The Supreme Court on Monday night blocked the Trump administration from enforcing sweeping new mail-ballot screening rules before November's midterm elections, leaving in place a lower-court order that had frozen the regulation as unlawful.
In an unsigned order, the justices declined to lift a district court's freeze on the rule, writing that the government was "unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge." The decision came in response to an emergency application from the Trump administration, which had asked the court to let the U.S. Postal Service begin enforcing the regulation while litigation continued, according to Votebeat's account of the ruling.
What the Rule Would Have Required
The regulation, built around a 95-page Postal Service implementation plan, would have required states to submit lists of approved mail voters through a new federal online portal that has not yet been built, and would have let the Postal Service refuse delivery of ballots from voters not on those lists. It also mandated redesigned ballot envelopes carrying unique barcodes that postal workers would scan during processing, with provisions allowing entire batches of ballots to be rejected if random sampling turned up even a single flawed envelope.
President Trump ordered the changes in a March executive order that directed the Postal Service to tighten mail-ballot handling, which the administration said was needed to guard against fraud. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked the rule in June and reaffirmed that decision in an 11-page ruling, writing that "the court is unaware of any delegation Congress made permitting USPS to regulate election mail."
Only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly dissented from Monday's order, arguing the rule was likely to ultimately be upheld and should have been allowed to take effect for this year's elections. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately to note the rule might eventually prove lawful but that election officials simply lacked enough time to implement it before voters begin casting mail ballots.
There is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service's statutory authority.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurrence
State and local election administrators had warned they did not have the time, staffing or budget to comply with the new envelope and portal requirements before ballots go out this fall. With the rule now blocked, mail voting for the November midterms is expected to proceed largely as it has in past election cycles, though the court's order leaves open whether some version of the restrictions could still take effect in future elections.
