The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a preliminary win Monday, lifting a lower-court injunction and clearing the way for key parts of President Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting to move forward ahead of the midterm elections.
The unsigned order split the court 6-3 along ideological lines, with the three liberal justices dissenting. It pauses a June ruling by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston, who had found that Trump exceeded his constitutional authority in issuing the order and blocked it from taking effect in California and 22 other states that sued to challenge it.
What the order would do
Trump's order, signed in March, directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state lists of citizens eligible to vote and requires the U.S. Postal Service to obtain those lists and deliver mail ballots only to people on them, along with specific barcoding requirements for ballot envelopes. The administration has said the measure targets voting by noncitizens, which research cited in court filings has found to be exceedingly rare. Twenty-three largely Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C. sued to block it; twelve Republican-led states backed the administration on appeal.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the dissenters, said the decision "needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections" and amounts to "an affront to" the states' sovereignty. New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the officials who sued over the order, called the ruling "a painful setback" but said "it will not be the final word."
A narrow, temporary win
Monday's order does not resolve the case on the merits and leaves in place a separate, broader nationwide injunction — issued August 11 by Judge Talwani — that still blocks the Postal Service specifically from complying with the directive. The administration is expected to ask the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to pause that ruling as well if Talwani does not act by Tuesday evening, according to court filings reported by NPR.
Election officials in the affected states now face a compressed timeline: with midterm voting set to begin within weeks and absentee ballots typically mailed out well before Election Day, several secretaries of state have warned that further litigation is unlikely to be resolved before ballots start going out. Al Jazeera and other outlets have detailed the ruling's immediate effects state by state.
