Judge issues setback to Trump administration plans to restrict mail-in ballots
A federal judge in Massachusetts on Tuesday issued a setback to the Trump administration’s plans to issue sweeping new restrictions on mail-in balloting for November’s crucial midterm elections.
The ruling is not the final word in a complex and rapidly escalating legal fight over the president’s executive order that would bar the U.S. Postal Service from sending mail-in ballots to voters not on lists of citizens created by federal agencies.
A separate case challenging the order has already reached the Supreme Court, which for now cleared one legal hurdle that has blocked its implementation.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama administration nominee, found the Trump administration violated her earlier preliminary injunction blocking the executive order when it issued rules on how the Postal Service should implement it.
The rules were set to take effect Wednesday.
In June, Talwani sided with the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups challenging the order, finding the president did not have the constitutional authority to alter how states administer elections.
After the new Postal Service rules were announced late Friday, the voting groups asked Talwani to intervene.
The Trump administration argued in court filings that it had not violated Talwani’s injunction because it stipulated it would not take any action to implement the rules for November’s election unless Talwani’s order was lifted.
“These arguments ignore the court’s explicit directive not to ‘initiat[e] or complet[e]’ rulemaking,” Talwani wrote Tuesday. “And Defendants cannot contend that they misunderstood the scope of the court’s order.”
Talwani’s order did not sanction the Trump administration for the violation, noting it would not change the legal posture of the case. She said her preliminary injunction had already blocked the implementation of the Postal Service rules.
The ruling comes the day after a divided Supreme Court decided 23 states and the District of Columbia had not met the legal bar to challenge the executive order in separate litigation.
In an unsigned order, the court’s conservatives agreed with administration arguments that it was too soon to take legal action because the Postal Service had yet to finalize the rules for implementing the order. The majority acknowledged additional legal wrangling is ahead. [Continue reading…]
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the Supreme Court’s conservative majority of injecting “chaos and uncertainty” into the 2026 midterm elections Monday after the Court lifted one injunction blocking President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order, even as a separate nationwide block remains in place.
In a blistering dissent, Jackson warned that the Court’s emergency ruling lets the Trump administration continue pursuing changes to state-run mail voting systems even though “no judge or Justice” has concluded that Trump’s order is constitutional.
“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” Jackson wrote. “It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.” [Continue reading…]