The United States Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to begin implementing an executive order restricting who can receive a mail-in ballot, weeks before some states start posting ballots for the November midterm elections.
The unsigned order, issued on August 24, 2026, lifted an injunction granted in June by Boston-based district judge Indira Talwani, which had blocked key provisions of the executive order in California and 22 other states that had challenged it. The court also granted a parallel application from Alabama and 11 other states.
The justices divided 6-3, with the court’s three liberal members dissenting.
At issue are provisions creating a federal list of eligible voters and directing the US Postal Service (USPS) to deliver ballots only to people on that list. Elections in the US are administered by the states, and the plaintiffs argue Washington has no authority to intervene.
The majority was explicit that it had not ruled on the merits. Its disposition did not mean that any measure taken to implement the order would “necessarily be lawful”, the court said, adding that time would tell. The reasoning turned on jurisdiction: the order, on its own, did not yet injure the states that sued, so Talwani had no basis to act in June.
A second, broader injunction remains in force. In a separate case, Talwani issued a nationwide ruling on August 11 barring the USPS from acting on the directives. The administration said it would ask the First Circuit Court of Appeals to suspend that ruling; 12 Republican-led states have already appealed it.
The practical effect is therefore narrower than the result suggests. The postal service has published its implementation plan, but several states begin mailing ballots within weeks.
Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Elena Kagan, wrote that the ruling did not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere in the states’ administration of the November elections were lawful, nor suggest the executive branch had authority to implement his directives. It merely postponed the question, she said.
Ketanji Brown Jackson filed a separate dissent accusing the majority of “taking its eye off the ball” by fixing on a technical point of standing rather than the administration’s wider aim.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said his state would sue again to block the rules. New York attorney general Letitia James described the ruling as a painful setback that would not be the last word, adding that her office was weighing its legal options.
The dispute descends directly from 2020, and from an argument about competence that has since changed sides.
That year saw the largest expansion of postal voting in US history. Roughly 43 per cent of voters cast ballots by mail, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Survey of the Performance of American Elections — close to double the 2018 figure.
Much of that expansion did not come from legislatures. California, Nevada, New Jersey, Vermont and the District of Columbia posted ballots to every registered voter as a pandemic measure. Elsewhere, witness requirements were suspended and ballot-receipt deadlines extended through emergency directives, litigation settlements and judges’ orders.
Republicans objected at the time on constitutional grounds, arguing that the US Constitution assigns the setting of election rules to state legislatures and to Congress, not to governors, secretaries of state or courts. Those objections were largely unsuccessful.
The party’s substantive case rests on the chain of custody. Once a ballot leaves the supervised environment of a polling station, its handling depends on address accuracy, signature-matching standards that vary between states and, in some jurisdictions, on third parties permitted to collect completed ballots.
Republicans point to the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired in 2005 by former president Jimmy Carter and former US secretary of state James Baker, which found absentee ballots to be the largest source of potential voter fraud and recommended barring party workers from handling them.
The commission did not recommend abolishing postal voting, and the Carter Center has said since that its findings are quoted selectively. States have also tightened procedures in the two decades since, introducing signature verification, shared registration databases and ballot tracking.
Trump goes further, maintaining that postal voting cost him the presidency in 2020 and presenting the order as a safeguard against non-citizens voting. Those claims were tested and rejected: in dozens of court cases, in Georgia’s Republican-ordered hand recount, in an audit commissioned by Arizona’s Republican-controlled Senate, in an inquiry by Michigan’s Republican-led Senate, and by Trump’s own attorney general and federal cybersecurity agency.
What survives from 2020 is therefore the narrower procedural argument — and it is now deployed against the administration. The states challenging the order say the federal executive is doing precisely what Republicans once said governors and judges could not: rewriting the mechanics of an election without legislative authority.
Postal voting has receded from its 2020 peak, falling to 32 per cent of ballots in the 2022 midterms and 29 per cent in 2024, though it remains above pre-pandemic levels and is used by voters of both parties. It nonetheless skews Democratic, which is why control of Congress is thought to turn partly on how the order is applied. Republicans hold narrow margins in both chambers.
The Supreme Court ruled against Trump-aligned arguments on postal ballots in June, finding after full argument that states may count ballots arriving after election day. This week’s order came instead on the emergency docket, without briefing.
For European observers, the case is a reminder that US election administration is neither centralised nor uniform, and that the fight over who writes the rules is now as consequential as the vote.
