US Supreme Court blocks Trump's mail ballot curbs before midterm voting
The US Supreme Court on Monday rejected, for now, President Donald Trump's proposed restrictions on mail ballots, leaving states free to continue using the systems they have followed for years as voting in the midterm elections is already under way.
The brief order came after a burst of last-minute legal action over the plan, which carried major implications as nearly one-third of the country votes by mail. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the restrictions should not take effect for the midterms, but indicated he could side with the Trump administration at a later stage.
The Trump administration had asked the court to allow the restrictions before the November elections that will decide control of Congress. Election officials said there was no practical way to carry out such a sweeping change only weeks before the polls. Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin began sending mail ballots to voters over the past week even as the new system was not in place.
Under the plan, states would have been required to adopt a standard envelope format and upload lists of eligible voters to an online portal. The Postal Service could have refused to deliver ballots from states that did not comply. But a whistleblower report said the postal system's requirements could mean millions of mail ballots were never sent because the portal had not been properly built and a single bar code error could cause an entire batch of ballots to be discarded.
Democratic state officials and voting rights groups challenged the move in court, saying the president had no constitutional authority to set election rules that would "virtually eliminate mail voting on the eve of a major election". Lower courts agreed and blocked the plan, including through a preliminary injunction issued by a judge nominated by Trump.
The administration then appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that federal control of the Postal Service gave it the power to set rules for handling mail ballots and that states could comply. The federal government had earlier secured a procedural win at the top court, but the justices had not ruled on whether the plan itself was legal. Trump has long opposed mail voting and falsely blamed it for his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, even though he has often used that method to cast his own ballot, including this year.
With the court refusing to intervene for now, states will keep sending mail ballots under their existing systems while the wider legal fight over the restrictions remains unresolved.
