A federal judge in Boston has blocked the U.S. Postal Service nationwide from carrying out President Trump's executive order rewriting mail-in ballot rules, expanding a ruling that had previously applied to roughly half the country.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled Tuesday that the president "has no authority to regulate elections," finding that the Elections Clause of the Constitution reserves that power to states and Congress. The preliminary injunction bars USPS from enforcing provisions that would have let the agency refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that declined to coordinate with it on voter-eligibility lists, and applies through the November 3 midterms.
From half the map to all of it
Talwani first blocked the order in June for 23 mostly Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia. Tuesday's ruling, sought by voting-rights groups, extends that bar nationwide. She wrote that the order "is presently causing confusion and threatening both increasing chaos and an erosion of trust in our democracy," and that the interest in "enfranchisement heavily outweighs the executive's attempt to unconstitutionally insert itself into the domain of election regulation." With "less than 90 days before the November 3, 2026 midterm elections," she wrote, the need for an injunction was acute — and noted the government had "declined to defend the constitutionality of the EO's directives" throughout the litigation, according to NPR's account of the ruling.
The order, which Trump signed in March, is titled "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections" and directs USPS to compile lists of voters and treat ballots from unlisted addresses differently. It marks the second time a court has frozen the mail-ballot provisions; the first, narrower injunction is already the subject of a pending emergency application at the Supreme Court.
Voting-rights advocates welcomed the ruling, in a case brought by the League of Women Voters and other nonpartisan groups. American Civil Liberties Union attorney Sophia Lin Lakin said it rejects an administration "that continues to weaponize portions of the government to sow chaos into our elections." The Justice Department, which had argued the order was needed to secure federal elections, said in a statement reported by Votebeat: "We disagree with the court's ruling. The Department remains confident that President Trump's order to secure federal elections will ultimately be upheld."
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston already declined once, in a 2-1 vote on July 25, to pause Talwani's original June order while the government's appeal proceeds. Rather than filing a fresh appeal of Tuesday's expanded ruling, the Justice Department on Wednesday submitted a supplemental brief urging the Supreme Court to rule quickly on its pending stay request, telling justices the nationwide expansion underscores the need for prompt action before ballots go out. That petition, filed July 27, has been fully briefed for more than a week; the justices have not yet acted.
