Trump’s Mail-In Ballot Order Dies (for 2026) at the Supreme Court

As I noted when the Supreme Court ruled in late August in favor of Donald Trump’s executive order (EO) on mail-in ballots and threw out a premature injunction against the U.S. Postal Service’s even writing a rule to comply with the EO, things would be different once the Court was presented with an actual rule from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). When the case, now captioned United States Postal Service v. California, came back to the Court in September, the USPS noticeably failed to include in its proposed rule anything that would address the actual point of the EO: specifically, a prohibition (unauthorized by Congress) on delivering ballots that the federal government believed to be cast by noncitizens. So what’s the point?

This evening, the Court let stand an injunction against the USPS implementing its rule in the 2026 midterms. While Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts has engaged in her usual ridiculous overreaches in this case, the emergency order refusing to stay her injunction got four votes from justices who had joined the opinion in favor of the EO: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The order explained none of its reasoning, but Kavanaugh wrote a short concurring opinion explaining his view that the effort to implement the rule at the last minute, given the chaos that this will entail for states trying to comply with new USPS standards for ballot envelopes at the last minute: “There is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority. . . . But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.” Unstated is that the administration never made a case for why it was so urgent to change the envelope-design rules if it wasn’t actually going to use them to stop noncitizens from voting.

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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As I noted when the Supreme Court ruled in late August in favor of Donald Trump’s executive order (EO) on mail-in ballots and threw out a premature injunction against the U.S. Postal Service’s even writing a rule to comply with the EO, things would be different once the Court was presented with an actual rule from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). When the case, now captioned United States Postal Service v. California, came back to the Court in September, the USPS noticeably failed to include in its proposed rule anything that would address the actual point of the EO: specifically, a prohibition (unauthorized by Congress) on delivering ballots that the federal government believed to be cast by noncitizens. So what’s the point?

This evening, the Court let stand an injunction against the USPS implementing its rule in the 2026 midterms. While Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts has engaged in her usual ridiculous overreaches in this case, the emergency order refusing to stay her injunction got four votes from justices who had joined the opinion in favor of the EO: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The order explained none of its reasoning, but Kavanaugh wrote a short concurring opinion explaining his view that the effort to implement the rule at the last minute, given the chaos that this will entail for states trying to comply with new USPS standards for ballot envelopes at the last minute: “There is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority. . . . But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.” Unstated is that the administration never made a case for why it was so urgent to change the envelope-design rules if it wasn’t actually going to use them to stop noncitizens from voting.