The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that President Donald Trump may begin carrying out parts of an executive order aimed at tightening rules for voting by mail. The court said further legal challenges could still delay or block the measures before the November midterm election.
In a 10-page decision issued without a signed opinion, the court framed its ruling as narrow. But it also kept alive the possibility that the administration will ultimately pursue the full set of policies set out in the order signed in March, which would give the US Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security expanded roles in election administration.
Limited Decision, Ongoing Court Battles
The court’s ruling means the Trump administration can move ahead with an element of the order that states had challenged in court. Those challenges will now continue on a faster or different timetable, depending on how lower courts respond to the next steps in the litigation.
The court left open that additional aspects of the executive order could still face obstacles, particularly after legal hurdles already identified in prior cases. It cautioned that if the Postal Service’s final rule harms states, they may seek further judicial review.
DHS Eligibility Lists And USPS Envelope Tracking
One part of the March order directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile, state by state, lists of voters the department believes are eligible to vote in jurisdictions led by Democrats that brought the lawsuit. The Supreme Court said the administration could proceed with that proposal for the time being.
Another part of the executive order instructs the Postal Service to require states that want to send ballots through the mail to provide their own lists of eligible voters to the agency. The order also calls for ballot envelope markings that allow votes to be tracked.
The Supreme Court allowed the Postal Service to implement that aspect of the plan, even though a lower court had blocked it nationwide in a separate case. As a result, additional proceedings are likely, with the prospect of more urgent appeals aimed at reaching the Supreme Court quickly.
Election Cases Draw Sharp Dissent
Monday’s decision drew opposition from the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, argued that the dispute was about whether the executive branch could legally interfere with states’ management of the November 2026 elections, while the majority focused only on timing.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote separately and used stronger language to criticise what she described as the ruling’s effect on the midterm election process. In her dissent, she warned that the court’s approach injects “Kafkaesque nightmare” conditions into election litigation, describing what she said was inconsistency in how the court treats challenges arriving too early or too late.
This year’s election-related disputes at the Supreme Court have intensified, including a separate late-April ruling in which the court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act in a decision on Louisiana’s congressional districts. Liberal justices dissented in that case as well.
March Order, State Challenges, And Next Steps
The March executive order requires states to submit eligible voter lists to the Postal Service, and says the Postal Service would not deliver ballots mailed to people not on those lists. It also directs states to include tracking barcodes on ballot envelopes.
The order further directs the federal government to prioritise prosecution of state election officials who send or receive ballots for non-citizens or others ineligible to vote, and it tells DHS to create separate eligibility lists of what it describes as US citizen voters in each state.
The administration has argued in court filings that a state’s failure to use those DHS lists would not, by itself, be a crime, while adding that it could be used as “relevant evidence” in related prosecutions.
Federal courts in Boston blocked the order’s implementation in 23 Democratic-led states that challenged it, but an appeals court in Washington, DC allowed the plan to proceed. The administration filed its emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on 27 July.
Alongside that case, a separate lawsuit brought by non-partisan voter advocacy groups is before the Boston court. Judge Indira Talwani, nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, issued a preliminary injunction there that blocks the Postal Service directives nationwide.
The Justice Department told the Supreme Court it should decide the Democratic-led states’ case in a way that would also resolve the separate advocacy groups’ lawsuit. The Supreme Court’s Monday order provided limited guidance on that request.
The government had also argued the challenge was not yet ripe because the Postal Service had not completed its final regulations and DHS was still deciding whether it could compile the relevant citizenship-based data. That argument weakened after the Postal Service issued a 95-page rule on Friday, describing how it would require tracking bar codes and participation in a postal eligibility portal using state-provided data.
In some states, deadlines for beginning to transmit mail ballots are weeks away.
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25 August 2026
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