Supreme Court Rejects Trump Administration’s Mail-In Ballot Rules Ahead of Midterms

September 14, 2026 4:50 pm PST

LCCN Staff Report

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to let the Trump administration enforce a new set of mail-in ballot delivery requirements, leaving in place a lower-court order that had blocked the rules from taking effect before the November midterm elections.

The decision came on the Court’s emergency docket, where the administration had sought to overturn injunctions issued by federal judges who found the plan likely exceeded the Postal Service’s legal authority. The rules, stemming from a March executive order, would have required state election officials to submit voter lists to USPS and comply with new envelope-barcode standards, with the Postal Service empowered to decline delivery of ballots that didn’t meet the requirements.

Most of the majority offered no detailed reasoning, saying only that the administration’s position was unlikely to succeed on the merits. In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that state and local election officials lacked sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the election. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

The ruling caps weeks of litigation. A federal judge in Boston issued the first injunction against the plan, which a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to disturb. A second federal judge in Washington, D.C. — Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee — separately blocked the rule last week, finding it wasn’t authorized by Congress. The administration had asked the Supreme Court to lift the Boston-based injunction and allow the new system to proceed while litigation continued.

The administration has said the measures were necessary to combat voter fraud. Election officials in numerous states pushed back, arguing that deploying an untested ballot-matching system just as mail ballots were beginning to go out to voters risked delaying or blocking delivery for eligible voters, rather than addressing any documented fraud problem.

With the Supreme Court’s order, mail-in voting for the midterms will proceed under existing state rules, and the Postal Service is expected to deliver mail ballots without the disputed new requirements.