By Josh Gerstein
08/24/2026 05:15 PM EDT
The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a block on President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at limiting mail-in voting but left uncertain whether it will allow him to implement major changes to those procedures before the midterms.
The justices voted, 6 to 3 along the usual ideological lines, to overturn an injunction a judge placed on Trump’s order in June. The lower-court ruling concluded that the president’s plan to use the Postal Service to limit the delivery of ballots likely exceeded his authority and had the potential to disenfranchise legitimate voters.
More than 20 blue states sued to block Trump’s order, saying it threatens to upend their planning for the midterms in November and intrudes on their authority to administer elections.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority said those states lacked standing in part because it’s unclear just how the administration will implement the order, although the administration on Friday released a final Postal Service rule addressing more details.
“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell. But the Order itself does not harm the States, so the District Court lacked jurisdiction to bar the Government from trying to implement it,” the court said in its unsigned majority ruling.
The high court faulted the judge who issued the injunction, Boston-based Obama appointee Indira Talwani, for engaging in “a string of speculations to find this suit justiciable.”
Voting rights and civil rights groups are also suing over Trump’s plan. Earlier this month, Talwani granted a separate injunction in that case blocking the Postal Service from complying with Trump’s order. It’s unclear how that litigation will be impacted by the high court’s order.
The private groups asked Talwani on Saturday to declare that the Postal Service’s final rule “has no legal force or effect for this year’s elections.” Justice Department lawyers responded that the rule’s language makes clear it won’t go into effect in this election cycle unless court orders blocking it are lifted.
Talwani said in an order Sunday that the Postal Service’s attempt to issue the final rule while contending it wouldn’t immediately take effect would generate “confusion.” She’s still considering the private groups’ request for further action.
The controversial order Trump signed in March instructs the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to create lists of U.S. citizens in each state and urges state officials to send lists of absentee and mail-in voters to the Postal Service, which the Postal Service would use to block mail delivery of ballots to people not on the list.
The order also directs the Postal Service to block delivery of mail-in or absentee ballots entirely in states that refuse to share lists with the federal government.
A judge based in Washington blocked the same key part of Trump’s order last month, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals put that ruling on hold.
All three of the Supreme Court’s liberals dissented from Monday’s ruling.
In a solo dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court’s majority was furthering “the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.” Jackson accused the court of creating a Catch-22 where some voting-related cases are dismissed for being filed too early in the process while the court throws out others for being filed too close to a looming election.