A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections. In an emergency opinion, the justices said President Trump could proceed with implementing an executive order he had signed. According to The New York Times, the order directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots.
Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens. The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of the executive order.
The majority wrote that it agreed with the government’s argument that it should be able to move forward with its plans. The justices found that the Trump administration was “likely to suffer irreparable harm” unless they lifted a freeze that lower courts had imposed. The three liberal justices dissented.
Separate lower court order still blocks parts of the Postal Service plan
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the majority “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” The majority said the states that challenged the president’s order could not demonstrate that they were sufficiently harmed by voting rules that had not yet taken effect.
The justices cautioned that their order was preliminary and not a final decision about whether the administration’s order “will necessarily be lawful” once the plans are complete. “On that score, time will tell,” the majority said in the 10-page, unsigned order. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been receptive to some, but not all, of the administration’s broad claims of executive power.
In this case, the majority said that the provision of Mr. Trump’s order that required creating lists of U.S. citizens was “an internal directive from the president to a subordinate” and so far imposed no obligations on the states. Similar disputes have led to rulings on the voter citizenship database.
The high court’s order landed just one business day after the Postal Service published final regulations on Friday clarifying how it would carry out the president’s executive order. The Postal Service said in its rule that it would “not take actions to implement the rule specifically for the 2026 election” unless the Supreme Court ruled in the administration’s favor.
A separate injunction by the same lower court complicates matters. That court action prevents the Postal Service from implementing some parts of the executive order.
New York Attorney General Letitia James called the ruling a “painful setback,” but predicted it would not be the final word from the court. “The right to vote is sacred, and no administration should be allowed to put that right in jeopardy by making it harder for eligible voters to cast their ballots,” she said in a statement. “This fight is far from over. We are exploring our legal options.”
In a social media post, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said the court’s decision did not deal with the substance of Mr. Trump’s executive order. He asserted that the ruling “does not mean his illegal attempt to restrict mail-in voting will go forward.” “Donald Trump does not run elections here in Pennsylvania, or in any state,” he added. “We’ll see the Trump Administration in court.”
The legal team representing voting rights organizations in the separate challenge to the president’s executive order said in a statement that they were “disappointed by this interim ruling by the Supreme Court,” but would press on with their efforts to block the order.
The team, which includes the American Civil Liberties Union, called the president’s order an “attempt to seize control of election rules from the states and Congress” that was “clearly unconstitutional and unlawful.”
Mr. Trump signed the executive order in March as part of his broader attempts to curtail voting by mail. It directed federal agencies to create “state citizenship lists” of people who will be 18 or older as of Election Day. Federal officials were then directed to send those names to state election officials, who administer the vote, purportedly so they could use them to purge voter registration lists of anyone who is not a citizen.
The order also instructed the Postal Service not to mail ballots on behalf of anyone whose name was not on the approved list. Several court challenges immediately followed, including a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts brought by Democratic state attorneys general.
The challengers argued that the president exceeded his authority because the Constitution gives Congress and the states power over elections, not the executive. Officials have also discussed possible Supreme Court appeals on voter rolls.
In late June, Judge Indira Talwani, a Federal District Court judge in Massachusetts, temporarily blocked the president’s order, finding that it violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. She also determined that Congress had not delegated authority to the Postal Service to determine which voters should receive mail ballots. A federal appeals court earlier upheld Judge Talwani’s temporary block.
Published: Aug 25, 2026 08:15 am