envelope design requirements and the submission of voter data into a USPS portal.
Now, we arrive at Thursday’s Trump administration action. It asked the court to freeze Talwani’s order and to issue an administrative stay that would put the order on hold while they consider the government’s request.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court argued that the order “partially nullifies the Postal Service’s efforts to address the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud – a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters, prevents election results from reflecting the will of the American people, and undermines ‘public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.’”
Howe also said that “Sauer pushed back against suggestions ‘that the Postal Service is trying to federalize the rules for mail-in voting.’” He wrote that “the Postal Service’s final rule imposes only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail,” and he claimed the Postal Service has the authority to create such rules and has done so in other contexts, such as requirements for mailing cremated remains.
Sauer also argued that Talwani’s order will cause “serious irreparable harm since some states are set to begin sending ballots to voters before the order expires on Sept. 14. Howe noted that the court directed challengers in the case to file a response by 10 a.m. EDT next Tuesday, Sept. 8.
